2016 M. NCAA Championships: Cal Gets Most Ups, Texas Gets Highest Total for Day 3 Ups/Downs

2016 MEN’S NCAA CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Wednesday, March 23 – Saturday, March 26
• McAuley Aquatic Center – Atlanta, GA
• Prelims 10AM/Finals 6PM (Eastern Time)
• Defending Champion: Texas (results)
• Championship Central
• Live stream: Wednesday/Thursday prelins & finals, Friday/Saturday prelims / Friday/Saturday finals on ESPN3
• Live results

For those unfamiliar with the terminology: “Up” means a swimmer who is in the A-final, as those swimmers cannot fall lower than 8th barring a DQ. “Down” will mean B-finalists, who are between 9th-16th place.

Note: Diving is expected to be completed by 3PM Eastern Time. We will update these up/downs then.

This year, we’re introducing a new angle on our traditional up/down rankings: and that’s the idea of “burned swims.” Basically, this will keep a tally of the number of swims that a team took (including scratches and DFS) to get to that number of up/downs. This is relevant because, for example, while Cal and Stanford didn’t have any finalists in the 500 free at the women’s meet, they also only had one swimmer entered between the two of them.

This metric will help identify where teams are expecting surges in scoring and smooth-out the curves from particularly weak or strong events from a team. We’ll focus on tracking burned swims from the top 12 teams – on Thursday, that means the top 12 teams based on psych sheet scoring .

Below, we’ve split out projections and actual results for each event, then at the end is a summary with just the core that you need to know. Scroll all the way down for that summary.

400 IM:

Cal and Georgia each have 2 championship finalists in this race, but Texas could haul in close to as many points if Will Licon defends as champion and their 2 B-finalists do well in consols.

100 FLY:

Texas has by far the highest number of finalists in this event, with 2 ups and 2 downs.

200 FREE:

Florida was projected to have just a B-finalist in this event, but they did very well this morning. They’ll bring back 2 swimmers to the top 8, Mitch D’Arrigo and Jan Switkowski, as well as Pawel Werner in the consolation heat.

100 BREAST:

Cal is the only top 5 team to bring anyone back to finals in the 100 breast, with Connor Hoppe in the B-final. Indiana was seeded with 2 up, but the Hoosiers dropped both swimmers down into the B-final. We’ll get representation from teams we aren’t used to seeing in the championship final here. George Washington, Oakland, and Air Force each have a swimmer in the top 8.

100 BACK:

Cal will look to close in on the competition with their backstroke points on the strength of Ryan Murphy and Jacob Pebley.

200 MEDLEY RELAY:

NC State just missed out on the championship final here, getting 9th in prelims. Both Texas and Cal moved into the top 8.

SUMMARY:

Following day 2, the Longhorns have the lead with 209 points, followed by Florida (163), Cal (141), NC State (137), and Michigan (90). We could see a few shifts in the team placing tonight.

The Golden Bears will bring back the most A-finalists. Cal has 5 ups and 3 downs tonight. However, Texas will bring back the highest number of finalists overall, with 9 total swims. They have 4 in the top 8, and 5 swimmers in consols.

With that, the Longhorns are in a strong position to continue their lead. The battle for 2nd will get interesting though. Cal will try to move past Florida. The Gators have 3 ups and 3 downs to Cal’s 5 and 3. Right now they’re separated by just 22 points.

Sorted by current team score: