Swimulator Conference Projections: Mountain West and MAC

With more than half the season and all the mid season rest meets complete, it’s time to start looking ahead to conference meets. Today: the Mountain West and MAC (ACC, Big 10, Pac 12, SEC). The Mountain West is women’s only so I’m doubling up today.

To project the meets, I’ve used SwimSwam’s Swimulator (available on the front page). This tool creates scores out a meet using top times so far this season (it can also do average times), while respecting plausible event combinations and trying to maximize each team’s points. It does not include diving. To get an idea of how we can expect these projected scores to change at the real meet, I compared last year’s projection as of today’s date to the real conference score at last year’s championship meet. Times from this weekend’s meets aren’t in the system yet.

Mountain West

Defending champions Boise State sit 246 points ahead of second place Nevada making them the favorites to repeat. Boise had a similar lead over San Diego St last year and Boise won by 251. They were helped by gaining 105 swimming points vs their projection. However, if, instead of gaining points, Boise drops points and one of their rivals has a good meet, an upset is possible.

This is mostly due to diving. Last year on the boards Nevada and San Diego St. outscored them by 129 and 95 respectively. Only Boise, Wyoming, and Fresno St had any senior divers in the top 16 last year, so Boise St’s diving deficit should remain intact this year. After diving Boise’s cushion drops to about 150 points. If they have a bad meet, that’s a gap one of their rivals could plausibly bridge.

Projected individual scorers are led by Kahoha Shinada and Adriana Palmino both of New Mexico with 91 points. They are followed by Allly Kleinsorgen of Boise St. with 89, Andressa Cholodovskis Lima of Nevada with 88, Brida Berggren of San Diego St. with 87, Kyndal Phillps of UNLV with 87, and McKenna Meyer of San Diego St. with 87.

MAC Women

Akron leads the MAC projection with 825 points. This puts them 309 points ahead of second place Buffalo. This is a much larger advantage than they held in last season’s mid season projection and they won the meet by a comfortable 150 points over Eastern Michigan. Eastern Michigan is ranked 7th this year, a repeat of their 7th place ranking at this time last year. They more than doubled their projected score at the conference meet while also scoring the most diving points, so a large rise again this year wouldn’t be surprising.

Projected individual scorers are led by Paloma Marrero of Akron with 57 points, Megan Burns of Buffalo with 57, Madison Myers of Akron with 56, Paulina Nogaj of Akron with 55, Sadie Fazekas of Akron with 54, and Izzy Jones of Toledo with 53.

MAC Men

Missouri St. hold the lead in the current MAC projection with 951 points, but defending champions Eastern Michigan (by 1 point(!!) last year) sit 324 points back. 324 points is a very large deficit, especially in a conference that scores to 16 places, but last year at this time Eastern Michigan was behind Missouri St. by 418. However the rest of the way, everything went Eastern Michigan’s way. They scored 151 diving points to Missouri State’s 0. Additionally they gained 101 swimming points and Missouri State dropped 167. For Eastern Michigan to defend, a similar swing needs to happen again this year. With the recent history, that seems pretty plausible. The men gained a bunch of points last year, and their women’s team (also coached by Peter Linn) gained 276. There seems to be a consistent philosophy regarding in season meets.

It’s worth noting that last year’s meet included Buffalo. Unfortunately Buffalo cut their men’s swim program this year, so they are no longer a factor.

The leaders in projected individual points are Artur Osvath of Missouri St. with 57, Tosh Kawaguchi of Eastern Michigan with 55, Kacper Cwiek of Missour St. with 54, and Antonio Thomas of Missouri St. with 54.

If you want to look at the event by event projections or more detailed swimmer points projections, follow the links to the full Swimulator projections.  Articles on other D1 conferences are forthcoming (here’s the ACC, Big 10, Pac 12, SEC, and some D3 conferences). In the meantime, if you want to know the projections for other conferences feel free to run your own custom projection here.