Discrepancies Between Coaches Rankings and National Rankings

On Monday the NCAA published the first coaches’ ranking for the 2024 Division I Wrestling Championships. These rankings are one of the criteria used to determine at-large selections and tournament seeding. With the rankings having such a large impact on the season, we thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare the InterMat rankings with the hierarchy established by the 14-coach committee.

Naturally, there are a few large caveats that heavily contribute to some of the differences in rankings. First, coaches can only consider a wrestler who has been designated as a starter for his team. Second, in order to be ranked, a wrestler must have at least eight matches against Division-I opposition and must have wrestled against a Division-I opponent in the last 30 days. Third, the coaches’ rankings were submitted on Jan. 19, while the InterMat rankings were updated this past Tuesday.

These pesky rules account for a large degree of the divergence between the two sets of rankings, but they can’t explain it all. Let’s look at the wrestlers in each weight class with the biggest difference in rankings.

125: Nico Provo (Stanford) InterMat 19 - Coaches 10

After qualifying for the NCAA tournament as a true freshman last season, Provo got off to a strong start to his sophomore campaign. He won the Cliff Keen Invitational and finished second at the Southern Scuffle. Last Sunday, he hit a bit of a speed bump as he dropped an overtime match against Max Gallagher (Penn), but he managed to turn things around with a victory over Desmond Pleasant (Drexel) later that afternoon. Provo appears destined to find his way back to the NCAA tournament again this year, and the recent loss likely contributed to his lower InterMat ranking. 

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