By Randy Horner
Associate Head Coach, Missouri State
There’s an elite fraternity in college swimming. It’s called the CSCAA Top Twenty-Five and, I assert, it’s hurting our sport. Ten times each season, a select group gets to brag about its privileged position in the land of collegiate swimming and why?

We’d like to think it’s a reflection of our sport, of the top teams, their swimmers, and their times, but with each release it seems we find the same cast of characters, week after week, year after year. How can this be?

The fact is, it can’t. Teams rise, teams fall, that’s why we have competitions, but the current system of rankings doesn’t allow for these teams to emerge. It’s with this belief in mind that I sought to see how an objective ranking system might look. I asked:

• Would it change the Top 25?
• Are there teams being overlooked?
• Are there teams over-rated based on the history of their program?

The answers? Yes, yes, and yes.

All times that are use were posted prior to December 1^st, and the CollegeSwimming.com Power Point values. Are the values perfect? Who knows. NISCA has points, FINA has points and there’s nothing to say anything is perfect. What they are, however, is objective. Even the much-maligned Bowl Championship Series is recognizing this by moving towards a greater reliance on computer ranking systems.

Here are the results:

When you look at the top ten, the results aren’t entirely surprising. On both the men’s and women’s sides we see most of the usual suspects. In fact, on the women’s side we see that most teams represented score well in on the point values. Only four teams pop up using the statistical measure and two of those – Minnesota and Notre Dame – have been jumping on and off the CSCAA’s Top 25 all season long. Why the hegemony? Perhaps because at fourteen scholarships, there’s a limited number of institutions that can fully fund a program.

On the men’s side, with fewer scholarships needed to be competitive, several teams are deserving of consideration. But how do they get into the top twenty five? One option would be to beat a top twenty-five team. Of course, Southern Illinois did just that, topping Wisconsin earlier this season, but is that reflected in the poll? Nope. How about Texas A&M who knocked off #13 Northwestern after stumbling to Big 12 rival Missouri. How about having top swimmers? NC State has one of the best and some of the fastest relays around, yet they don’t deserve a mention in the coaches’ poll. Using the data here, you could assert that NC State is the most under-rated men’s program while Tennessee, ranked 12^th by the coaches, falls to 33^rd by the computers.

Taken together, its obvious that the current system is tragically flawed. In football, sixty-two coaches get a voice but in swimming eight people dictate the pecking order for our sport. In fact, look at the latest women’s poll. All eight voters, with one exception, picked the top six in exactly the same order. Georgia got eight first place votes, Auburn eight second-place votes, Stanford eight third-place votes, Florida eight fourth-place votes and only one person that picked Cal-Berkeley over Arizona. You have to wonder what that person was thinking. Was he (there’s only one woman voter after all) an independent thinker or did he just forget to drink the Kool Aid?

Why can’t we have a system that can rank every team in the nation, from top to bottom? We should reward teams that swim fast, not those living off years past. Instead we perpetuate the good-old-boy’s network. CollegeSwimming.com, with its Mid-Major poll, has done a great thing to give voice to provide an objective ranking system, but I challenge CollegeSwimming.com and the CSCAA to step up to the plate and provide an equitable way of ranking programs.

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