The postseason is upon us! Another regular season is in the books, which means it’s time to run our postseason simulator again to see who the title favorites are and where to look for the most likely upsets along the way.
Methodology
We collected all of the scores from the 2024 season and wrote a script that randomly selects scores from the remaining pool to simulate a meet, with gymnasts who competed more often during the season being more likely to make the lineup in the simulated meet. We also accounted for the fact that there are more judges in the postseason by adding or subtracting 0.0125 from some of the scores, determined randomly in each simulation; because of postseason judging being slightly stricter than regular season, the model was more likely to subtract .0125 than add it. Finally, we expanded the script to simulate the entire bracket, starting with the play-in rounds and finishing with the national final. We ran this script 10,000 times.
In a change for this year, we added logic to prioritize home scores for regional hosts and away scores for the remaining teams. When simulating the final two rounds of competition in Texas, away scores were prioritized for all teams. This doesn’t mean that other scores were never used, they were just less…
