Rather than edit to correct I thought I would do the thing I hate, the self-quote, in order to preserve my prior wrong statement.
Alirez's ELO did not go down at all during his redshirt 2024 season. It was just frozen in amber.
Meanwhile, Mendez's ELO took big jumps at the end of the 2024 season with Big10 (dual and tournament) and NCAA results. So really what the algos said was Mendez had a more impressive season in 2024 than Alirez had in 2023.