What Does The Midlands Mean For This Year's NCAA Tournament?
What Does The Midlands Mean For This Year's NCAA Tournament?
The Midlands is one of the toughest mid season NCAA wrestling tournaments every year. What do Midlands place winners do at that year's NCAA tournament?
The Midlands is one of the toughest folkstyle wrestling tournaments outside of the NCAAs and has been for decades. Now entering its 55th iteration, this season's holiday classic takes place Dec. 29-30 at Sears Centre Arena in Hoffman Estates, IL, and is shaping up to be one of the best in recent memory.
But what does success at Midlands mean for a wrestler's chances at the national tournament? We take a look at the numbers to see what a top eight placement at Midlands portends for March.
To get an idea of what a Midlands medalist might do a few months from now in Cleveland, we looked back at the last three years of Midlands results. We then matched each Midlands top eight finisher with his corresponding NCAA finish from the same season.
Why three years? Because the further back you go the less relevant the data is to the present and also because that's all the data we had handy and going back any further would be way more work.
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After assembling our list of place winners from 2014-16, the first thing we had to do was take out all the non-NCAA Division I athletes, as they would not be eligible to compete in the NCAA DI national championship. That meant removing the postgrads, the NAIA wrestlers, etc.
Next we needed to strike the competitors that, for whatever reason, did not wrestle in the postseason. So the redshirts, the injured, and the guys who just got beat out for a starting spot by a teammate were all removed.
That left us with the following number of NCAA DI place-winners over the last three seasons who then proceeded to wrestle at NCAAs:
| Place | # |
| 1 | 27 |
| 2 | 28 |
| 3 | 24 |
| 4 | 25 |
| 5 | 20 |
| 6 | 20 |
| 7 | 21 |
| 8 | 20 |
One final caveat is that there may have been some NCAA DI Midlands place-winners over the last three seasons who started for their teams yet simply didn't qualify for the NCAA tournament. While I didn't recognize any names from the list, it's possible a competitor or two to whom that applies snuck into our sample study. But even if a few did, it would have a negligible effect on our numbers, though it is something to be aware of I suppose.
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OK, so now we have 185 Midlands place-winners (out of a total of 240) who then went on to wrestle in the NCAAs. Of that group, 63, or34 percent, ended up earning All-American honors.
Unsurprisingly, wrestlers who won the Midlands were more likely to earn All-American honors than wrestlers who placed eighth. The complete breakdown of NCAA DI Midlands place-winners over the last three years and the percentage who later earned NCAA All-American honors during same season is below.
| Place | % AA |
| 1 | 88.9% |
| 2 | 32.1% |
| 3 | 50.0% |
| 4 | 24.0% |
| 5 | 25.0% |
| 6 | 15.0% |
| 7 | 9.5% |
| 8 | 10.0% |
What perhaps is surprising is that a greater percentage of third-place Midlands finishers ended up on the podium in March than those that finished as runners-up at the Midlands, by a significant margin.
Incidentally, the only wrestler in the last three seasons to have won both Midlands and the NCAAs is Illinois' Isaiah Martinez, who did it in 2014-15 at 157 pounds.
Finally, to get an even more granular look at the numbers, we can look at each group of Midlands placers — i.e. everyone who finished first, second, etc — and figure out their average NCAA placement. Bloodround finishers were all assigned 12th place, the four out before them at the NCAAs were given 16th place, the next eight out got 24th, and the rest 32nd.
After adding up all those NCAA finishes, we divided by the number of total Midlands wrestlers at each placement. The results, which show the average NCAA placement for each Midlands placement over the last three years, is below:
| Mids Place | NCAA Place |
| 1 | 4.7 |
| 2 | 13.0 |
| 3 | 11.6 |
| 4 | 18.6 |
| 5 | 19.9 |
| 6 | 19.8 |
| 7 | 21.2 |
| 8 | 20.3 |
As foreshadowed by our All-American numbers, Midlands third-place finishers averaged a better NCAA finish than the runners-up. Midlands winners averaged a middle step on the NCAA podium, while second- and third-place finishers at Midlands average an NCAA exit in the round of 12.
There is a substantial drop-off after that, so any All-American who come from a fourth-place finish or worse from the Midlands should be considered a bonus.
Of the NCAA DI Midlands winners over the past three seasons, only three failed to earn All-American honors. For the second- and third-place Midlands finishers, the numbers are 19 of 28 and 12 of 28 for non-podium placers, respectively.
None of these numbers predetermine the fate of any wrestler, of course. Everyone still controls his own destiny, and we're merely providing some extra context as we prepare for an electric 55th Midlands tournament. See you there!