As anyone who has paid attention to my posts knows, there are a couple of things I hate for their laziness. The generic claims of ducking and stalling. Here we will ignore the former and focus on the latter.
I loooooove @pmilk's posts on strategy. After all one man's strategy is another man's stalling. And this can be very tribal. All you need to do to see that is read some of the posts on HR by their fan parody account Ironbird. A recent perfect example is yesterday he complained that Woods would have won by more if the opponent hadn't stalled. In the same post he referred to Arnold's "tuff ride/mat returns to wear a guy down and kill some clock". You know because one is clearly stalling, but the other is strategy. Blah, blah, blah.
Digging through @grogs84 data for the 1988 to 2021 NCAA tournaments I thought I would find the wrestlers who won a title while scoring the fewest points. To do this I narrowed it down to wrestlers who won all of their matches by decision on their way to a title. Let's call them the Efficient Eight (really 10 with ties, but I do love alliteration).
Why score any more than you need to? It's not like you can use those extra points in later matches. Conserve energy. Don't let 'em see your moves on tape. Good luck scouting all my moves when I only use one per match, if that many. Now that is just smart wrestling.
The heavies are, um, heavily represented with 6 of the 10, but it is a middleweight who shall lead them all. While it saddened me to see that no one had won five straight 1-0 matches in OT, Jason Tsirtsis at 149 in 2014 came closest, having won his 5 matches 4-1, 4-3, 2-1 (OT), 2-1 (OT) and 3-1 (OT) for a 15 point total (only 12 in regulation time, awesome).
Does anyone know of any wrestlers pre-1988 or post 2021 to score fewer than the world's most efficient wrestler**?
*Ok, Ten, so The Taut Ten?
** Guinness verification pending.