Women’s Big 12 Picks Revisited: Trust In Kansas Pays Off, WVU Performs Well

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 women (9x)
• 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 Women

SwimSwam Fan Guide Picks

1. Texas
2. Kansas
3. TCU
4. West Virginia
5. Iowa State

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

1. Texas (-)
2. Kansas (-)
3. TCU (-)
4. West Virginia (-)
5. Iowa State (-)

The low volume of teams in this conference makes it much easier to predict than the other majors. Still, credit to our fan guide for departing from Swimulator projections in the race for second. Season-best times would have had TCU besting West Virginia by nearly 150, and Kansas by nearly 220, for second. From our fan guide:

“The reason we’re rolling with the Jayhawks for 2nd instead of TCU, even with TCU’s massive lead in the Swimulator, is because we think the changes in each team’s meet schedules this year due to COVID-19 is causing the Swimulator to over-project TCU by a little bit. Driving that suspicion is mainly that TCU went to a mid season invite this fall, while Kansas did not.”

Kansas held up their end of things, beating TCU by 121 for second. West Virginia very nearly upset TCU for third, but fell just two points short. Still, that’s a good showing for West Virginia, which returned the fewest individual points of any team in the conference from 2020.