Orange is the New Black and Third is the New First
FloWrestling’s Kyle Klingman recently wrote an article examining NCAA tournament scoring anomalies (Is 3rd Better Than 1st…). One of the main concerns expressed in the article is that third place…
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Grading The Expected Points Model
It is time for introspection and to hand out some grades. I Go To Extremes Every year there are outliers. Wrestlers or teams that show up, or not so much.…
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The 3 Point Takedown – Folkstyle’s Sea Change
The year was 2023 and there was a plague upon the land of folkstyle wrestling. Scoring at the NCAA tournament was down – a lot. After hitting a near-term peak…
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Expectations – 2026 NCAA Tournament Viewed Through the Lens of What Could Have Been
Expectations are funny things. There is no universal standard for them. We can both look at the same set of facts and data about the world but develop wildly different…
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Can Penn State Score 200 Points?
Yes That is the short answer. Pretty unsatisfactory though. I will require more detail. Let’s start by making some assumptions about seeds and bonus.  That comes to 192 points if wrestled…
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Youth Will Be Served (or I can’t stop thinking about the 133 bracket this year where there are four freshmen ranked in the top six)
With all the talk of freshman studs possibly winning this year I thought I would take a look at the history of freshman at the NCAA tournament. But before we…
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Hello, Chaos My Old Friend
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…
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NCAA Tournament Over / Under Performers
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…
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Expected Points – Friend or Foe?
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…
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There Will Be Consequences
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…
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