Projecting the Cut-Line for the 2018 Men’s NCAA Championships

The official NCAA invite lists won’t go out until Wednesday, but anybody with the pre-cut psych sheets, released earlier today, a spreadsheet, and an army of stat guys can do the math ahead of time to determine the invitees before they’re officially released – barring any changes to entries.

A refresher on how that process works: The NCAA will go through, event by event, and add one swimmer to each, until a certain “line” (aka, all 30th-ranked swimmers) puts the field over the maximum 235 individual entries (270 total minus 35 places for divers). At that point, swimmers will be invited based on who is the closest to the NCAA Championship Record in their event from the next line (in this case, line 37). If you want to look at the full procedure, check section 2.4 of the NCAA Pre Championship Manual. Once a swimmer is invited in an individual event, they can swim up to 2 other events in which they have “B” cuts.

Unlike the women’s cut line, that fell way shorter than normal, the men’s cut-line fell about where it usually does – everybody ranked 28th-or-better in at least one event earned an invite, as did the 3 swimmers from the 29-line whose times, by percentage, are closest to the NCAA Championship Record.

This year, the Cal men lead the way with 17 invitees – making them the only team in danger of having to bump an individual qualifier to stay under the cap of 18. They had 1 diver qualify already (who counts as half an entrant), and aren’t expected to take any relay-only swimmers, so they should be clear to take all 17 individual invitees.

Texas, who has had to deal with leaving qualifiers while winning the last 3 championships, and Stanford each have 15 individual invitees. 7 teams have double-digit invitees. That list includes Virginia, who doubled their count from 5 last season to 10 this season.

2 of the first 3 alternates are from the upstart Grand Canyon program, with Danil Antipov and Youssef El Kamash sitting just outside of the meet, for now. Both swimmers will be at the meet anyway – Grand Canyon earned a Qualifying Standard in the 200 free, 200 medley, and 400 medley relays in their first season eligible for the NCAA Division I Championships.