Have you been trying to understand the scoring drama behind this season of NCAA gymnastics?

Well, here’s everything you need to know about what LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne posted last week as we decipher whether the scores are good or bad for the sport.

As the season progresses, audiences, coaches and even gymnasts feel that many scores are the victims of unnecessary deductions, particularly ones kept at the judges’ discretion.

This limits the number of perfect 10s — a burning topic among fans.

Only three perfect scores have been awarded in the nation through Week 6: two for Jordan Chiles at UCLA and one for Missouri’s Helen Hu. By Week 6 of the 2024 season, LSU alone had received four 10s.

The theory is that the NCAA and judges want to restrict the number of 10s handed out to increase their value among fans, gymnasts and teams, but many people have expressed their disfavor for the new system.

Coaches and members of the LSU gymnastics team, most notably Dunne and head coach Jay Clark, have shared their opinions on the matter.

On Jan. 26, Dunne took to X (formerly Twitter), advocating for the lack of 10s being given in NCAA gymnastics.

“At some point it feels negative and loses the entertainment factor that draws the crowd in,” Dunne said in her post.

About an hour after her initial post, Dunne followed with another tweet, where she assured her audience that she was advocating for the sport, not for LSU, and building on crowd engagement for the sake of the athlete’s revenue support.

Clark addressed Dunne’s tweet following the face-off between the Bayou Bengals and the Missouri Tigers last Friday.

“I had nothing to do with that and she knows how I feel about it, but she’s right,” Clark said. “We’re at a time where collegiate athletics and Olympic sports programs — many are in peril for funding.”

While the lack of revenue in NCAA gymnastics fills athletes with uncertainty, fans are confused by lower-than-average scores being awarded to even elite gymnasts.

“It’s ill-timed, it’s incomplete [and] it’s ill-conceived,” Clark said in regards to what he described as a “poison pill” being dropped into scoring.

But are these lower scores genuinely taking away from the sport?

Short answer: yes, maybe not regarding the revenue of the sport and the athletes, but perhaps to the safety and well-being of the gymnasts themselves.

Raising the stakes in scoring, lowering scores and making perfect 10s more difficult to achieve, ironically makes it more frustrating than satisfying for a gymnast to achieve their goals.

Yes, goals are meant to challenge individuals. Still, with a team that includes several elite gymnasts, like all-around senior and Olympian Aleah Finnegan — who has seven perfect 10s in her career — there’s no reason why a 10 shouldn’t be achievable for LSU this far into the season.

Finnegan has yet to receive a perfect 10, only receiving a high of 9.95 for both vault and floor against Iowa State.

So what could this mean for her as a gymnast or any NCAA gymnast themselves?

After delivering a routine that takes hours of practice, coordination and even mental strength, only to receive a score that practically mocks their hard work, these athletes can push themselves to unhealthy levels of commitment.

If that means mentally beating themselves up or overworking themselves, lowering scores to the point where 10s are unachievable will harm gymnasts’ health and sport.

In addition to an athlete’s mental pressures, additional stressors develop to meet those unrealistic expectations in front of fans.

Clark compared the feeling to baseball fans hoping to see a home run — it’s the event’s climax, so it’s disappointing when they’re denied that.

The last thing an athlete wants is to come up short in front of the home crowd, and that could easily weigh on many gymnasts.
College gymnastics has been on the rise over the last decade, and LSU’s crowd has more than doubled in that time. Perfect 10s attract more fans and bigger crowds, so why take away one of the sport’s most marketable aspects?

A 10 should hold immense value and shouldn’t be handed out like candy for the sake of entertainment, but there has to be a healthy medium between that and depriving deserving gymnasts.

Without that medium, viewership and revenue are harmed, as well as, more importantly, the gymnasts themselves.