All The Upsets From Week 7 Of The 2023-24 NCAA D1 Wrestling Season
All The Upsets From Week 7 Of The 2023-24 NCAA D1 Wrestling Season
It was a light week as far as the schedule goes, but there were still ten upsets for us to discuss!
All the usual caveats apply. What are upsets strictly according to the most recent set of NCAA D1 rankings may not look like upsets by the end of the season, or even next week!
There are less competitions over the holiday season so there are less matches and thus, less upsets this week, however, that just gives us more time to discuss the upsets that did happen. I'll group the 10 upsets we got into relevant categories.
LOL at 125 Pounds
125: Cooper Flynn, Virginia Tech over #1 Nico Provo, Stanford - 5-2
125: #11 Jore Volk, Wyoming over #3 Richard Figueroa, Arizona State - 6-4
This weight class is a mess. An absolute nightmare for the rankings. You can disagree with specific rankings all you want but until you craft your own set of 33 ranked 125-pounders and subject it to the same scrutiny and standards as Flo's rankings there's just no way to know what the "correct" order should be.
Trying to rank 125 this season reminds me of the adage: "Man makes plans and god laughs". You can do a good job, and some rankings may be 'more correct' than others, but no one will ever have it nailed unassailable perfect. Maybe one day with computers, though!
But Are They Starters?
165: Nicco Ruiz, Arizona State over #13 Cael Carlson, Oklahoma - 5-2
197: Sonny Sasso, Virginia Tech over #16 Nikolas Stemmet, Stanford - 8-4
Another conundrum for rankers is what to do with wrestlers who may or may not be the starters in the postseason. The new rule that true freshmen can make 5 varsity starts while still retaining the ability to redshirt just makes everything more complicated.
In the case of Ruiz and Sasso, if you have to give them an 'assumed' ranking and then try to arrange the whole weight class with them somewhere in there, then take them out because they aren't yet the starter (yet). All very complicated stuff. Try some time you don't believe me!
Watch Ruiz over Carlson in the video below:
A Ranker's Paradise
184: #10 Sam Wolf, Air Force over #7 Clayton Whiting, Missouri - 4-1 SV
157: #7 Daniel Cardenas, Stanford over #6 Bryce Andonian, Virginia Tech - 15-7
Not all upsets create problems for rankings. Sometimes you spend most your life living in a ranker's paradise. That's when the upsets are between guys who are only one or two or three spots away from each other. Then it's a pretty simple adjustment (usually). For most weeks, however, those kinds of results are lamentably rare.
Watch Wolf upset Whiting in the video below:
The Further Down The Rankings You Go, The Tougher It Gets
165: #26 Connor Brady, Virginia Tech over #16 Hunter Garvin, Stanford - 10-3
174: Jack Janda, Drexel over #24 Sal Perrine, Ohio - 5-2
157: Isaiah Crosby, Oregon State over #28 John Wiley, Oklahoma - 4-2
157: Sloan Swan, Wyoming over #28 John Wiley, Oklahoma - 6-1
Once you get outside the top 20, or sometimes even the top 10, things get a lot more muddled. You see way more "ranker's delights" when you get into the twenties and thirties. That's when you have three wrestlers -- A, B, & C -- and you get recent results where A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A.
I dunno if that's what happened in these instances but I figured I'd stay on theme for this upsets article and continue talking about rankings dilemmas.
But that's all the upsets for this week. We'll talk about more upsets and they're rankings implications next week. See you then!