By Dan D’Addona.
A couple of weeks ago, the Michigan women repeated as Big Ten champions with distance, depth and diving.
This week, the Stanford men used their distance, depth and diving to repeat as Pac-12 champions, holding off Cal with a stunning final day.
A top-three sweep in the first event of the final night inspired the Cardinal to their 64th championship in program history.
True Sweetser (14:35.93) led a 1-2-3 finish in the 1,650-yard freestyle, setting a Pac-12 championship record in the process. Grant Shoults (14:50.06) backed him up in second place, and Liam Egan (14:57.47) rounded out the podium.
The Pac-12 meet format was different than other conferences as diving was done last week.
It is easy to forget that, but the Cardinal didn’t forget. They scored a ton of points on the boards.
Bradley Christensen won the 1-meter for the second consecutive year, and Tarek Abdelghany won his first conference title on the platform. In all, Stanford earned six top-four finishes en route to scoring the most diving points of any team.
Stanford finished the meet with 784 points, comfortably ahead of Cal (757) and USC (657). Arizona State (531), Arizona (360) and Utah (257) rounded out the field.
Cal swam well, including its leaders Ryan Murphy and Andrew Seliskar. It will be interesting to see how those swims from both teams translate to the NCAA championships after a strong taper.
Cal still has a stronger chance to challenge Texas for the national title, but Stanford closed the gap considerably after this weekend.
Distance, depth, diving and ELIGIBILITY TIMING.
Awesome job by the distance guys!