Less than three years ago, Cal Men’s Gymnastics was on the ropes. The MAG community banded together to help save the 100-year-old program. A reprieve was granted, and today’s resulting roster is mostly comprised of a young group of non-scholarship athletes. …
Saturday night’s home meet against the defending national champions, Illinois, was a perfect display. The Bears showed consistency on all six events to offer more than a glimmer of hope they are good enough to compete for one of the top six team spots that could punch their ticket to the gymnastics version of the Big Dance — The NCAA Team Championships. …
read more – Stick It Media – Cal Upends Illinois in Thriller
That link has updates on the other meets this past weekend.
To look at the Troester GymInfo rankings, you’d think we’ve got a tight race in the works.
FMA
1 Penn State 444.767
2 Oklahoma 439.450
3 Michigan 436.800
4 Stanford 434.317
5 Ohio State 433.233
6 Illinois 431.717
7 Minnesota 430.700
8 California 426.450
9 Iowa 425.517
10 Air Force Academy 424.783
I’ve learned the hard way, however, that MAG NCAA rankings from season don’t often help predict who’s going to be standing on the podium at Championships.
12 comments ↓
The average system is rubbish. They need to move to ranking by number of wins or by win/loss so that the first half of the season isn’t a waste of time.
Clinton, that won’t work.
There are so few teams left the straight win loss record means next to nothing. William & Mary has and will end up with a better win loss record than California, as Cal is going up against repeatedly against the likes of Stanford and OU, while William & Mary is facing Army and Springfield.
The numbers actually do mean something, even the early ones.
And what waste of time are those early season meets, anyway? They certainly are not a waste for the participants. I’ve sat through plenty of them and always had a good time.
I think they only need to be in the top 12 teams anyway so for the likes of Illinois, Stanford, Cal, Oklahoma, OSU, Michigan and Penn State the whole regular season is kind of meaningless since they will always be in the top 12.
It is the top 12 teams making the NCAA championships, so from that standpoint the whole regular season is “meaningless”, and even the conference championships are “meaningless”, if you buy into thinking the only meaningful men’s NCAA gymnastics meet is the NCAA championship.
Seriously, people complain about early season NBA, NCAA hoops, and MLB games being meaningless. But people still watch and play in those meaningless games.
Or we could just be like the BCS and have the Championships be some team from EIGL that won most of it’s meets up against Oklahoma – sort of like Notre Dame against Alabama.
P.S. Oklahoma is probably going to win. Well, I bet that every time. It has to pay off someday.
A proper win/loss ladder might not work with the current fixture. But it could easily be structured to make it work. Organise the teams so they compete against a good spread of teams based on last years results, so that it is even. Or perhaps even divide it into groups of 10 or so based on ranking. So the top teams only compete against each other and the bottom teams compete against each other. Then they could easily create an interesting season and it would make much more sense. You could even have promotion/relegation between the top 10/bottom 10 like in football. That would have the added advantage of not having stupid meets where you have completely mismatched teams against each other.
Teams don’t have the money to travel as it is. Why do you think Cal doesn’t leave the state until conference and NCAA? They have no budget. The NE schools are the same deal. If they had to travel hither and yon to make up some formula they’d be cut in a heartbeat.
With how few schools there are, having 12 advance is probably crazy but, technically, day one of NCAAs is really “Regionals,” and only the team final is truly the National Championships.
The great thing about men’s NCAA is that, year over year, despite the dearth of schools with teams, it’s really competitive. There are somehow, always, 4-6 teams that could win on any given night. Unlike the women were there are only 4 teams that ever HAVE won. Which is such a total joke.
My money this year is on Penn State, with Illinois (talent, no discipline) and Michigan (if Mikulak gets it together at the last minute) as dark horses.
I found this old NCAA comp:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxvJ4mxpBNo&w=420&h=315
Why did they change the format from 3 teams to 6? It was much better with 3. 6 is too hard to follow. Looks like attendance has also dropped since then as a result.
I’ve seen that video. I think that’s the one where Nebraska protested so many times they got themselves even farther behind.
“Looks like attendance has also dropped since then as a result”….as a result of their being 40 teams in 1992 and 17 NCAA teams now.
Even though there were only 3 teams in the championships 1992, there were more than three times as many people directly involved in men’s NCAA gymnastics in 1992, in addition to all their friends and families. I don’t see any way there would not have been a drop in attendance between 1992 and the present, no matter what the format.
I don’t know why there are six teams in the final. It is pretty chaotic. That said, the women seem to draw a big audience with 6 teams on the floor at their championships.
It was a little bit of a joke to suggest that was the sole reason for the drop. No doubt there are many factors. However, even though there are less than half the teams it would be interesting to compare the actual numbers of gymnasts. It seems to me that with more guys specialising there are more gymnasts per team now. Most teams seems to have about 20 gymnasts. I doesn’t seem like there was that many before.
The average squad has gotten larger. There were 590 gymnasts in 1992 and 341 in 2012. There are probably more gymnasts per team because there are less teams.
I would guess the format change had little to do with the drop, but nobody really knows.
There were 4000 + people at OU last year for NCAAs. That really isn’t too bad for a non revenue sport that doesn’t have much hold in the US.
Sorry but the move from 3 teams in finals to 6 was a good one. It used to be that a team on the podium (in all NCAA sports, 1-4 get trophies) wasn’t even competing on the night, meaning they’d been in different sessions on day on, and teams that could have won the whole thing were often left on the sidelines. With three, there’s not much drama. It seemed like winners were almost always a foregone conclusion.
Very, very few people care about watching every single routine at a gymnastics meet. Mostly they just want to watch their team, or their gymnast, so the more going on the better. Since that way it’s more likely there’s something out there that everyone wants to watch.
’92 was before my time, but crowds at NCAAs from, say, ’96 (when it was still 3-team finals) to now, have been about the same. In fact, they’re probably better the last decade or so, since in the days of 6 teams only making it to NCAAs, and only 3 to finals, many times the host school wasn’t even represented by a team. Talk about depressing the crowd.
Besides, if you didn’t qualify as a team, just about every guy on your team qualified as an individual anyway, and watching the individuals was so boring and so low energy it was a real mood killer. The stakes were so low, not even the gymnasts seemed to care.
Glad they finally got rid of the stupid bye rotation, at least in team finals. Hope they keep it that way. Really kills the momentum when top teams stop competing and their scores don’t all match up.
Also, Worlds and Olympics have 8 teams on the floor in finals…
There is a lot of energy with 6 on the floor. It doesn’t bother me all that much.
The women’s NCAA has six.
What needs to happen is better scoring display.
Sports other than men’s hoops and football are as much about participation opportunities as they are about drawing huge crowds.
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