Should NCAA Meets Be Allowed to End In Ties?

This weekend, we saw an electric matchup between the #1 Arizona State and #2 California men as they faced off at Spieker Aquatics Complex for the Golden Bears’ senior day meet. 13 pool records later, the meet ended with the Sun Devils and Golden Bears tied at 150 points each. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, dual meet we’ve ever seen ended without a winner.

This isn’t the first dual meet that’s ended in a tie this season. There have been at least four other instances with perhaps the most notable one being the cross-Carolina border clash between the UNC and South Carolina women.

There’s been renewed attention this season on how to grow NCAA swimming. There have been six swim meets this year that have had over a thousand fans in attendance and teams have introduced DJs, super-finals, and 50 freestyles with fins as they try to find ways to reinvigorate college dual meets.

So, while we’re rethinking the way the NCAA does things, should college meets be allowed to end in ties?

Full disclosure, I am a sports fan from the United States. That means that I have a hard time with the notion of a tie in sports. I was raised watching leagues that aren’t satisfied with a tie. There always has to be a winner, even if extra time is needed to settle the score.

The way that NCAA swimming is currently set up, the score of a dual meet does not matter. Teams do not need to fight their way into the postseason; every team is guaranteed deck space at their respective conference meet. And from there, it’s the times of your swimmers that earns your school an invite to NCAA championships—not where you finished at conferences.

As a sport, swimming chooses its moments to care about ties. The fact that the pool is only so big necessitates the swim-off. If you tie for a specific place—usually 8^th or 16^th—that isn’t acceptable because we can’t cram another lane into the pool. So, you’ll swim-off for as many times as it takes to have either you or your opponent win.

But the sport doesn’t care if you tie for any other place. It also only cares about ties in prelims. There’s no problem if there’s two swimmers on the same step of the podium sharing the same trophy.

I don’t think this is inherently a problem. At its core, swimming is a sport about going fast and doing it at the right moment. If two swimmers tie for gold—like Simone Manuel and Penny Oleksiak in the 100 freestyle at the Rio Olympics—that speaks to the beauty of the sport rather than betraying a problem.

But in the collegiate context, points do matter. It’s a team that wins the national championship trophy. And those trophies matter. They matter to the swimmers, to the coaches (often in terms of a bonus), and to their school’s athletic departments. The wins matter, which means so do the points.

The current NCAA swimming handbook states in Section 11 that “The team accumulating the greatest number of points shall be declared the winner of the meet. If the final total number of points for each team is the same, the meet is declared a tie.” This goes for both championship and non-championship meets.

NCAA gymnastics, another sport that walks the line between the individual and the team, operates this way too. At the 2014 NCAA Championships, Florida and Oklahoma tied. That result marked the first tie for the NCAA team championship title in league history. In gymnastics, ties aren’t broken for individual or team titles but are “for pretty much everything else,” according to the NCAA’s how-to guide for college gymnastics fans.

But back to swimming. As the  NCAA swimming structure stands, there is not much of a reason to break ties, especially at dual meets. I don’t think switching to a head-to-head format is the answer (and neither do a lot of you). However, I do think that it’s worth reevaluating whether ties in points scoring are acceptable. The landscape of college sports is changing drastically, and swimming needs to adapt. We’ve seen teams rethink dual meets this season and it’s worth continuing that trend up the NCAA structure.

Maybe part of that is because then we get to the fun discussion about what the potential tiebreaker looks like. Maybe it’s because I am who I am and I get stuck on the idea of the ASU and Cal men hoisting the team trophy in March together. All season long there’s been a great debate about which team will prevail in Indianapolis and for me, it feels anticlimactic if it ends in a tie.

But then, maybe that’s just the beauty of our sport. Maybe the dual meet, which ultimately doesn’t count toward any standings for anything that matters, served its purpose, #1 vs #2, building that anticipation for bigger battles to come at Pac-12s and NCAAs.