Who Is The Power In The Power Four? Comparing The Conference Championships ...Middle East

By Sam Blacker on SwimSwam

The year of 2025 saw a significant shift in the world of conference swimming. The Pac-12, after 13 years of competition since rebranding from the Pac-10 in 2011, was to stop sponsoring swimming & diving at the end of the 2023/24 season.

That meant a new home for four of the top schools in the NCAA; Cal, Stanford, USC, and newly-crowned men’s National Champions ASU.

The first two trod the same path, locking horns again in the ACC. USC (Big Ten) and ASU (Big 12) went another direction, but not as far from home as the first two. There are some seeming contradictions in the case of Cal and Stanford’s new conference – two universities that are within 25 miles of the Pacific Ocean now competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Those were not the only seismic shifts heading into the 2024/25 season. Texas, a powerhouse which had won five of the last ten national championships on the men’s side and 79% of all Big 12 Championships on the women’s side, moved to the SEC.

The SEC and ACC had already established themselves as the deepest of the Power 5 conferences. Schools like Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, NC State, Virginia, and Louisville were consistently in the top-ten at the national level

Heading into the 2024/25 season, the concentration of talent within the SEC and ACC was especially notable though. For the men, eight of the top ten schools from 2024 NCAAs would compete in those two conferences, as would 26 of the returning 33 individual medalists. For women the story was similar, as seven of the top ten teams and 16 of the 22 returning individual medalists came from those two conferences.

The introduction of automatic NCAA qualification for conference champions, as long as they hit the NCAA qualifying time in their title-winning swim, has helped raise some questions around the concentration of talent in the Power 4 conferences. However, clearly there is an imbalance of sorts even within those four powerhouses.

How then do those conferences compare at their championship meets? We would expect the Big Ten to be reasonably similar to the SEC and ACC in terms of ‘A’ final requirements, but both the Big Ten and Big 12 should fall off faster than their East Coast counterparts. Is that what happens in practice?

We’ll start off with the big caveat. Conference championships, like the national championships, restrict swimmers to three individual events. Add in that there are different event schedules across conferences and this is not an entirely like-for-like exercise.

However, the way we are approaching this comes from the premise: “how would time X score in each conference” – that is one of the questions a swimmer asks when choosing a school. The respective championships are the best way to investigate this.

Looking at the top eight only, the majority of events follow our expectation. The SEC and ACC lead the way, with the Big Ten close behind. The Big 12 does lag behind those three, which is to be expected. ASU are the only real powerhouse in the conference, while the schools behind them (Utah, Cincinnati, BYU, Arizona) are more in the ‘qualify but rarely score’ category at NCAAs.

Arizona has moved out of that category into ‘consistent relay points and some individual scoring threats’ over the last couple of years.

There is not one conference that dominates at the top for both men and women. The ACC are clearly the strongest women’s conference right now, led by Virginia and Stanford, while the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten are comparable across most events for the men.

We have collated data of the individual prelims finishers in 8th, 16th, and 24th across the Power Four conferences this year for both men and women. We have also collected the 3rd and 8th place finishers across all five relays. There are some caveats – the men’s Big 12 contains only seven teams, so we have the data for 3rd and 7th, and a couple of events only went to 23 swimmers individually.

You can find the data further down, but it’s a little easier to view using these interactive graphs. We’ve highlighted some of the more notable differences between the conferences too – most noticeably the concentration of sprint freestyle talent in the two East Coast conferences.

Women’s

The ACC is the fastest of the four in a majority of events, for the majority of placings. The SEC and Big Ten are relatively close across the board when looking at 8th place times, but the depth shows out in some events when you go further down the rankings. In IM, breaststroke, and butterfly though, the Big Ten shows off more depth than either the ACC or SEC, with a smaller drop-off from the ‘A’ final time to ‘C’ final time. The Big 12 lags behind their counterparts at all levels.

For the women it is the ACC leading the sprint freestyle charge – it takes roughly the same time to make the ‘B’ final there as the ‘A’ final at SECs or Big Tens. The 50 free it is a little closer, and by the time you get down to 24th only 0.05 seconds separates the three conferences.

The 200 breast follows the same pattern, with the ACC way out in front in terms of ‘A’ final requirements but actually slightly slower than the SEC by the time you get down to the ‘C’ final. The 100 breast is even more striking – 8th at ACCs this year was 58.79, over a second ahead of the SEC, but the time in 24th was slower than both the SEC and Big Tens. This was also the event where the Big 12 was closest to the other conferences.

The graph below shows the absolute difference between the conferences at each level, with the fastest conference defined as the zero point.

Men’s

On the men’s side the sprint free talent is highly concentrated. In the ACC it took 19.03 just to make the 50 free ‘A’ final this year, and 19.40 would not have got you even into a ‘B’ final at either ACCs or SECs. The 100 free was even stronger – there were ACC swimmers who missed scoring entirely who would have been ‘A’ finalists in the Big Ten and Big 12. The 50 free was the Big 12’s strongest event, requiring a 19.22 to be in the top eight.

The SEC is the king in distance free, led by Florida and a strong Kentucky team. They also lead the 100 back, but the 200 is a different story entirely – the SEC has less depth than either the ACC or Big Ten, while the ACC has almost as much depth as the SEC and Big Ten combined.

The Big Ten does take the lead in the 200 breast, and the three main conferences are relatively even at both distances. IM is another area where the Midwest shines – they had the highest quality ‘A’ final in the 200 IM and 400 IM.

Women’s Data

Men’s Data

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