Since I covered gymnastics last year and I spent a lot of the season writing about how bad Georgia was on beam, I decided to look further into the data that shows this.
This graph shows how Georgia’s team score was ultimately determined by its beam score. At first this seems obvious because a team score is the sum off the four events scores, but what is interesting is that the vault, bars and floor totals hardly fluctuate throughout the year. This means that whether Georgia won or lost each meet was almost always a product of whether or not the team did decent on beam. With the line graphs of the scores from every event, you can see how the beam score is the one that is usually bringing down the overall total. Apart from one meet of bad bars, no other event shows this type of fluctuation. It’s cool to look back at it this way because I felt like every week I was writing about beam. Georgia either had a disaster on beam and lost, or it somehow pulled it together on beam and it won. This graph shows that fairly simply.
Next, I looked at how Georgia’s rough year on beam compared to other teams. This graph shows all the Division I teams that averaged above a 48.5 on beam. The bars that are colored in show the teams that qualified for the NCAA championship. This is an interesting way to look at how far behind Georgia was from other top programs throughout the year on the event. This shows how abnormal it was that Georgia was able to qualify for the national championship despite such a rough showing all year on beam
