Wrestleknownothing

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45864313/ravens-employ-olympian-michael-phelps-teach-swim I will make the same offer to wrestlers

The beauty of having them half way around the world is I can trivialize while they sleep.

For the 12 seed era I will stick to the original criteria and go with exceed only. Oh, and there are only three. So no number 1's need apply. Sorry to flip and flop on you.

100%. Well done.

You gotta admit that is a pretty cool graph, though.

Two down. One to go.

Worse than that. It disqualifies me. It turns out no one exceeded their seed in the 16 seed era four times while AAing. I had an error in my query. But there were three who met OR exceeded. Let's go with that instead. In the meantime, I will learn to live with the shame.

Bingo. The man who saved Stanford wrestling.

Brewer is correct, but one of the edge cases I ignored. Thanks for finding him. His first AA was in the 12 seed era, his next three in the 16 seed era.

Gotta get your reps in to build stamina

Jan Gould - "I underestimated you Michael" Michael Scott - "Well, maybe next time you will estimate me" This one needs a little explaining. I was taking a fresh look at my breakdown of the eras in college wrestling with an eye toward calculating who exceeded expectations by the most. The reason you need to break things up into eras is because the exceeded expectations calculation depends on starting and ending points (seeds and AA finishes). How the tournament has been seeded and how many AA's per tournament was highly variable in the early days. The sport was growing and organizers experimented a bit before settling on a more stable structure. I call this The Growth and Experimentation Era. The number of AAs steadily increased as the size of the tournament increased, but seeding was a hot mess. Some year the number increased, some years it decrease, some years it disappeared, and some years even had different numbers of seeds in different brackets. Like I said, hot mess. I am going to ignore this era in this trivia. What followed were three more eras where the number of AA's stabilized at 8, but the number of seeds increased incrementally. This will be our area of focus. Maybe it is best to share a graphic at this point that illustrates the concept. Now back to the trivia questions. In the 12 seed era (1979 - 2013) only 4 wrestlers exceeded their seed every year and finished on the podium four times. Who are they? In the 16 seed era (2014 - 2018) only 3 wrestlers exceeded their seed every year and finished on the podium four times. Who are they? In the 33 seed era (2019 - 2025) only 1 wrestler exceeded their seed every year and finished on the podium four times. Who is he? A couple of notes. Each one of these wrestlers started and finished their careers within the era. There are probably wrestlers whose careers spanned two eras who qualified, but I didn't bother to look for them. This eliminates a guy like Yianni Diakomihalis who was a freshman in 2018 (16 seeds) and a senior in 2023 (33 seeds). That leads to the second note. Yianni would be eliminated even if his career was within an era because he was often a #1 seed, making it impossible to exceed his seed. So forget about anyone who was ever the favorite.

I arrived here in a time mac.... Never mind. I have said too much.

Winner, winner. Well done. With a 19-12 loss in the round of 32 followed by a 21-13 loss in the opening consol round he went down swinging just hard enough to edge out Oklahoma State's Jeff Ragan, who needed three loses to amass his 24 match points.

Hint #2: He is his school's most decorated wrestler of the post-war era.

I am just an unfrozen caveman statistician. @Jason Bryant and his new fangled ways frightens and confuses me. Pinfall may have left the rule book in 1955, but it has never left my heart.

Summer school for you

2001-2010

Hint: Our wrestler was always on the offense. While he went 0-2 as a sophomore, he finished 5th and 7th the next two years while never putting up fewer than 7 points in a match that went 7 minutes.

Hard to say. During the regular season he had a 42% bonus rate. It was during the Big10 and NCAA tournies that he really locked it down. In 2014 he only scored 15 points on the way to his title. But it is unknown if that is the lowest total ever for a title winner with 5 decisions. In 1953 Cornell's Don Dickason scored 13 points in the 4 matches for which a score was recorded in the bracket. The fifth match is just listed as a ref's decision. If the score was 0-0 or 1-1, the "title" would belong to Dickason. Dickason won three of his five matches by ref's decision. One was recorded as 2-2, one was recorded as 1-1, and one had no score attached. There is probably no truth to the rumor that Dickason's uncle was the ref that day, but he is the only wrestler to win three matches by ref's decision in a single tournament.

I do not know how I feel about this question. It is a pretty obscure one, but here goes. Who holds the record for most points scored while going 0-2 at a single NCAA tournament?

I checked that one. The shift from 3 pt to either 2 or 4 didn't happen until 2016.

Yes, I missed the pigtail match

The only quintuple pinfeller who did not win a title that I can find is Gary Albright, but he took 15:34 to Taylor's 13:52.

Not right away. The wrestlers on the roster (and incoming freshman) that are over the roster limit are exempted from the roster limit for the rest of their careers (designated student athletes, I believe they will be called). The schools do not have to keep them on roster, but they can choose to keep them. And if one of those wrestlers chooses to transfer elsewhere his roster exemption follows him to his new school.