nozatx

It was the 9-team 2024 Pac-10 tournament where they made semis (after winning 2 one-run games in a 3-team first round group). Stanford lost in the ACC first round last year Their lack of pitching plus the large number of teams in the ACC tourney will make it really tough for them this year, as they'd somehow have to go on a 5-game winning streak to take the tournament. Stanford's best WHIP among pitchers who pitched more than 1 inning in the season is worse than the Longhorn *team* WHIP. Very, very unlikely they'd make it out, but it's not impossible.

Just for sake of completeness, Stanford could get a very unexpected 25+ points by making NCAA tourney in baseball. They'd have to win next week's ACC tournament to do that and that's very unlikely given their losing record in ACC play along with the presence of Georgia Tech and North Carolina at the top. Barely worth mentioning, but it's there. Tourney starts on Tuesday.

Horns down Frogs 4-3 in men's tennis to reach NCAA finals, so only possible change from projection is +10 by winning championship. Seems like a good plan to me. #1 Wake Forest or #4 Virginia in final.

Men's tennis takes care of Baylor 4-1 to reach final four (Saturday), so that narrows the range from projection to -7 to +10.

Most everybody following along here understands the potential to lose points from the highly ranked sports still in play, but no matter what happens there, track and field is such a huge wildcard (127.5 projected points at my last checkpoint) that it's going to be hard to be comfortable.. Even though the men are ranked 14th at USTFCCA, they only have 3 individuals (and no relays) with season bests in the top 8. The women have 4 with a couple of relays just outside the top 8. The teams really didn't do all that much after the Texas Relays, and maybe that was by design?? fwiw, FloTrack provides a ranking system which scores season bests like the NCAAs.

Women's golf regionals finished up today, mostly going chalk in terms of which schools qualify for NCAAs (UT women won by 11 strokes in regional at UNC, Stanford won by 38 at home), with one significant DC-relevant exception. In the Tallahassee regional, a Kentucky golfer holed out for eagle on the 18th hole which caused Kentucky to jump over 15th-ranked UCLA by one shot for the 5th and final qualifying spot there. UCLA drops 19.5 points from their projection in women's golf with no potential to improve. Final 30 includes 10 SEC schools - OU, Vandy, MsSt failed to advance.

In other news today, Stanford came from behind to upset Michigan in women's lacrosse, so they are accumulating points there unexpectedly. Also, Texas rowing lost in varsity eights to Tennessee which cost them the SEC championship and likely the top ranking in the next poll. Earlier in the season, Stanford beat Tennessee in varsity eights and Texas beat Stanford, so anybody's game at NCAAs.

They do. In the weird world of NCAA sports, M WP is a fall sport. They went out in semis, which only nets them 55 points (excluded almost certainly in their score) because M WP has only 8 teams in the tournament.

Right - water polo.

Here's my current Stanford v Texas snapshot as of May 9 results and rankings. I will expand this later to include at least UCLA, but I wanted to go ahead and post. Texas still needs to perform well pretty much across the board because Stanford's score is well -protected by having a large number of high-scoring excluded sports to fill in in case of an unexpectedly bad showing in one sport (but it also keeps them from gaining a lot of points in case of an unexpected good result). T&F rankings are really sketchy and just a few individuals can make a huge difference in the final team placing, so that's just a big wild-care until it's over. ("x" in front a score means that the score is outside the top 14 non-mandatory sport scores).

You want to see the sheet with 24 schools or the detailed Texas/Stanford table?

Yep, that's it - thanks! Now our predictions are within 10 points each on Texas and Stanford, which would just be attributable to which ranking systems we use for the various sports. I started doing my own just because I wanted to be able to follow along at each competition level more closely, I'm currently tracking 24 schools in all (chosen based on fall/.winter standings and strength of spring sports), but that's overkill at this point. The hardest part to me was figuring out which scoring table applied to which sport, which required some reverse engineering from past results (golf scoring in particular surprised me).

Next up for me in priority would be an indoor track facility. Always seemed weird that there wasn't one and seems like it would help for training and recruiting. T&F is 4 of the included sports. Btw, Stanford upset A&M in 2nd round of men's tennis so that is now an unexpected scoring sport for them. They get #6 TCU in next round. Let's go Frogs.

At least water polo (M/W), fencing (M/W), wrestling (M), gymnastics (M/W), lacrosse (W). volleyball (M), and soccer (M). Water polo is certainly a niche sports, as is men's volleyball (only 23 Div 1 programs).. Men's wrestling has a surprisingly large number of schools which compete. There are only 12 division 1 men's gymnastics programs. There are 70 men's D1 lacrosse programs but only 30 women's D1. Out of these sports, Stanford is projected to use the scores from M SOC (64), W Fencing (60 - might be excluded), M wrestling (73.5), gymnastics (100 & 71.25), and maybe W lacrosse (60). I've read that Ohio State has an even larger number of Div 1 sports, but they're not that competitive in DC.

Yep, they drop 10 from the #1 seeding position there, but UT also dropped 7 from the #2 seeding by missing the finals, so close to a wash in terms of projections. Big difference between UT's and Stanford's overall position is that UT doesn't have extra scoring sports to cover a big unexpected letdown. Stanford has solid scores which are currently outside the 20 sport cutoff (5 50+ scores) which would just slide into place in case of an unexpectedly poor performance in some sport. UT doesn't have that buffer, so all the spring sports really have to perform in order to grab the DC.