While we anxiously await the 2025 college gym season, we decided to look back at one of the highlights of 2024: The NCAA National Championships. This meet was everything you could want from a national championship: thrilling, exciting, and seemingly anyone’s meet to win, especially after top-seeded Oklahoma’s shocking loss in the semi-finals. But was it really anyone’s championship to win? How close was the meet in reality?
To determine this, we took our meet predictor and made some tweaks. For our usual pre-meet predictions, we simulate all 96 routines of the meet. Here we entered in each routine’s actual score one at a time, in the order that they came in on the broadcast. Then we simulated only the remaining routines of the meet where the gymnast(s) who already competed were no longer eligible to provide a simulated score. We ran each simulation 10,000 times and determined how likely each team was to win the championship at every moment during the meet.
The results of our simulations are in the chart below. The first point for each team represents its win chances before the meet started and each subsequent point is the new win percentage based on the most recent routine. In the rotation-by-rotation charts, there will always be a win chance for…
