Lizzy Johnson Commits to Florida State: The Flat 4.4% Curve and the 2028 Vacuum

At the RAFC Winter Classic in December, Lizzy Johnson touched the wall first in the 50-yard freestyle in 23.17 seconds. At the same meet she finished ninth in the 100-yard freestyle. Two months earlier, at the FHSAA Class 4A State Championships, she placed fourth in the 100 free in 51.13 and sixth in the 200 free in 1:49.90.

Three distances, three different metabolic structures. When I set them against the four fastest legs Florida State holds in its women's sprint group, something appeared that I rarely see on a recruiting file: a nearly constant gap.

50 free: 23.17 versus Maryn McDade's 22.20 — 4.37 percent slower. 100 free: 51.13 versus Ioana Stirbu's 49.03 — 4.28 percent slower. 200 free: 1:49.61 versus Stirbu's 1:44.97 — 4.42 percent slower.

The spread between the three events: 0.14 of a percentage point.

In five years of tracking the women's sprint lane through the American college system, I have grown used to curves with spikes — a sharp peak in a specialist event, a cliff in everything else. Johnson's curve has no peak. It has no cliff either. It is flat.

That is the entire story of her recruitment, and it appears in no press release.

She wrote on social media that she was overjoyed to announce her verbal commitment to continue her academic and athletic career at Florida State University, thanking Goller, coach Ali, Cynthia, her family, and coaches Kyle, Ben and Neal for giving her the chance to turn a lifelong dream into reality. She signed off with "GO NOLES."

Johnson attends Windermere High School, where she is a junior, and swims year-round with Lakers Swimming. She arrives at Florida State as a sprint-group commit, entering in 2028.

The group she will join carries real names. McDade, a junior, holds 22.20 in the 50 free and 49.04 in the 100 free. Mary Leigh Hardman, also a junior, holds 49.51 and 1:48.17. Antonina Biegajlo, a sophomore, holds 22.87 and 50.94. Stirbu, a sophomore, holds 49.03 and 1:44.97.

Place those four beside Johnson's file and the picture becomes far clearer than the way it is usually read.

Measured only against the leaders, Johnson is slower at every distance. Measured against the middle tier, the gap collapses. In the 100 free she trails Biegajlo by 0.19 seconds — 0.37 percent. In the 200 free she trails Hardman by 1.44 seconds, or 1.33 percent. In the 50 free she trails Biegajlo by 0.30.

Which means: Johnson is not an individual scoring slot. She is a relay leg, and she sits roughly half a second to a second and a half away from the position that could lift Florida State's sprint group by one tier.

To understand why a slot like that was offered this early, you have to look at the team's departure schedule.

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McDade and Hardman are juniors. Under the NCAA calendar they graduate in 2028 — the exact year Johnson sets foot in Tallahassee. The two fastest legs in the Florida State women's sprint group vanish at the same moment Johnson arrives. She is not joining a queue. She is filling a vacancy that was scheduled in advance.

Biegajlo and Stirbu will be seniors when Johnson is a freshman. That is the structure any coach wants: an upper class strong enough to hold the training standard, plus a lower class close enough to inherit within one season.

But that structure only holds value if Johnson keeps moving down.

And this is where the data becomes hard to read.

Her freshman year at FHSAA Class 4A: 50 free 23.74 (fourth), 200 free 1:50.23 (eleventh). Sophomore year: 200 free 1:49.90 (sixth), 100 free 51.13 (fourth). From 1:50.23 to 1:49.90 is 0.33 seconds in a year. By December of the same academic year she swam 1:49.61 at the RAFC Winter Classic — another 0.29 seconds, in a matter of weeks.

Total: 0.62 seconds across roughly fourteen months in the 200 free.

For a 16-year-old girl, that rate of improvement sits in the slow band. The big jumps in age-group women's swimming tend to arrive as steps: two to four seconds in a single season, usually tied to a growth phase or a major change in training volume. Johnson does not step. She slides.

A slide can be read two ways, and both readings are half right.

Reading one: she has not yet been through her growth phase. Steady sliders usually carry good technical foundations and depend less on raw power, which means that when the body matures they have more room to absorb training load without breaking technique. This is the cohort college coaches like to sign early, because the market has not priced them correctly.

Reading two: she has already hit her ceiling. Steady sliders can equally be athletes who have extracted nearly all of their technical upside at 16, with only decimal places left.

Those two readings produce completely different outcomes in 2028. And the public data cannot separate them.

There is one detail that gets almost no attention, and it matters more than the 1:49.61.

As a freshman, Johnson swam the 50 free at the state final and finished fourth in 23.74. As a sophomore she dropped the event from her state programme entirely and moved to the 100 and 200 free. But in December she swam the 50 free again at the RAFC Winter Classic — and set a personal best, 23.17, which is 0.57 seconds faster than the swim that once made her fourth in the state.

Reorder the sequence: she shifted her emphasis to longer distances at the state meet, then swam faster than ever over the shortest distance immediately afterwards.

That is not the signature of an athlete losing speed. It is the signature of an athlete building an aerobic base while raw speed keeps climbing. Johnson dropping the 50 free at the state meet was a tactical decision by the Lakers Swimming staff, not a signal about her ceiling over short distance.

And there is another asset that no recruiting bulletin has priced: the 100 IM.

57.38 seconds. That was her time at the RAFC Winter Classic, second overall, in a meet where she also won the 50 free and took second in the 200 free.

For a 16-year-old girl, 57.38 in the 100 IM is the range college programmes file under "developable into a 200 IM." But Johnson has no recorded 200 IM time in the public data. Nor has she swum a 200 breast or 200 back at any reported meet.

That is a data hole, and it is not small. An athlete with a 57.38 100 IM, a 55.83 100 fly, lifetime bests in the 500 free and 200 fly set in November, and 23.17 speed over 50 — that is the profile of a potential 200 IM swimmer, not a pure sprint specialist.

If she swims a 200 IM for the first time at 17 and touches in 2:00, the entire valuation changes. In the NCAA, a 200 IM slot is worth far more than a 50 free slot, because it lets a coach place her on two or three different relays without sacrificing an individual event.

Relay math is the math market analysts skip, and that is a mistake.

At ACC level, points come from A finals and B finals, but relay legs decide team placing. A 51.1 leg will not reach an A final in most ACC seasons. A 51.1 leg in the 4x100 free relay, placed alongside three legs at 48.5 to 49.5, can push a team into scoring position. Johnson does not need to be the fastest swimmer in the pool. She needs to be the fourth fastest.

And that is precisely the position she occupies in the group.

The 4x200 free relay is the more interesting calculation. A 1:49.6 leg at high school level can convert into a 1:47 to 1:48 leg at college level if the development curve continues. Add four legs like that and a team can reach ACC scoring range. If she stalls at 1:49, the slot loses value immediately.

There is one more variable no spreadsheet captures, and it speaks directly to the betting market.

2028 is a Los Angeles Olympic year. An American 16-year-old at 1:49.61 in the 200-yard free converts to roughly 1:59 to 2:00 in the 200-metre free. The cut for the U.S. Olympic Trials final in that event has sat around the low 1:57s to 1:58 in recent cycles. The gap is about two seconds, and between 16 and 20, two seconds is a gap that can close.

If Johnson approaches that threshold in the spring of 2028, she faces a choice bookmakers have already begun to price: race at Olympic Trials, or protect her scholarship and her fitness for her first college season. Those cases usually end with an athlete deferring enrolment, taking a redshirt, or changing plans outright.

A verbal commitment at 16 carries zero binding force.

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This is where I have to say plainly what most recruiting bulletins do not.

A verbal commitment is an option, not a contract. Across the twenty-four months between announcement and enrolment, both sides can walk. The athlete can take a better offer after a breakout season. The school can pull the scholarship if injury strikes or the development curve flattens. In college swimming, the transfer portal has turned that dynamic from exception into norm within a single decade.

With Johnson, the risk sits on both sides and the balance is uneven.

On her side, the biggest risk is that the flat curve is not a sign of untapped potential but a sign of a ceiling already reached. If she is still at 1:49 and 51.1 in the autumn of her senior year, her value in Florida State's eyes drops sharply, and the scholarship slot can be redistributed to a name that surfaces later.

On Florida State's side, the risk is that she develops faster than projected and gets targeted by larger programmes during the waiting period. That is why early commitments usually come with financial terms designed to lock both parties in before the market reprices.

There is one more point I consider more important than either risk: the flatness itself.

A college coach looking at an athlete is usually hunting for a spike. A spike means there is one event the athlete can score in immediately, with everything else built afterwards. A flat curve makes the allocation of coaching resource harder: there is no event to concentrate on, and no event to abandon.

Seen that way, Florida State is betting on something outside the individual event list. They are betting that after four years inside their system, with higher training volume, faster training partners and a professional strength programme, a 16-year-old with sound pacing distribution will produce a spike she has never had.

That is a reasonable bet. It is also a bet without evidence yet.

I have watched similar bets fail. In Kazan I learned that a 99 percent probability can still die on the betting board. But I learned the reverse too: steady sliders, the ones with no steps, often have the highest four-year survival rate in college, because they never depended on a single jump.

Numbers have no gender. But in women's swimming they are read by people who do — people with schedules, scholarships and a college ranking that recognises only the top sixteen. The numbers have no gender; the people reading them do.

That does not make the calculation wrong. It only makes it more complicated.

Based on my experience following American high school and college swimming meets over many years, I set one rule for myself: with any athlete under 18, I trust a long sequence of numbers, not a single moment. A 16-year-old at 1:49.6 says nothing about her at 20. A sequence of six swims declining steadily across three years does.

And that sequence, for Johnson, does not exist yet. It is being written.

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I do not trust emotion. I trust a sequence of numbers longer than your emotion. But I am obliged to record the part of the data I cannot measure.

Limits of the data: I do not have a 25-yard split breakdown for Johnson, so I cannot say whether her weakness sits in the swim, the turn or the start. I have no training-load data and no injury history — nothing like the professional files I have valued before. I have no long-course times, so every Olympic-standard conversion in this piece carries at least a one-second error, possibly more. I do not know her height, wingspan or maturation timeline, three variables that decide most of the trajectory for a female athlete at this age. And I have no 200 IM time, the event I consider the single most important indicator of her long-term potential.

Beyond that, a verbal commitment is not data. It is a statement of intent, and intent can change in sixty seconds, let alone twenty-four months.

I also have to concede something about the market. Betting lines tied to American college swimming do not behave like football or basketball. Liquidity is thin, bookmaker margins are wide, and team-level derivative markets barely exist in a form deep enough to bet meaningfully. A commitment like Johnson's moves no number. It only moves the number inside a model of the relay leg that will be used in 2030.

That is why news like this gets ignored. And that is why it is worth reading.

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What is worth tracking next season is not Johnson's 100 free time. She is at 51.1 and she will return somewhere near it. What is worth tracking is three specific signals.

First, a 200 IM time. If she appears in that event and touches at 2:02 or better, her entire valuation framework changes.

Second, the slope of her 200 free through her junior season. One swim at 1:48 confirms the slide. Two swims at 1:49 confirm the ceiling.

Third, whether she holds 23.17 speed over 50 while continuing to improve at longer distances. That is the only indicator showing development is happening on both axes at once, rather than a migration from sprint to distance.

None of those three signals will appear on a state final results sheet. They will appear only in the preliminary results almost nobody reads.

That is where I will be reading.