This year’s RQS calculator is live.

It’s on view-only status, but you can either download the document from there or select “make a copy” if you want your own version to edit yourself so you can play around with your own “If we got 199 next week, and they got a 2, would we be ahead of them?” pipe dreams. I’ll update each week with the new scores.

It’s still early. Only two teams have a full RQS score so far (congratulations on your championship Iowa), and RQS doesn’t get used for official rankings until week 8. But, a large chunk of teams will have a prospective RQS following this weekend’s competitions, so the comparison game can start—while the “they desperately need three more road scores” game has already long since begun.

Current national scoring records for the 2017-2020 quad (seniors).

Continue reading Quad Records →

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 →