This week, 15 routines received a 10 from one judge. Interested in having a rage stroke? Watch (the ones we have) here.
The 10s
Maggie Nichols – Vault (Friday) – Oklahoma
Lexy Ramler – Beam – Minnesota
Kyla Ross – Bars – UCLA
Maggie Nichols – Vault (Monday) – Oklahoma
The 9.975s
Kiya Johnson – Floor – LSU
Maggie Nichols – Floor (Friday) – Oklahoma
Tiarre Sales – Beam – Minnesota
[Wasn’t included in the broadcast and haven’t seen video yet]
Kyla Ross – Beam – UCLA
Emi Watterson – Bars – Cal
Maggie Nichols – Beam (Monday) – Oklahoma
Maggie Nichols – Floor (Monday) – Oklahoma
The 9.950s
Ragan Smith – Bars (Friday) – Oklahoma
Ivy Lu – Beam – Minnesota
Audrey Barber – Bars – Maryland
The 9.925s
Hannah Joyner – Beam – Rutgers
How could one judge give Hannah Joyner a 9.85 for what was clearly a 9.95 or better routine??
I’m happy to see Joyner doing well in NCAA! Wasn’t she an (aspiring maybe?) junior elite who trained with Simone/Aimee back in the day?
The scoring at the OU meet was ridiculous. How could someone give Maggie Nichols’ beam a 10 with that obvious of a balance check?! People complain about Florida, UCLA, and Georgia homescoring but OU’s is just as bad.
Pretty much everywhere is bad this year. I remember when Alabama, Cal, and Michigan were known for reasonable and sometimes tight scoring. Now every team and conference is throwing 9.9+ like Mardi Gras beads.
Let’s not forget Bre Showers infamous beam last season vs Florida. Its like OU judges can’t take off deductions for anything on beam.
Let’s not forget when another gymnast from another team did the exact same thing and received the exact same score #carryon
@Mic – um it’s particularly relevant to call out overscoring when it’s THE TOP TEAM in NCAA gym. Obviously, OU is not the only team whose scores are out of proportion to their performances. But they are the team winning every single meet, with gymnasts that have the highest rankings.
I think it’s pretty obvious that OU is the best team in NCAA gym, but if it’s more important for a score to be Maggie Nichols than to do error-free gymnastics, what’s the point of even having judges? We could all be like “oh looks like OU is still consistent and mostly clean, here’s the trophy, let’s skip the farce and go home.”
Right?!? With the 0.1 wobble on the flight series and lack of split/flexed feet on the leap, it was a 9.85 best.
At the very, very least, 0.05 needed have been taken off for the balance check. I would have been ok even with a 9.95 since the form and split flaws were borderline enough to not be taken. However, I can’t accept that a judge let that obvious balance check go. It wasn’t simply unsquared shoulders or a quick flourish of the arms – it was an obvious and noticeable lean. If you can’t deduct for that, I’m surprised that judge lifted her pen at all…
Where is the 9.95 from Kyana George of CAL on floor?
Nevermind, you are only counting people who had one 10.
I love Maggie, but her getting a 10 on beam with an obvious bobble and flexed feet is all the evidence one needs to deem NCAA gymnastics as a show rather than a sport.
Does Spencer do Things Are Happening during the season because wow, things are HAPPENING.
Nichols’ 2-pass routine makes me wonder if the judges ever take the “Insufficient distribution of the elements” 0.05 deduction off routines. With the exception of the closing leap series, she did almost all of her elements (two passes and a leap) in the same section.
I’d say that could fit the “most difficult elements placed in the same section of the exercise” consideration.
Maybe but I want to give her a medal for connecting a Gogean to a tumbling pass. Very cool, and a deeply entertaining nod to all the catastrophising we all did back when pass+leap became the new hotness.
Yes that is really cool!
They might take that deduction sometimes, but they’re never going to take it from Nichols.
Are there any formal guidelines as to what constitutes “same section of the exercise?”
My guess is that putting the split leap 3/2 between the two tumbling passes was enough to separate the passes into different “sections.” Nichols routine on paper ended up being tumbling, dance, tumbling, dance even though it was effectively two back-to-back tumbling runs topped off by a leap pass.
I personally don’t mind consolidation of difficulty in a routine. If NCAA is going to have a rule like this, they should define it better so routines like Nichols’ don’t cause unneeded confusion!
The only two Ds were placed in the same section of the exercise, within 13 seconds of each other, so it should have triggered a distribution deduction — “most difficult elements placed in the same section of the exercise”. The first 20 seconds of the exercise had no skill of any value and the last tumbling skill was 38 seconds before the end. The Gogean was short (other gymnasts get deducted consistently for this, it is one of the few leaps that truly gets hit), the landing on the double pike was shaky.
I know its been talked to death, but the absolute highest scores Maggie should’ve gotten on beam and floor were 9.85 and 9.9. The fact that 4 different judges got scores so high is absolutely wild.
I think a fair question to ask is if a routine as simple as Maggie’s should be able to start from a 10? Maggie got the 0.1 bonus for finishing with a double salto even though that salto was in the dead middle of the routine.
Another point to argue is that her Gogean leap was a full 1/4 short when she landed. She did a great cover up to show full rotation but the judges should have recognized the underrotation.
If the judges did recognize the skill as a split full instead of a Gogean, she would have lost 0.1 in start value. Would she also have lost the 0.1 connection bonus for her leap pass since that would have included a repeated skill?
At the verrrrry least she shouldn’t be getting bonus for the double salto. The code should be more explicit about a window of time that it has to fall within, I’d say the last15-20 sec but even 30 sec if they’re feeling generous. She finished her double pike 40 sec into the routine and had almost 40 sec still remaining. That’s absurd.
I honestly feel bad for Maggie getting so overscored. So often she truly is flawless and deserves 9.95+ scores, but handing out those scores to her when she has clear deductions minimizes her accomplishments when she does deserve the big scores.
It’s time for KJ to have a little talk with the judges about fair scoring. “Look, I’m all about the gifts. But you have to draw the line somewhere. If there is a major wobble, you simply CAN’T throw a 10 for that.”
#JusticeforMaggie #Takethedeductions
I don’t feel strongly one way or another about KJ and I have no reason to think she’s a shady coach; on the flip side, I have no reason to think that she’d use her power to push for fairer judging. It makes her team and fans happier in the short term and all the winning ensures she’ll keep her job, so why would she bother?
This is more of an assumption but the fact that she specifically choreographed Maggie’s two-pass routine to really ride the code out to its limits, I don’t see her as someone who’d go out of her way to advocate for changes that would hurt her scores.
All that being said, fully agree that inaccurate judging hurts the athletes, even the ones who benefit from it. The way I see it, judging fairly is a way of showing them respect for all the hard work they do.
Well said!
Just the fact that coaches can speak directly to judges in NCAA is ridiculous, and the system being set up in a way that incentivizes the judges to listen to them (at least the more powerful coaches) is just insane.
In a world with unlimited funds, I would love to see each university have a panel of 8 judges (2 per event) that travel to various meets around the country. No more than 1 judge per school would attend any single meet, meaning that athletes would be scored by judges from 8 different schools.
Catch #1: Each university’s judges can never judge an athlete from their own university.
Catch #2: As much as is logistically possible, if a judge from university A’s panel judges university B’s athletes, at some point in the season, a judge from university B should judge university A’s athletes.
This would prevent ridiculous home-scoring situations as well as judges being tempted to intentionally overscore or underscore a particular school.