It’s one thing to compare teams to each other, as we do in the rankings every week, but how a team measures up to its own standards is also a significant benchmark, particularly for those teams with no realistic postseason or beating-other-schools aspirations.

So, today’s journey into the numbers offers an intra-team comparison of how all the teams are currently scoring versus how they were scoring after the same number of meets in the 2016 season.

For most teams, the comparison is reason for optimism, even for a roller-coaster team like Georgia that, in spite of its “the bus is in the gully” start to the season, has improved on 2016 in each subsequent meet and is now better off than it was at this point last year.

In fact, the heavy majority of teams are scoring better this year than they did in 2016, with 54 teams having improved their averages versus just 28 teams falling off from last season. This is particularly apparent at the bottom of the rankings among the DII and DIII teams where only a handful of teams are weaker this season and many have improved their averages to the tune of multiple points. The national average of averages for all 82 teams sits at 192.500 right now, compared to 192.082 at this time last season, which is not an insignificant bump. Teams are scoring a half point better than they were last year. So, yeah, that trend of increasing scores doesn’t show much sign of abating.