19 Men’s Teams Will Swim All 5 Relays at 2018 NCAA Championships

As part of our preparations for the upcoming NCAA Championship meets, we’re breaking down the qualifiers a number of different ways to give a complete picture of program quality and potential heading over the 2017-2018 season. One of these ways includes the number of relays qualified for the NCAA Championships, and how those relays were qualified.

This year’s men’s meet has a unique circumstance, in that the Georgia men qualified 9 individuals but didn’t have a single relay under the Qualifying Standard. Still, with 4-or-more swimmers in the meet, they’re eligible to swim all relays in which they have met the slower Provisional Standard (“B” standard), meaning that they’ll still be eligible to swim 4 relays.

The rest of this post mirrors the women’s post, which you can see here. If you’ve already ready that post, then you can skip straight to the table.

There are many ways to measure the strength of a college swimming and diving program. The most obvious involve looking at points scored, or place earned, at an NCAA Championship or conference championship meet.

Another way to tier the top programs in the country is by the number of NCAA Championship invites they earn in relays. Under the new relay qualification systems, only the best-of-the-best programs are able to take relays to the meet. To take a relay, a team is not only required to have an individual swimmer or diver invited, but they also must hit the “Qualifying Standard” (aka “A” cut) in at least one relay. Once those two criteria are met, teams are able to take as many relays as they want, provided they all have “Provisional Standards,” aka “B” cuts.

Alternatively, a team that earned invites for 4 individual swimmers (not divers) can swim any relays in which they had a provisional standard. 1 men’s team accomplished that this year: Georgia, who has 9 individual swimmers entered.

While these relay qualifications will tie heavily to scoring, they themselves serve as a separate metric for which schools have true depth. Schools with 5 relays have the depth that, in most cases, they’ve been able to hit at least a provisional standard without one of their best swimmers on at least one of those relays.

There are 3 non-power 5 teams who have earned relay slots this year. The big success story is Grand Canyon, who is in their first year of NCAA Division I Championship eligibility after making the 4-year transition from Division II. Denver (2 relays) and Harvard (5 relays) also join them from outside of the ‘Power 5’ conferences – the women’s meet had no non-Power 5 teams to qualify.

The big heartbreak here is Pacific, who, as far as we can recall, became the first team under the new qualifying system to earn an NCAA Qualifying Standard but not have the requisite individual invitee to swim relays at NCAAs.

Below, see a table sorted by number of relays eligible to compete, and then number of “A” cuts by those relays: