The LSU Tigers Gymnastics team just pulled off one of the biggest regular season wins in program history. They hosted No. 1 Oklahoma in the PMAC on Friday night and the defending national champions, who were ranked No. 2 going into the night, dominated them in the final rotation to win, 198.050-197.675.

However, a couple days after the meet, the new rankings came out and a lot of fans were shocked to see that LSU actually fell to No. 3 after knocking off the top team in the country. In gymnastics, rankings aren't done the same as most other sports. There's no AP Poll and voters who decide who is the best team, they rank them based on straight average score...that is until they don't.

About halfway through the season, the NCAA starts ranking teams based on their National Qualifying Score (NQS), and this is where things get complicated.

The NQS takes your seven best scores, three of which must be road scores, and averages them after dropping your best score. So, LSU's 198.050 they posted in their win over Oklahoma didn't even help their average.

The Tigers are currently carrying a 196.600 score from their road trip to Arkansas, which is absolutely tanking their NQS average, which currently sits at 197.420 - just .035 behind No. 2 UCLA. If they were to go off straight average of their seven meets to date, their average would jump to 197.492 and firmly secure them the second spot in the rankings.

If you know LSU Head Coach, Jay Clark, you would know he's not a big fan of some of the things the NCAA does. He disagrees with the new strict scoring policies (that's a whole different story), but he also doesn't agree with using NQS average to rank teams, and it's not because his Tigers fell to No. 3 in the rankings, he couldn't care less about that.

"It certainly doesn't make us more understandable," said Clark. "The things that I advocate for are things that erode our understandability. As great as we're doing here in terms of attendance, nationally we're still trying to grow as a sport and increase the awareness, so with things like this, I've been advocating for straight average. That wouldn't have moved us anywhere, it would've kept us second, but then at least you could say it's solely based on average. When you talk about NQS and you have to explain a formula to an average Joe fan who doesn't know a lot about gymnastics but he knows he loves the purple and gold and you're trying to attract them to be a consistent part of your fanbase, it just adds a layer of difficulty...It's an oddity, there's no getting around it."

What Clark is advocating for is to make their sport as easy to understand for the casual fan as possible. It's hard to explain to a new fan that you can beat the No. 1 team in the country and still fall in the rankings because the score you posted that night doesn't actually count towards your ranking.

Clark went on to say that it isn't really a huge issue because things usually sort themselves out by the end of the year; the Tigers still have three road meets to replace their 196.600 with a much higher score, so they'll likely jump back into second as soon as next week, but it just makes it hard for new fans to understand, and that's the last thing gymnastics needs right now as it continues to grow in popularity.

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