Crunching The Numbers: What if NCAA’s Were Scored By Country?

The Canadians are coming! The Canadians are coming! With much discussion in recent years about how much of an impact international swimmers are having on the NCAA, we decided to take a closer look.

We started with a list that USA Swimming Stats Tweeted out earlier of all international swimmers entered into the meet – they have the benefit of seeing the names entered as uninvited relay swimmers, whereas the rest of us don’t, so we’re forced to start there. We then supplemented that with at least two names that they missed, and scored the psych sheets as though NCAA’s were done on a ‘by country’ basis. Based solely on individual swimming events, the United States would dominate the scoring, as expected, with our neighbors to the north (Canada) and south (Mexico) coming in next.

Editor’s note: it appears as though the lists USA Swimming Stats tweeted were based on the pre-selection lists, in other words swimmers who had B standards but were included on the pre-selection lists and weren’t invited are included here as well. With that in mind, we’ve cut down the country scoring to just those countries that would score.

There are a few other countries with huge pipelines to the U.S., however. Sweden had 7 swimmers on the pre-selection list, Australia had 9, and Great Britain had 10 (though they’re only scored to score three points with those ten).

The Canadians, though, make up by far the biggest portion of the international contingent, with at least 48 NCAA qualifiers representing that country.

Note that many of the swimmers on the list (which we’ve posted at the end of this article) hold dual citizenship, and have been listed by their official sporting citizenship, so people like Erica Dittmer from Texas A&M, who are effectively Americans but who swam for other countries internationally (she swam for Mexico at the 2012 Olympics) are counted as internationals.

Our instinct is that at the men’s meet, internationals will account for a larger percentage of the scoring, given that they tend to be more refined and/or stronger coming into college than their American counterparts as a whole relative to the women’s side. But that will play out in a week.

Out of 153 internationals representing 42 countries on the pre-selection lists, SMU, Florida Gulf Coast, and Texas A&M have the most with 10, 7, and 6 respectively. Cal (6), Indiana (5), Michigan (5), and Pitt (5) follow them. The defending NCAA Champions from Georgia have only two, and among other probable top ten teams, Texas has 1, Tennessee has 1, Stanford has 1, Minnesota has 4, USC has 4, and Arizona has 2.

Though SMU has the largest portion of their elite group represented by internationals, they aren’t expected to score the most points from them. That honor would go to Texas A&M, who is hoping for at least 81, followed by Florida (52) and Louisville (33 – all from Tanja Kylliainen, who was born in Maryland).

International Seeded Scoring by Country

Number of International Swimmers By Team