NC State Takes Full Advantage of Morning Swims, Leads Day 2 Ups/Downs

SwimSwam's Lauren Neidigh also contributed to this report. 

For those unfamiliar with the terminology: “Up” means a swimmer who is in the A-final, as those swimmers cannot fall lower than 8th barring a DQ. “Down” will mean B-finalists, who are between 9th-16th place.

This year, we’re introducing a new angle on our traditional up/down rankings: and that’s the idea of “burned swims.” Basically, this will keep a tally of the number of swims that a team took (including scratches and DFS) to get to that number of up/downs. This is relevant because, for example, while Cal and Stanford didn’t have any finalists in the 500 free, they also only had one swimmer entered between the two of them.

This metric will help identify where teams are expecting surges in scoring and smooth-out the curves from particularly weak or strong events from a team. We’ll focus on tracking burned swims from the top 12 teams – on Thursday, that means the top 12 teams based on psych sheet scoring .

Below, we’ve split out projections and actual results for each event, then at the end is a summary with just the core that you need to know. Scroll all the way down for that summary.

200 Freestyle Relay

Texas Vs. NC State. Each team had three swimmers under 19 seconds and a fourth swimmer in the low 19’s.

500 Freestyle

Swimmers from eight different teams qualified for the A final of the 500 freestyle. Texas’ Clark Smith was a little off this morning, missing the opportunity for a second swim. NC State and Florida took advantage of the opportunity to sneak up on the Longhorns, however, each putting a swimmer in the A final and a second swimmer in the B final.

200 IM

California loaded up in this event, placing Josh Prenot, Ryan Murphy, and Andrew Seliskar into the A final and Jacob Pebley into the B final.

50 Freestyle

Caeleb Dressel may have rattled his own American record this morning, but it was NC State that really shined, putting Simonas Bilis and Ryan Held into the A final and then Andreas Schiellerup into the B final.

400 Medley Relay

SUMMARY

While the top four teams continued to separate themselves by earning two A final relay appearances, NC State managed to out swim the rest of the field during the prelim session, putting three swimmers up and four swimmers down. They also burned fewer swims than any of the other top 5 teams. Texas and Florida also had strong morning. The longhorns will have more swims tonight, but the Gators have an extra A final swim which will give them a boost.