It's time for our annual analytical deep dive into the greatest collegiate competition of the year!

Previous NCAAs By The Numbers: 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014

2022 By The Numbers: Bonus Coverage

Final team scores can be found here. And a complete set of brackets can be found here. Brookmark them, that's what I do!

Below are the total team points by conference.

And in the form a pie chart it looks like this.

We can also see the relative strength of the conferences in each weight class, as the charts below demonstrate. 

The first five weights:

And the last five weights: 

Next, everyone's favorite, National Qualifiers (NQs), All-Americans (AAs) and champs by Home State.

And I like to normalize for population and figure out the strength of each home state per capita. This is a very normal thing to do when analyzing statistics by state, however, some people, for whatever reason, don't think it's a good idea. But that's too bad for them because I am going to do it anyway. 

Here are approximate points by home state per million inhabitants. 

And here is a heat map to help visualize the states that performed the best at the 2022 NCAAs.

There was also a national qualifier from Russia, Iowa State's Ramaz Attasauov, who did not place, and one from Cuba, Yonger Bastida, who placed fifth at 197-pounds, also from Iowa State. Now that's what I call casting a wide recruiting net! 

All the top seeds placed in the top three, with seven #1 seeds earning titles. 59 of the 80 wrestlers seeded between in the top 8 made the podium. The lowest seed to earn All-American honors was Ohio State's Gavin Hoffman, who placed 6th from the #21 seed at 184-pounds. The high seed to miss the podium was the Hawleyes' 141-pounder, Jaydin Eierman, was seeded #2 but injury defaulted in the 1st consolation round of 8 (final 16 wrestlers). 

Below is a table of All-Americans and where they were seeded.

How does that compare to the how the All-Americans were ranked? Pretty similarly, as unsurprisingly, the rankings and the seeds linedup pretty closely. 

Here's the same table of All-Americans but with their FloWrestling ranking going into the tournament rather than their seed. 

We had 62 All-Americans ranked in the top 8. Six wrestlers ranked 9th also made the podium.

To get a better idea of what did a better job of predicting placement, seeds or rankings, I calculated the absolute value of the different between placements and both seeds and rankings and added it up. For wrestlers given the rank of honorable mention, I substituted the number 29, halfway between 25 and 33. 

For wrestlers who finished in the round of 12 I assigned them the placement of 9.5, for wrestlers who finished in the round of 16 where given the placement of 14.5. 

The total difference between the placement values and that of both seed and rank are summarized in the following table.

Both seeds and rankings were about equally good at predicting tournament placements. Not a big takeaway there, but I did all the calculations so I wasn't not going to include them in this blog.

Okay but what about heat maps? 

Good idea. Here is a heat map of all the 2022 National Qualifiers. 

And here's a map of NQs but just of the contiguous USA (plus Cuba).

Here's a heat map of just the All-Americans.

And finally, a map that you can hopefully interact with and get the names of all the AAs.

That's all the numbers for now. More to come though. Probably!