Swimulator Conference Projections: Big 10

With more than half the season and all the mid season rest meets complete, it’s time to start looking ahead to conference meets. Today: the Big 10 (ACC).

To project the meets, I’ve used SwimSwam’s Swimulator (available on the front page). This tool creates scores out a meet using top times so far this season (it can also do average times), while respecting plausible event combinations and trying to maximize each team’s points. It does not include diving. To get an idea of how we can expect these projected scores to change at the real meet, I compared last year’s projection as of today’s date to the real conference score at last year’s championship meet.

Big 10 Men

Michigan leads the 2018 projection over Indiana by 256 points. Indiana should be able to make up most of that gap with divers (Indiana out scored Michigan’s divers by 221 last year and return a large percentage of their diving points). Last year Michigan beat their projected swim points by 172, whereas Indiana scored 48 fewer points than their January 10th projection. If that trend is repeated this year Michigan will win, but right now the meet appears close.

The top individual scorers in the projection all come from Michigan and Indiana. The top ones are Felix Auboech of Michigan with 92 points, Blake Peironi of Indiana with 88 points, Vini Lanza of Indiana with 88 points, and Jacob Montague of Michigan with 88 points. Michigan and Indiana have 6 swimmers beyond those 4 with 80+ projected points. The highest projected individual from another team is Conner McHugh of Minnesota with 71.

Big 10 Women

The Michigan women appear to be strong favorites based on the current projected scores. They lead second and third place Ohio State and Indiana by about 400 points and gained points vs seed last year. Ohio State and Indiana are virtually tied for second. History indicates Indiana as the slight favorite of the two. Last year, Indiana netted 85 points vs seed over Ohio State and out scored them on the boards by about 70 points.

The projected individual scorers are led by Siobhan Haughy of Michigan with a perfect 96 points, Meg Bailey of Ohio State with 89 points, Beata Nelson of Wisconsin with 88 points, and Clara Smiddy of Michigan with 85 points.

If you want to look at the event by event projections or more detailed swimmer points projections, follow the links to the full Swimulator projections.  Articles on other D1 conferences are forthcoming (here’s the ACC, and some D3 conferences). In the meantime, if you want to know the projections for other conferences feel free to run your own custom projection here.