Determining the Greatest of All-Time, or GOAT, has become an increasingly common debate among sports fans. While some sports lend themselves more easily to this exercise, gymnastics, which relies on some level of subjectivity within its scoring, proves a bit more vexing. Looking at NCAA gymnastics specifically, which doesn’t differentiate between difficulty and execution scores like in the elite system, it is even more difficult to compare the caliber of skills and form of different athletes. So the question arises: what criteria can we use to crown a GOAT in NCAA gymnastics? Is it an athlete’s impact on their team? Their postseason success? Or could it be the number of awards they earned over their career, their amount of perfect routines, or maybe their high scores on each event? What does it truly mean to be the best of all time? This Data Deep Dive examines NCAA success from a multitude of angles to truly define what makes a gymnast the greatest at their craft.
In order to compile an initial list of potential GOATs, we looked at gymnasts who met any of the following criteria:
- NCAA All-Around title winner
- NCAA Individual title winner on 2 or more events
- AAI Winner
- Gym Slam (an athlete who scored a perfect 10 on each of the four…
