Men’s Pac-12 Picks Revisited: Utah Overperforms Expectations, Nabs 4th

2021 MEN’S PAC-12 CHAMPIONSHIPS

• When: Sunday, February 28 – Wednesday, March 3
• Where: Houston, TX (Central Time Zone)
• Champion: Cal (4x)
• 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?

Pac-12 Men

SwimSwam Fan Guide Picks

1. Cal
2. Stanford
3. Arizona
4. USC
5. Utah

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

1. Cal (-)
2. Stanford (-)
3. Arizona (-)
4. Utah (+1)
5. USC (-1)

There wasn’t a whole lot of doubt that Cal would win this one, carrying in a nearly-300-point Swimulator margin and the most returning points in the conference by more than 100. They would wind up besting Stanford by almost 200 while winning all but one swimming event.

Arizona was solidly third, and though their placing didn’t change from Swimulator projections, it’s probably fair to say they outswam projections.

The only wrinkle in our picks was the 4th-place battle. USC was projected to be easily fourth, almost 300 points ahead of Utah. But like we saw on the women’s side, Utah had much, much more in the tank in a season where dual meets and the regular season weren’t great indicators of how good a team truly was.

The battle was extremely close, but Utah triumphed by six points, relegating USC to fifth.