23.17 Seconds, One Verbal Commitment, and the Data Problem Behind Lizzy Johnson at Florida State

Last December, at the RAFC Winter Classic, Lizzy Johnson touched the wall in the 50-yard freestyle at 23.17 seconds. At the same meet she finished second in the 200 free and the 100 IM, ninth in the 100 free and 50 breast, 11th in the 50 fly and 17th in the 100 fly. Four personal bests in a single session: 50 free 23.17, 200 free 1:49.61, 100 fly 55.83, 100 IM 57.38.

A month earlier, at RAFC's Almost Turkey meet, she set lifetime bests in the 500 free and 200 fly. At the FHSAA Class 4A State Championships last fall, as a sophomore, she placed sixth in the 200 free (1:49.90) and fourth in the 100 free (51.13). As a freshman she swam the 50 free (fourth, 23.74) and 200 free (11th, 1:50.23).

Three meets, three data sets, and they tell one story.

When she announced her verbal commitment to Florida State University beginning in 2028, I opened my tracking sheet and set four numbers side by side: 23.17, 51.13, 1:49.61 and 1:49.90. Those four numbers are everything we know for certain. The rest belongs to the market.

I deleted the word "certain" from my model long ago, and the model demands an explanation every time I forget.

Context: what a verbal commitment is actually priced on

Johnson attends Windermere High School, where she is a junior, and swims year-round with Lakers Swimming. She announced her commitment on social media, thanking coach Goller, coach Ali, coach Kyle, coach Ben and coach Neal, along with family and friends. She said she cannot wait to get started in Tallahassee.

For readers outside the US system, some scaffolding is required.

First, American college recruiting runs on two different signatures. A verbal commitment is a public statement with no legal force. The binding document is the National Letter of Intent, usually signed during the official signing period of senior year. Two years can pass between those two milestones, and in those two years anything can move: injury, a dip in form, a coaching change, or simply a better scholarship offer.

Second, American college swimming is contested in 25-yard pools, not 50-meter pools. This matters. A 23.17 in the 50-yard free cannot be compared directly with an international 50-meter time. Yards are shorter, turns are more frequent, and average velocity is higher. Any comparison between the two measurement systems requires conversion, and conversion always carries error. I say this because I have watched people place a 23.17 yard time next to an Olympic 50-meter freestyle result and draw a conclusion. Wrong method, worthless conclusion.

Third, women's college swimming exists inside a very specific financial structure. To balance gender ratios under Title IX, the federal law requiring federally funded schools to treat men's and women's sport equitably, many large universities use women's scholarships to offset football rosters that consume dozens of spots without counting against an equivalent cap. As a result, women's swimming becomes a budget line managed as a compliance obligation rather than a market attraction. That shapes directly how a roster spot like Johnson's is valued.

That is why I never read commitment news as purely good news. It is a transaction. And every transaction has two sides.

Core data: where the progress curve actually sits

Now to the numbers.

The most important data point is not 23.17 itself, but the rate of change between seasons.

Line up Johnson's 50-yard freestyle over time. As a freshman she swam 23.74 at the state championships. Last December she hit 23.17. That is a 0.57-second improvement, roughly 2.4 percent, in under eighteen months.

In the 100-yard freestyle she swam 51.13 as a sophomore at state. In the 200 free she moved from 1:50.23 (freshman) to 1:49.90 (sophomore) and then 1:49.61 at the RAFC Winter Classic.

Three events, three different improvement rates. This is where my model starts talking.

The improvement rate in the 50 free is 2.4 percent across roughly 18 months. The improvement rate in the 200 free is 0.6 percent across roughly two years. That gap is not random. It describes an athlete accelerating at sprint distance and nearly plateauing at middle distance.

What does that mean for a scholarship?

It means Florida State is not recruiting a 200 freestyler. They are recruiting a 50 and 100 freestyler, and betting that the sprint curve continues. That is a reasonable bet, but it is a bet, not a fact.

Add another layer: split decomposition. A 51.13 in the 100-yard free is built from two 50-yard legs. If the opening leg is around 24.4 and the closing leg around 26.7, Johnson has a fairly typical young-sprinter profile: strong out, losing speed on the way home. If the reverse is true, she is a stamina-speed type. The original report does not supply detailed splits, and I will not invent numbers. But that is exactly the data I would request in a room with the coaching staff.

Without splits, we hold only half the picture.

The third number worth examining is the individual medley. A 57.38 in the 100 IM is notable for an athlete whose profile is freestyle. The 100 IM is butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle, 25 yards each. A sub-58 mark shows technical breadth and hints at relay value in mixed medley events. At college level, an athlete who can swim all four strokes is worth far more than a single-event specialist.

But I have to be blunt: a 57.38 in high school does not say much yet. At NCAA Division I level, the women's 100 IM leaders sit around 53 to 55 seconds. The gap from 57.38 to that zone is roughly two and a half seconds, a large gap in a four-length race. That is a two-to-three-year development zone, not a single season.

Which is exactly why the 2028 entry date matters.

A commitment for 2028 is not a valuation of a current athlete. It is a valuation of a trajectory.

Two and a half years is a long time in age-group swimming. Long enough for a 23.17 swimmer to become a 22.3, or for a shoulder injury to end everything. Every scholarship of this type is an option purchase, not a finished-asset purchase.

Roster structure: the real math of a spot

The original report includes what I consider the single most important detail: Johnson will join a sprint group that may still include juniors Maryn McDade (22.20 in the 50 free, 49.04 in the 100 free), Mary Leigh Hardman (49.51 in the 100 free, 1:48.17 in the 200 free), and sophomores Antonina Biegajlo (22.87 in the 50 free, 50.94 in the 100 free) and Ioana Stirbu (49.03 in the 100 free, 1:44.97 in the 200 free).

Build the internal ranking.

In the 50-yard freestyle: McDade 22.20, Biegajlo 22.87, Johnson 23.17. Johnson is third.

In the 100-yard freestyle: Stirbu 49.03, McDade 49.04, Hardman 49.51, Biegajlo 50.94, Johnson 51.13. Johnson is fifth.

This is where I stop. Read only the numbers and you conclude Johnson is the slowest swimmer in the group and the scholarship is a weak gamble.

Now read the timeline again.

McDade and Hardman were juniors when the original report ran. Biegajlo and Stirbu were sophomores. Johnson is a high school junior who will enroll in 2028.

That gap spans more than four college seasons. Meaning that by the time Johnson steps into the Florida State pool, most of the listed sprint group will have graduated. The original report's phrasing that the group "may still include" those names is loose, and readers should verify it themselves.

This is precisely the kind of detail I call noise rather than signal. It creates the impression of brutal competition that will, in practice, barely exist when Johnson arrives.

Florida State's real problem is not Johnson's standing today. It is their scholarship structure for the 2028-29 season and how to field enough legs for the 400 and 800-yard free relays at the national championships.

Relays are where everything is counted in sums, not individuals. A 51.13 in the 100 free is not enough for an individual NCAA final. But a 51.13 on the third leg of a 400 free relay, paired with three 49-second swimmers, can be the piece that carries a team into the final.

That is the true value of a spot like this. Not individual medals, but relay contribution.

Contrarian angle: verbal promises, the transfer portal and the youth bubble

Now the part where I am usually accused of being cold.

A verbal commitment is a press release, not a contract. In American college sport, the transfer portal has turned every signature into a temporary state. Thousands of college swimmers enter the portal each year. A verbal commit today can change schools after two years without losing eligibility, provided the process is followed.

That means valuing a scholarship at the verbal stage is valuing an asset that can be resold at any time.

This is not a moral point. It is a market-structure point.

Zoom out beyond the pool. In football, clubs are paying 100 million euros for players who have not played fifty top-flight matches. I have written that this is a naked gamble, and I stand by it. Women's college swimming has no such figures, but it runs on the same logic: a 16-year-old with one good December meet can draw offers from major programs based on extrapolation rather than verified performance at the highest level.

Most of those extrapolations will be wrong. I say this not to diminish Johnson but to point out that the base rate in this business is brutal: most high school swimmers sitting around 23 seconds in the 50-yard free will never reach the 22-second zone.

One more layer, and this one concerns health. The schedule of a young American swimmer has almost no genuine off-season. Johnson raced at the state championships in the fall, at the RAFC Winter Classic in December, at Almost Turkey in November, plus year-round training with Lakers Swimming, plus selection meets and qualifying rounds.

That density is the single biggest cause of shoulder and back injuries in young swimmers. No medical staff can save an athlete from a schedule of two meets a month sustained over years. The shoulder of a butterfly and freestyle swimmer is a joint under repeated load with a large range of motion, and it does not regenerate indefinitely.

I once paid a price for ignoring non-quantifiable factors. In 2026 I declared that Denmark would exit Euro early because their pre-tournament expected-goals average was only 0.9. Then Christian Eriksen suffered cardiac arrest on the pitch in the opening match. Denmark played with an emotion no model encodes, beat Russia 4-1 and reached the semi-finals. I lost 12 million dong on an accumulator. The lesson was not the money; it was that I had believed every variable could be measured.

Since then, every model of mine carries an explicit line: non-quantifiable variables, risk-adjustment factor from 0.8 to 1.2. For Johnson's case those variables are: a dense meet schedule, an injury history we have no right to access, the possibility of a coaching change at Florida State within two years, and the possibility that she changes her mind before signing.

No model prices a 17-year-old changing her mind.

The price of a women's roster spot

One more dimension I will not skip, because it sits inside a set of problems I have followed for years.

Women's swimming scholarships in the US are often administered as a compliance duty rather than a revenue-generating investment. A school needs enough women's spots to balance ratios under Title IX, and swimming is among the cheapest ways to do that: one pool serves many athletes, operating costs are low compared with football or basketball, and roster numbers can expand without new infrastructure.

The result is that women's swimming programs sit in a grey zone: funded enough to operate, not funded enough to compete at the top. The best athletes concentrate at a small set of legacy schools, and everyone else accepts a roster-filling role.

For Johnson, the question is not how fast she swims but how far Florida State will invest in her. A full swimming scholarship can be worth anything from tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand dollars over four years, depending on tuition and aid structure. But coaching support, recovery, nutrition and data analysis are the parts that decide whether an athlete improves.

And those parts are rarely published.

What the data says about the next two and a half years

If I had to build a simple trajectory model for Johnson through 2028, I would use three variables.

Variable one is her rate of improvement in the 50-yard free. A 2.4 percent gain over 18 months, maintained linearly, would put her near 22.5 seconds after two and a half years. But human progress curves are not linear. They are steep early and flatten near physiological limits. A more reasonable forecast sits between 22.6 and 22.9.

Variable two is her rate of improvement in the 100-yard free. If she holds 51.13 and improves about 1.5 percent over two and a half years, she lands near 50.3. That is a zone where a relay spot becomes contestable.

Variable three is her 100 IM development. If she moves from 57.38 to around 55.5, she becomes an option for mixed medley relays. If she stays put, that event has no college future.

Three variables, three thresholds. I will track all three.

Every lane sends a signal. The analyst does not decode it; he listens.

What to watch next

The original report closes with an invitation to submit commitment news and a short description of Fitter and Faster Swim Camps, the sponsor of the recruiting channel. That is standard operating structure in American swimming media: recruiting content is sponsored by camp operators, and commitment news is free data for media channels.

There is nothing wrong with that structure. But readers should know they are reading a processed release, not independent analysis. The time marks in the report are sourced, verifiable and cross-checkable against results databases.

For me, three tasks are clear over the next six months.

One, verify the actual splits behind the 51.13 in the 100-yard free and the 1:49.61 in the 200-yard free. Without splits, every forecast is decorated guesswork.

Two, track her 50-yard free through the coming winter. If she reaches 22.8 or lower before graduating high school, the progress curve is holding and Florida State's valuation is sound. If she stalls between 23.1 and 23.3, the story changes entirely.

Three, track Florida State's published scholarship list for the 2028-29 season. That is the real map of the roster problem, not the list of people training today.

Controlling a lane is a beautiful lie; the touchpad time is the blinding truth.

The analyst's duty is not to be right. It is to say what the data wants said.

And the data, at this point, has only told half the sentence. The other half is two and a half years of swimming, with a pair of shoulders and a mind that no spreadsheet can reach.