As mentioned previously there is a lot of focus this year on the 133 bracket. And for good reason. There are a lot of experienced inexperienced wrestlers in that bracket to go along with the exceedingly experience (seven years anyone?). It will be very hard to seed this bracket. Every partisan will feel duty bound to disagree with what the… Read more: Hello, Chaos My Old Friend

1979 – 2025 (12+ Seeds and 8 AA’s Era) Two team performances in the past two tournaments got me thinking about which teams most outperformed and underperformed their expectations in the NCAA tournament. Expectations In my previous post I walked through how I developed an expected points model built on the historical performance of seeds. The goal there was to… Read more: NCAA Tournament Over / Under Performers

The first thing I did when playing around with historical wrestling data back in 2020 was figure out what the average outcome was by seed. A #1 seed doesn’t always finish on top of the podium. As a matter of fact, they finish #1 roughly half the time. A #1 seed doesn’t even finish top 8 all the time. Though… Read more: Expected Points – Friend or Foe?

Let’s acknowledge the obvious first. Every match matters. Teams that win titles win a lot of matches and each win is a part of the tapestry of a title. It is hard to single out any one match as being more consequential than any other. So, guess what I am going to do now. I bring you The Most Consequential… Read more: There Will Be Consequences

Who Shall Wear the Crown? There has been a lot of chatter about the 133 bracket this year and whether it may be the greatest bracket of all time. With eight returning All-Americans and the addition of an unbelievably talented and credentialed crop of freshmen it certainly has the potential to take the title of greatest of all time. But… Read more: The Greatest Bracket of Them All

Jacob from Ohio State writes, “Since there has been so much scrutiny over Ohio State being number one for a week or two, can you give a post on how it’s possible to win?” Before I get into the gory details, let me just say that as a Penn State fan, this one hurt a bit. But as a numbers… Read more: Penn State Heresy: Or Can Ohio State Win It All?

I have been asked in the past what happens to older wrestlers. I have never been able to answer that question satisfactorily. Until now. Depending on your partisanship you are likely to argue either side of the question. For every sixth or seventh year guy that finally breaks through there is one that breaks down instead, like an old draft… Read more: Age Is Just A Number

Welcome to the wonderful world of wrestling (data) wrangling. I, wrestleknownothing, will post everything I think I know about wrestling here in my little sandbox. You have been warned. After investing a lot of time and effort into building the premier NCAA D1 NCAA Tournament results database it is time to put that work to work. I got started playing… Read more: Hello World