[ColoradoTree]

ColoTree, thanks for your expert reports.  Did you swim at Stanford?

Ha! Nope, just a lowly rugby player that gets obsessed with swimming (and really, lots of sports) at the Olympics.  Just decided to read up a lot on the NCAA championships this year.  And when I'm digging into sports I don't know that well leading into a major event like NCAAs, one thing I try to find out is what's expected of us (what we're good at; what rivals are good at; how realistic a championship is, etc.), so I can reasonably measure whether we're overperforming or underperforming. Honestly, looking through the psych sheet is a big help, and reading through stuff on swimswam.com is brobdingnagian, too. 

So, take what I say with a grain of salt.  When I say stuff like "we'd expect so and so to get into the A final," what I'm really saying is "so and so has the Nth best time so far this year, which would project into the A final."  Not a perfect projection, since folks train differently, and while everyone has their eyes set on NCAAs, not everyone times their training perfectly enough to have their absolute best time. But useful for my limited, non-expert analysis on how likely it would be for us to win (or yield a certain number of points at) each event and thus, the overall title.

I do the same thing for the Olympics, so in each event I like, I can have a sense of what American performance should be so I can better gauge my expectations. I did a pretty deep dive on alpine skiing this year, so I really focused on the alpine skiing World Cup, and how likely a given skier might be to win a particular event based on the last few years of World Cup results, current form, return from injury, etc.

(I did grow up playing a lot of tennis, so I can speak with a little more authority on tennis posts than I can on ones like these, since I pair obsessive research with the history of playing the sport for a long time. Wasn't ever good enough to play at Stanford, but I would have played at the DIII level.)

[ColoradoTree]

ColoTree, thanks for your expert reports.  Did you swim at Stanford?

Ha! Nope, just a lowly rugby player that gets obsessed with swimming (and really, lots of sports) at the Olympics.  Just decided to read up a lot on the NCAA championships this year.  And when I'm digging into sports I don't know that well leading into a major event like NCAAs, one thing I try to find out is what's expected of us (what we're good at; what rivals are good at; how realistic a championship is, etc.), so I can reasonably measure whether we're overperforming or underperforming. Honestly, looking through the psych sheet is a big help, and reading through stuff on swimswam.com is brobdingnagian, too. 

So, take what I say with a grain of salt.  When I say stuff like "we'd expect so and so to get into the A final," what I'm really saying is "so and so has the Nth best time so far this year, which would project into the A final."  Not a perfect projection, since folks train differently, and while everyone has their eyes set on NCAAs, not everyone times their training perfectly enough to have their absolute best time. But useful for my limited, non-expert analysis on how likely it would be for us to win (or yield a certain number of points at) each event and thus, the overall title.

I do the same thing for the Olympics, so in each event I like, I can have a sense of what American performance should be so I can better gauge my expectations. I did a pretty deep dive on alpine skiing this year, so I really focused on the alpine skiing World Cup, and how likely a given skier might be to win a particular event based on the last few years of World Cup results, current form, return from injury, etc.

(I did grow up playing a lot of tennis, so I can speak with a little more authority on tennis posts than I can on ones like these, since I pair obsessive research with the history of playing the sport for a long time. Wasn't ever good enough to play at Stanford, but I would have played at the DIII level.)