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Men’s Big 12 Picks Revisited: West Virginia Snags Second With Strong Showing

2021 BIG 12 SWIMMING & DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

  • When: Swimming: Wednesday, February 24 – Saturday, February 27, 2021 / Diving Monday, March 1 – Wednesday, March 3, 2021
  • Where: Lee & Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center – Austin, TX (Central Time Zone)
  • Champion: Texas men (25x)
  • Results

In the lead-up to NCAA conference meet season, we previewed all ten major conference meets and took a stab at predicting a team order. Now, we’re looking back at those picks to see how the final team standings shook out. Where were we wrong? Where were we right? Which teams over-performed and under-performed compared to expectations?

Big 12 Men

SwimSwam Fan Guide Picks

  1. Texas
  2. TCU
  3. West Virginia

Actual Finish Order (With Change from our picks noted in parentheses)

  1. Texas (-)
  2. West Virginia (+1)
  3. TCU (-1)

Just as we saw on the women’s side, West Virginia outswam expectations, beating TCU by 132 to remain the conference runners-up. TCU looked like a young team on the rise, returning 90% of their individual points from 2020 along with 19 of 20 relay legs. But in hindsight, it was worth putting a bit of a damper on those expectations, because TCU still returned 37 fewer individual points than West Virginia.

We projected the second-place battle to be much closer than the Swimulator projections, which had TCU leading by almost 180. After the swimming had entirely wrapped, TCU still led by 20 – but even by that point, we knew West Virginia’s deeper diving group would carry the day, especially in a thin conference where every diver would score at least some points.

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About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

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