Wrestleknownothing

An the oath is a lie. Flo claims these are not predictions, but then to come up with their team rankings they treat their individual rankings as though they are predictions.

I have expounded on the un-serious way they set up the seeding points. Have all the tournaments in the most difficult to get to time zones for the western hemisphere. If they show, they have two choices: get there a week early, ala the world championships, to acclimate and optimize performance (and spend loads of money - see point 2); get there just in time, and feel like crap, and maybe get hurt. Have the points accumulate individually so that a deep country, like the US, will have to spend a crazy amount sending multiple wrestlers, but PR can just send the one that they know is their rep. Make it a perfect attendance award rather than merit, because attendance lines their pockets, not achievement.

Yes

Lee was 7th, not 8th. But not the 7th best wrestler there. See Repechage is French for Stupid.

Being in the US it would have to be at a catch weight for Micic, like 97. I kid. I kid.

Testify, Pat Milkovich.

Someone kinda did with the Yianni thread on intl.

This would have been a Zain Retherford thread a year ago. Perhaps @Antitroll2828 is a little premature on this take. And a little late (Yianni is having a hard time hearing you over his world silver).

Didn't @jross archive the old site? Perhaps he can tell.

I'm skeptical.

@Dark Energy asked "what about The Other Guys?" in the Big Board Big Boys thread. And he wasn't talking about Allen "Gator" Gamble and Terry "The Yankee Clipper" Hoitz. He was talking about the teams that do well recruiting outside of The Big Board Top 20. But before we get into that, a shout out to The Brain, @Husker_Du, for setting me up with a better, more complete, and higher quality, consistent data set for The BB. He was kind enough to fill in the blanks for me and replace the years Flo attempted to replicate his Brain, with his actual Brain. So now there are little bits of Willie all over these rankings. Read on if you dare. Breaking down The Big Board into groups of 20 and merging it with the AA data we get the following Kings of the Quintiles below the first quintile. Northwestern and Missouri have done the best mining the wrestlers ranked 21 - 100 (plus and honorable mention) with 14 AA's from those ranks over the past 10 recruiting classes (2013 - 2022). However, it has been a struggle to keep these guys, as Eierman, Rivera and Micic all transferred. The other teams with double digit AA success are Virginia Tech and NC State. As expected there are not a huge number of NCAA winners from these quintiles, but there aren't none. The deed has been done five times. Nino Bonaccorsi at #30, Max Dean at #74 and Ryan Deakin at #97 we know about. But there was also Darian Cruz (#37), and Seth Gross (#47).

Doesn't Rutgers leaving the EIWA for the Big Ten have something to do with that?

Ditto

This, right here. And this holds true internationally, not just domestically.

And somewhere, someone who knows nothing about wrestling, smiles contentedly, raises his drink to no one, and says "cheers".

That is pretty funny

And I mislabeled the table. Should say 2015-2022 as those are HS grad years.

Stay tuned

Yes. I created another one today for team level stuff. The Big Boys on The Big Board.

Wasn't there someone on themat who went through this for every (some? a lot of?) team at one time? I thought he found their budget filings somewhere and pulled together a bunch of data.

correct. Covid, free year, round of 12, 1st.

By the time Alirez is done you may also want to consider Northern Colorado.

Now that we have established that the Big Board matters, lets take a look at who is optimizing (haha, we know who it is) the Big Board talent. From 2015 to 2022 (2023 class has not competed yet) the race for the most Big Board Top 20 wrestlers is pretty tight. PSU has the edge over Ohio State 18 to 15. But PSU has gotten 27 AA finishes from those 18 wrestlers (1.5 per) while Ohio State has gotten "only" 18 from 15 (1.2). But where things get really crazy is that 23 of PSU's 27 AA finishes were first, second, or third (85%), while Ohio State had 7 top threes among their 18 AA finishes (39%). Iowa gets trashed a lot for under-performing, but the real issue is they under-recruit. They got commitments from only 9 Big Board Top 20 wrestlers. So, even though those wrestlers averaged 2 AA finishes per, there just were not enough of them. One caveat. The school where the wrestler committed gets credit for all the wrestlers AA finishes regardless of where they were achieved. This hurts Iowa with a lot of recent transfer AAs (DeSanto, Eierman, Woods) and PSU (Dean, Kerkvliet). My logic is this is a measure of high school recruiting rather than retention. For a fuller picture, you would want to look at retention too (independent study opportunity?). It could be that PSU is just getting the best of the best leading to those best in class results. But, that is not completely the case. Ohio State has brought in slightly higher ranked wrestlers on average. ASU has also brought in higher ranked wrestlers on average, though significantly fewer of them.

11th on the list of Big Board Top 20 talent since 2015.

Mean streets? You mean the gold-lined streets of Wheaton? I think they had a gate to keep us Streamers out.