This season, I have been updating and expanding the Hall of 10s (always available at the top of the page) with the goal of including names, dates, and apparatuses for every 10 ever scored in NCAA gymnastics.

It currently includes 873 scores of 10.0 dating from Kelly Garrison in 1988 to Elizabeth Price in 2018, but it’s definitely not the complete account of every 10.0 ever scored. I’m missing exact dates for a number of 10s from the mid-90s (because apparently the internet was invented 7 days ago, and before that we didn’t have calendars and told time by the wind).

Plus, most of the Jenny Hansen 10s don’t appear at all in the list because I’m missing years for them (I currently have dates for just six of the twenty-one vault 10s and none of the six floor 10s). No matter. She’s not the most 10-ed NCAA gymnast of all time or anything (oh wait, yes she is). Information is also pretty sparse for those schools that don’t have programs anymore, since they’re weirdly not super concerned about maintaining records because of the whole not-existing thing.

So, I think we can do better if we work together. I know we have a lot of the original fans out there, so take a look at the list and let me know if you have information that isn’t included so that this can become a more complete Hall of 10s.

As we have it now, you may be interested to know (if you’re a trash nerd like me), that the 10-iest day in the history of college gymnastics came on March 12, 2004, when twelve separate 10.000s were awarded (five to Arizona State alone). Disclaimer: 2004 is not a role model.

Plus, a scavenger hunt: Can you find the only athlete in NCAA history who has scored a 10.000 for two different schools?

I blame Maggie Nichols. All of these high all-around scores she’s dancing around in right now mean that we need some historical reference points by which to compare what she’s doing to the highest all-time individual AA performance. So here we are.

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. Continue reading 2017 v. 2016 →

The first meets of the season are in the books (for almost all the teams), and since everyone has decided based on only that who the Super Six teams will be, we should probably just fast forward to regionals, right? We have all we need to know.

Last night, Stanford performed a catastrophic floor rotation, a clunky beam rotation, and a surprisingly OK vault rotation to score the traditional first-meet 1.100 in a show of true compassion for Georgia. Stanford’s 193.250 is its lowest first-meet score in over a decade, and yet my general impression was, “Could have been worse.” So there’s that. Stanford would like us to know that starting slowly is all part of a cunning master plan that works almost a third of the time. UNSTOPPABLE.

Considering various teams and their general trends of starting slowly/quickly and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing or even matters, I plotted the first-meet scores of the eventual champions for each of the last 10 years.

What this tells us is that there’s not a rule. You could be Oklahoma in 2014 and start high, stay high, and end high (team motto?), or you could be Alabama in 2011 and start in the garbage before pulling it back. The good news for teams that struggled in the first meet this year is that apart from that Oklahoma 2014 number, these aren’t overwhelming scores. (But they’re also not 193s, Georgia and Stanford.) Champions don’t have to be champions in the first week and often aren’t.

That’s also reflected in the average first-meet scores for the six ultimate Super Six qualifiers.

In 2014, the good teams all started well and remained excellent right through to the end, but that’s sort of an outlier. In 2015, Stanford and Auburn were trash in the first meet and came back to make Super Six. In 2011, none of the six final qualifiers scored higher than 195.700 in the opening meet. Scores were lower as a whole in 2011, but not that much lower. So it can be done. Continue reading First Meet History →