Blockchain Wrestling

[grogs84]

@cowcards ,  @Wrestleknownothing and myself have been on a little adventure in wrestling history. When I found out the UWW uses blockchain technology to create draws, I just couldn't pass up on the chance to make an article out of the pun.

 

Blockchain Wrestling

The world’s oldest sport needs a more reliable ledger

https://medium.com/@mattgrogan/blockchain-wrestling-504ddd5a56c1

Edited 14 hours ago by grogs84
I wanted to reword something.

[Gene Mills Fan]

WRESTLING HISTORY needs a time travel machine

[grogs84]

3 minutes ago, Gene Mills Fan said:

WRESTLING HISTORY needs a time travel machine

@Wrestleknownothing has that on his backlog

[WrestlingRecords.com]

I'm with you. That's why I made https://wrestlingrecords.com/. The lack of data in wrestling is pretty crazy. Followed you on Medium, you have some great stuff.

[Wrestleknownothing]

All Data Contains Errors

Just get comfortable with that fact before we move on.

What we think we know is not always knowable. Details get lost to time. Mistakes get made (and missed) and become official. But it is OK. We can live with the uncertainty, the nagging sense of doubt, or at least acknowledge our history contains errors, and it will still be OK. The sun will rise; the roses will smell just as sweet; and our loved ones will still love us (or at a minimum, tolerate me).

Why do I bring this up? Because by the end of this post I may need to break someone’s heart. I don’t want to, but the power of the data compels me.

As many of you know @cowcards has built a fantastic resource for housing the history of wrestling. And as was mentioned above cowcards, @grogs84 and I have been working on taking the wrestlingstats brackets and feeding them into a database with an eye to extending that resource further.  Of course there were errors in our manual process. So, some QA work was required.

SPOILER: It turns out a whole lot of QA work was required.

Team Scores?

One idea we had was to use the individual match database to score every past tournament using the rules that existed at the time of each tournament and using the rules that exist today. Besides being interesting it also aided us in finding our mistakes. We could use the history document published annually by the NCAA that contains every past team score to check our own work. It was my hope that we would find our tiny number of errors this way. Oh, those were some sweet, innocent days.

There Were How Many Differences?

When all was said and done there were over 750 team score differences to track down between 1950 and 2025 (out of almost 5,300 team scores). Sigh. Every single one had to be researched.

Most of those differences boiled down to our imperfect understanding of how the rules were applied from year to year. One thing about NCAA wrestling is that it has had an absurd number of rule changes for scoring the tournament. In football a TD has always been six points, in basketball a FT has always been 1 point, and a win is a win is a win. But not in wrestling. Oh, no. We cannot make it that easy. We need to change the value of everything all the time, and we need to be careful to not keep close, detailed records because we love a sense of mystery.

After a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth (and a fair amount of consulting with @gimpeltf) we have been able to reduce the total number of differences to about 100 team scores with an average absolute difference of 0.89 points. On information and belief we think a lot of those differences are likely to be the result of human error in the score keeping process. We will publish everything soon, so that the army of internet sleuths can tell us where we went wrong (or right?).

Forgiven Me @ionel For I have Sinned (against the Cowboys, so not like a mortal sin)

Now on to a few situations where we know the NCAA scores are wrong:

Wyoming 2011 – The NCAA has them in 28^th place with 21 points. But if you score the brackets, they have 31 points, good enough for 21^st place. Either the brackets for 2011 contain unprecedented errors (they don’t or else it would affect other team scores), or whoever typed this up for the NCAA hit a 2 instead of a 3.

Hobart 1978 – Who the hell is Hobart? Well, there is no Hobart. There is a Humboldt though. Oops.

Oklahoma State 1950 – With sincere apologies to ionel, this one is modestly consequential. In 1950 Oklahoma’s Bill Borders placed fourth at 121, good for 1 team point.

Unfortunately, that team point was accidentally awarded to Oklahoma State (Oklahoma A&M at the time) resulting in Oklahoma State being credited with a fourth-place tie with Syracuse at 10 team points.

How do we know this? Because this is one of the few years that they showed their work in the NCAA Wrestling Guide.

Here we have Borders with a fourth-place finish:

And here we have Oklahoma State with the point Borders earned:

Moving that team point to its rightful owner, Oklahoma, moves them up from a tie for twelth to a tie for tenth. But it also moves Oklahoma State down from a tie for fourth to solo fifth.

We are going to need you to send that team trophy back. On your dime.

To show the power of these types of errors to become canon and persist unquestioned, it is even carried to this day in the Oklahoma State Media Guide:

If You Have Come This Far...

If you are still reading this, and I doubt you are at this point, I want to tease again that we will soon have this data up on cowcards' website. We still need to finish some 1929 - 1949 QA and get a little more disciplined around reason codes and the like, but be assured it is coming soon to a website near you. 

I also intend to start using the detail to publish some visuals and the like on the site. Not sure what yet. Lets see what tickles my fancy.

 

Edited 9 hours ago by Wrestleknownothing

[ionel]

1 hour ago, Wrestleknownothing said:

All Data Contains ErrorsJust get comfortable with that fact before we move on.  @gimpeltf

Forgiven Me @ionel For I have Sinned (against the Cowboys, so not like a mortal sin)

Now on to a few situations where we know the NCAA scores are wrong:

Wyoming 2011 – The NCAA has them in 28^th place with 21 points. But if you score the brackets, they have 31 points, good enough for 21^st place. Either the brackets for 2011 contain unprecedented errors (they don’t or else it would affect other team scores), or whoever typed this up for the NCAA hit a 2 instead of a 3.

Hobart 1978 – Who the hell is Hobart? Well, there is no Hobart. There is a Humboldt though. Oops.

Oklahoma State 1950 – With sincere apologies to ionel, this one is modestly consequential. In 1950 Oklahoma’s Bill Borders placed fourth at 121, good for 1 team point.

Unfortunately, that team point was accidentally awarded to Oklahoma State (Oklahoma A&M at the time) resulting in Oklahoma State being credited with a fourth-place tie with Syracuse at 10 team points.

How do we know this? Because this is one of the few years that they showed their work in the NCAA Wrestling Guide.

Here we have Borders with a fourth-place finish:

And here we have Oklahoma State with the point Borders earned:

Moving that team point to its rightful owner, Oklahoma, moves them up from a tie for twelth to a tie for tenth. But it also moves Oklahoma State down from a tie for fourth to solo fifth.

We are going to need you to send that team trophy back. On your dime.

To show the power of these types of errors to become canon and persist unquestioned, it is even carried to this day in the Oklahoma State Media Guide:

 

ahh ... are you sure they gave out 4th place trophies in 1950?  I've never seen it it the trophy case so be hard to send back dime or no dime.  Moreover everyone knows that a Sooner is a cheater.  They snuck in early on the land rush.  I have no problem cheating a cheater.  

[gimpeltf]

One thing about team scores that everyone may not know. In the early years (1928- around 1940) they didn't always do team scores officially. So there wasn't an official champ. Also, in the pre-NCAA tournament years it seems there was some sort of championships based on dual results. I don't think the NCAA had anything to do with it but in Rec Hall (PSU) where they have their championship flags, they have one for 1920 (I think that's the year). I asked about that and was told it was based on duals. 

[gimpeltf]

11 minutes ago, ionel said:

ahh ... are you sure they gave out 4th place trophies in 1950?  I've never seen it it the trophy case so be hard to send back dime or no dime.  Moreover everyone knows that a Sooner is a cheater.  They snuck in early on the land rush.  I have no problem cheating a cheater.  

As they say out there- If you ain't cheatin, you ain't tryin!

[ionel]

3 minutes ago, gimpeltf said:

 Also, in the pre-NCAA tournament years it seems there was some sort of championships based on dual results. I don't think the NCAA had anything to do with it but in Rec Hall (PSU) where they have their championship flags, they have one for 1920 (I think that's the year). I asked about that and was told it was based on duals. 

But Carl said ddm so shirely he had em take that banner down.   

[Wrestleknownothing]

Hold all tickets. 

It turns out if you once were in charge of scoring the tournament, you might know a thing or two about where to look for explanations of discrepancies. Thanks to @gimpeltf we can now explain a seeming contradiction that explains the 10 point Wyoming difference above even though the brackets suggest it should not be there.

From the Wyoming website news archives:

"After racking up four consecutive wins on Friday, LeBlanc missed weight by just half a pound on Saturday morning and forfeited his final two matches and all the team points he had accrued in the tournament. LeBlanc finished sixth despite having being disqualified from Saturday's two matches."

Joe LeBlanc kept his All-American finish, but lost all 10 of his team points.

That is a good trivia question for anyone who wants a free beer at the next tournament.

[Wrestleknownothing]

46 minutes ago, ionel said:

ahh ... are you sure they gave out 4th place trophies in 1950?  I've never seen it it the trophy case so be hard to send back dime or no dime.  Moreover everyone knows that a Sooner is a cheater.  They snuck in early on the land rush.  I have no problem cheating a cheater.  

We are going ro need you to make a fourth-place trophy and send that back. 

[ionel]

10 minutes ago, Wrestleknownothing said:

We are going ro need you to make a fourth-place trophy and send that back. 

Here ya go

[Jason Bryant]

50 minutes ago, Wrestleknownothing said:

Hold all tickets. 

It turns out if you once were in charge of scoring the tournament, you might know a thing or two about where to look for explanations of discrepancies. Thanks to @gimpeltf we can now explain a seeming contradiction that explains the 10 point Wyoming difference above even though the brackets suggest it should not be there.

From the Wyoming website news archives:

"After racking up four consecutive wins on Friday, LeBlanc missed weight by just half a pound on Saturday morning and forfeited his final two matches and all the team points he had accrued in the tournament. LeBlanc finished sixth despite having being disqualified from Saturday's two matches."

Joe LeBlanc kept his All-American finish, but lost all 10 of his team points.

That is a good trivia question for anyone who wants a free beer at the next tournament.

That was the controversy that year. He kept his team points where previously, you DNMW, you lose all your points, right @gimpeltf?

[SetonHallPirate]

52 minutes ago, Jason Bryant said:

That was the controversy that year. He kept his team points where previously, you DNMW, you lose all your points, right @gimpeltf?

It was the 2011 offseason (right after that controversy) where they changed the rule.

[gimpeltf]

4 hours ago, Jason Bryant said:

That was the controversy that year. He kept his team points where previously, you DNMW, you lose all your points, right @gimpeltf?

He lost his points that year but kept his place.

[grogs84]

6 hours ago, ionel said:

They snuck in early on the land rush.  I have no problem cheating a cheater.  

I had a feeling this was going to circle back to land rush controversy. One of my main hesitations for posting really.

[grogs84]

10 hours ago, WrestlingRecords.com said:

I'm with you. That's why I made https://wrestlingrecords.com/. The lack of data in wrestling is pretty crazy. Followed you on Medium, you have some great stuff.

This looks great. I've actually been looking for more international results.