2021 BIG 12 SWIMMING & DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS
- When: Swimming: Wednesday, February 24 – Saturday, February 27, 2021 / Diving Monday, March 1 – Wednesday, March 3, 2021
- Where: Lee & Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center – Austin, TX (Central Time Zone)
- Champion: Texas men (25x)
- Results
In the lead-up to NCAA conference meet season, we previewed all ten major conference meets and took a stab at predicting a team order. Now, we’re looking back at those picks to see how the final team standings shook out. Where were we wrong? Where were we right? Which teams over-performed and under-performed compared to expectations?
Big 12 Men
- Texas
- TCU
- West Virginia
Actual Finish Order (With Change from our picks noted in parentheses)
- Texas (-)
- West Virginia (+1)
- TCU (-1)
Just as we saw on the women’s side, West Virginia outswam expectations, beating TCU by 132 to remain the conference runners-up. TCU looked like a young team on the rise, returning 90% of their individual points from 2020 along with 19 of 20 relay legs. But in hindsight, it was worth putting a bit of a damper on those expectations, because TCU still returned 37 fewer individual points than West Virginia.
We projected the second-place battle to be much closer than the Swimulator projections, which had TCU leading by almost 180. After the swimming had entirely wrapped, TCU still led by 20 – but even by that point, we knew West Virginia’s deeper diving group would carry the day, especially in a thin conference where every diver would score at least some points.