It’s an all too familiar tale within the plot of the postseason: Your favorite team goes up on beam first in the regional final, hoping to upset gymnastics blue bloods to advance to nationals, only to score five mid 9.7s in a row and take itself out of contention before the competition even really begins. But is this tendency a fluke? Does starting on beam—or any other event for that matter—truly affect a team’s chances of finding success during the postseason?
That inference can certainly be drawn, a product of the nerves of competing not only to win but not to be eliminated, and the comfort of competing in the familiar Olympic order. But does this inference have statistical proof to back it up? Luckily, the (somewhat) random draw of the rotation order for postseason allows for this to be tested to determine whether starting on an event truly puts a damper on a team’s championship dreams.
For this analysis, we took every postseason full team score from the NCAA tournament dating back to 2016, excluding the play-in rounds from 2019 on. We removed any major outliers from the analysis, aka any performance that was more than 1.5 points away from the team’s NQS for that year. We then compared the deviance of the teams’ overall performance from their NQS…
