Matthew Auchincloss: Judging in Michigan-Nebraska meet merits reform

Before Michigan and Nebraska took the floor on Mar. 21, the highest team score this season in a men’s gymnastics meet was 330.700, set by Oklahoma against Illinois on Jan. 25. By the end of the meet, both the Wolverines and the Cornhuskers had shattered that record, with Michigan defeating Nebraska 335.950 – 335.200. 

But they shouldn’t have. 

A judging controversy arose in the days following the meet after it was discovered that multiple gymnasts were egregiously overscored. Neither Cornhuskers coach Chuck Chmelka nor Wolverines coach Yuan Xiao challenged the overscoring of their own gymnasts, raising outside questions of ethics and sportsmanship. Neither coach could challenge the other’s scores either due to NCAA rules.

Arguably more controversial, however, is how the judges could have possibly erred in their scoring as badly as they did. Initially, the scores were simply chalked up to a spiraling phenomenon. The judges overscored a gymnast early and then had to compensate for this by scoring better gymnasts even higher, pushing the scores up and up. 

“At a competition where it’s senior night, judges will try to be lighter on that team,” Michigan junior Fred Richard said after the meet. “But when it’s a head-to-head competition, if the next guy on the opposing team does a better routine, they have to score him a little bit higher. And so it kind of just creates this whole spiral effect of scores just being high.”

Ultimately though, that was only part of the issue. The judges overscored both on difficulty — the more objective part of the score — and on execution. Difficulty is based on the new Code of Points, redone after the last Olympics, as is typical. Each element of a gymnast’s routine is given a value and if they complete that element, they receive those points. There is sometimes controversy as judges can give gymnasts points for elements they didn’t fully complete, but that is typically a more subjective decision.

Scoring controversy typically looks like this. But at this meet, the judges awarded 2.5 difficulty points that were simply not present in multiple gymnasts’ routines on both teams — 1 point to the Wolverines and 1.5 points to Nebraska. It’s an enormous error by the judges and the source of the original controversy. 

The issues with the judging began immediately, as the first gymnast to compete on the floor, the Cornhuskers’ Nathan York, received an 8.8 despite going out of bounds on his routine. In another meet, this is exactly the sort of score that could set off a score spiral, but this was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Michigan freshman Solen Chiodi was the next gymnast to compete. His routine was solid, earning him an 8.6 execution score. But when everyone looked at the screen for the difficulty score, it read 5.9 — a score that would rank among the top-five highest difficulty scores in the world this year. Chiodi is a good gymnast, but the score was absurd given that he is not a top-five gymnast in the NCAA, let alone the world.

Initially, it seemed as though perhaps one of the judges had simply “fat-fingered” it, perhaps hitting nine instead of zero. 5.0 would be a much more plausible score for Chiodi and would be in line with the 5.0-5.1 difficulty score he typically receives when competing on the floor. 

But there was only one option for remedy — a Wolverine coach’s challenge. Ultimately, none of them did, and Nebraska’s coaches had no choice but to accept the score and continue with the meet. 

The Cornhuskers got their own bonus when York earned 0.6 more in difficulty on his pommel horse routine than existed within the routine, raising his difficulty score from the expected 4.4 to 5.0. Chmelka also did not challenge the score.

“What you can say with Solen’s score (is) ‘Oh, maybe the judge meant to hit 5.0 and fat-fingered it to 5.9,’ ” reporter Kensley Behel of Neutral Deductions told The Michigan Daily. “4.4 and 5 — you don’t mess that up by fat-fingering it, yeah. So then you start to realize, okay, there’s all these different scoring errors. When you total it all up, there is around 2.5 in difficulty that was granted at this meet that literally never happened.”

The controversy arose mostly from conversations about ethics and the obligation of coaches to inquire about scores that they know are wrong in a way that might hurt their team’s chances to win meets. Behel spoke with approximately nine NCAA men’s gymnastics coaches. One-third said they would have or had challenged overscoring like this, including Sooners coach Mark Williams. One-third, including Illinois coach Daniel Rivera, said they wouldn’t have, and the final third were undecided on what they would have done in this exact situation. For differences of a tenth, coaches are unlikely to challenge, but for larger errors like these were, some of them might have. 

Ultimately, the scores of both teams ended up overinflated due to overscoring on both execution and difficulty. Execution scores are much more difficult to critique as it’s much more subjective. But just observing Michigan and Nebraska’s previous score average, it’s clear that something in the execution scores was also very wrong, as the team’s scores were inflated far beyond what difficulty errors could explain. The Wolverines’ season-high score the week prior to the meet was 328.100. The Cornhuskers’ high was 328.850. Both of them shattered their season highs and broke Oklahoma’s score by more than five points. 

It’s important to know that even if the judges had scored the routines correctly, the meet’s outcome wouldn’t have changed. Behel asked several other judges to rescore some of the routines as they would have had they judged the meet. The judges determined that Michigan still would have won the meet. Additionally, Nebraska wouldn’t have won any share of the Big Ten title even if they had won as they were 1-2 in conference meets. 

The most obvious solution to this issue is to allow coaches to challenge the opposing team’s scores. It’s a simple solution that, with some guidelines, could very easily correct the problem. 

Other proposals have included retraining for judges whose judging is deemed to be below standard and suspensions for those who are deemed to have repeatedly made egregious errors. 

Whatever the solution is, it should come swiftly. Mistakes should resolve as judges become more familiar with the new Code of Points, but there shouldn’t be meets as in doubt as this one was ever again. 

The post Matthew Auchincloss: Judging in Michigan-Nebraska meet merits reform appeared first on The Michigan Daily.