Opinion: Judging was supposed to get better this season. It hasn’t and that’s a real problem
Before the start of the 2024 NCAA women’s gymnastics season, there was reason for hope.
It may have been the faintest of hopes, but it existed nonetheless.
There was reason to believe that judges — the arbiters of scoring in gymnastics — were going to become more critical in their evaluations of routines this year, tempering some of the rampant scoring inflation that has occurred in the sport in recent years.
Three weeks into the season, though, it is clear that that hope was misplaced, and wildly so.
That’s a real problem for gymnastics.
Has there been scoring inflation?
To believe that there needed to be a crackdown on scores, there needs to be an understanding that scoring in college gymnastics has gotten out of hand.
Let’s look at some numbers.
First up, team scores, per Road to Nationals.
In the last 10 years, the average scores of teams have risen dramatically.
In 2014, at the end of the regular season, the No. 1-ranked team in the country was the Florida Gators. Their average team score over the course of the season was 197.645. After them, five additional teams had average team scores in the 197-range. That was it.
The majority of programs in the top 25 averaged meet scores in the 196-range. Good teams regularly scored in 196s.
Jump ahead five years to 2019 and things were still fairly similar.
No. 1 Oklahoma had an average score of 197.808, nearly two-tenths better but still within range. After the Sooners, five teams had a season average score of 197 or better.
Jump ahead to 2023 and a very different picture emerges.
Oklahoma was still the best team in the country, but the Sooners had an average team score of 198.150. That is more than five-tenths of a point better than what the Gators averaged in 2014.
Behind the Sooners, a whopping 12 teams had an average score of 197 or better, double the amount of teams that were able to pull off that feat only four years prior.
Currently in 2024 — keep in mind that teams improve as the season progresses, and scores rise with that improvement — Oklahoma sits at No. 1 overall with an average team score of 198.025 and nine other teams have an average team score in the 197 range.
Is some of the rise in team scores due to an influx in Olympic-caliber gymnasts in college gymnastics? Is some of it also due to a fifth year of eligibility gained by gymnasts due to the pandemic?
Absolutely. With the advent of NIL and the adoption of fifth years — beyond those who had suffered season-ending injuries earlier in their careers — there is a real argument that the caliber of gymnastics being competed, as well as the number of quality gymnasts in the NCAA, is higher than ever before.
Oklahoma scored a 198.325 over the weekend and, for the most part, the score appeared more than fair.
Yet the idea that so many teams are vastly improved over those of only a few years ago, let alone a decade ago, is a stretch.
It used to be that great teams were those that would score 197s and on rare occasions break into the 198 range. Now it is a near requirement for great teams to show that they can score multiple 198s in a season.
And good teams are now expected to regularly score in the low 197s, where 196s were once a clear indicator of good teams.
It isn’t just team scores, though.
Individually, perfect 10s have gone from being rare to being regular.
Last season, 84 perfect 10s were awarded, and those “perfect” routines were spread out across teams in the SEC, Pac-12, Big Ten and Big 12, plus one from the now-defunct MRGC.
This season already, there have been 15 perfect 10s handed out — it took until Feb. 3 to get 14 perfect 10s last year — in such conferences as the Pac-12, SEC, Big Ten, MAC and MIC (Midwest Independent Conference).
By way of comparison, in 2014, only 27 perfect 10s were awarded over the course of the entire season. In 2019, that number had risen to 37, but come 2022, a total of 71 perfect 10s were given out.
Currently there are three active gymnasts in the top 20 all-time in the sport in perfect 10s earned — Utah’s Maile O’Keefe, LSU’s Haleigh Bryant and Oregon State’s Jade Carey.
Include gymnasts who’ve competed in the last five years and that number rises to seven, which if all 10s are equal, means seven of the 20 most perfect collegiate gymnasts of all time competed from 2019 to 2024.
Why the hope for more critical judging?
The hope that judges would be more critical when evaluating routines this season derived in no small part from the institution of a new finishing position rule, a rule designed to eliminate the “college stick,” wherein gymnasts have attempted to excite and emote their way out of uncontrolled landings and still get credit for stuck landings, avoiding deductions.
“I think it will help separate some of those questionable landings, where you wonder, ‘Did she really hold it, did she really show control?’ As long as judges continue to take it, right? It will, maybe, help separate some of those 10s that maybe weren’t a really solid and controlled landing,” Utah gymnastics coach Carly Dockendorf said following Utah’s season-opening meet against Boise State.
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It wasn’t just that the new rule gave judges the chance to take another deduction, though.
The subtext of the added rule was that the current way of judging routines was no longer appropriate. The rule addition said that the sport — coaches, fans and gymnasts — wanted scores to more accurately reflect what was competed.
By asking judges to pay more attention to landings/finishing position, it was reasonable to expect that judges would pay more attention to deductions already built into the rules.
Based on the first three weeks of the season, however, reason hasn’t won out.
This past Saturday alone proved a clear indication of that.
At the Tennessee Classic, seven teams — Ball State, Kent State, Fisk, Lindenwood, Northern Illinois, Southeast Missouri State and University of Wisconsin-Whitewater — competed, and all of them broke their overall program records.
Six of the seven teams had top-five program scores on every event and 11 individual program records were tied or broken. Moreover, five perfect 10s were handed out, four to Ball State gymnasts, the other to an SEMO gymnast.
Four teams — Kent State, SEMO, UW-Whitewater and Ball State — bettered their national qualifying score from last season by at least 1.5 points, a gargantuan margin in gymnastics. UW-Whitewater actually beat its 2023 NQS by more than four points.
The previous high for @BallStateGYM was 196.900 before their 198.025 last night.
That was the lowest previous high of the 21 schools before they scored their 1st 198+.
Here are the prev. highs of all of them. (It might surprise you who had the 2nd-lowest score. pic.twitter.com/fIGfIOpCvU— Drew Porche (@TalentStats) January 20, 2024
It wasn’t just the Tennessee Classic, though. Across the sport, team scores were outsized.
LSU scored a 198.125 in a win over Kentucky and a cursory perusal of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, saw many critics emerge of scores awarded to the Tigers. Scores given to Bryant on vault and floor were especially singled out.
And those weren’t the only competitions that had suspect scoring. As evidenced above, there has been suspect scoring every week this season.
Why it matters
Some will write off extreme scoring like what happened at the Tennessee Classic as a one-off. No real harm done.
It was one meet and NQS — which drops a team’s highest score and favors road meets — should prevent those scores from having an impact on postseason qualification and/or seeding.
Moreover, if there is scoring inflation across the sport, then things are still fair as far as competition goes, though not so much for record books.
And yet, suspect judging — and its continuation over multiple seasons — is a real danger to the legitimacy of women’s college gymnastics.
Controversy with officials isn’t new to sports, and referees rarely, if ever, hold to the letter of the law in any sport at all times.
On any given possession in a basketball game, there is a foul or a travel that could be called but isn’t.
On any given play in a football game, there is a hold or interference of some kind that is ignored by the refs.
On any given pitch in a baseball or softball game, an umpire makes a subjective decision as to whether the offering from the pitcher was a strike or a ball.
And the list goes on and on.
But in a sport like gymnastics where judges play such a key role, suspect judging is much more damaging.
It makes the sport appear to be nothing more than a showcase or performance, rather than a legitimate competition.
It leads fans to question whether teams deserve the success they achieve, or if they get it only because of the color of their leotards, or the amount of fame gymnasts have achieved over the course of their elite and collegiate careers.
It discounts legitimately great performances and makes it even more difficult to understand what makes for a good performance, a great one and a truly special one.
With every passing week, inflation in scoring renders the current era of NCAA gymnastics more and more like the steroid era of baseball.
The numbers those baseball players achieved were astounding, their individual greatness appreciated, yet their era will always be viewed as an aberration and not reflective of “authentic” baseball.
That has already happened with an era of women’s college gymnastics. In the early 2000s, scores were similarly outsized and records made from 2002 through 2004 are viewed as less legitimate as a result.
The same thing is threatening to happen now, to the current era, only it is happening at a time when women’s college gymnastics needs to be as popular and legitimate as possible, given the current college sports landscape and threats to Olympic sports.
Lawsuits could in the near future render student-athletes school employees and require schools to pay for play.
If that happens, universities will have to make difficult choices regarding what sports are worth the cost. And if gymnastics is viewed as a joke, good luck convincing the powers that be to bring the sport along into the new era of collegiate athletics.
