Conference championship weekend is complete and the bracket has been revealed—let the postseason begin! We have once again run our postseason simulator 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 2025 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. At the regional level, home scores from the regular season were weighted more heavily than away scores for the host teams while away scores were given priority for the remainder of the field; when simulating the national semifinal and final, away scores were prioritized for all teams. Scores from March are also more likely to be chosen than scores from January and February. Finally, we expanded the script to simulate the entire bracket, starting with the…
