After the 2022-2023 NCAA Wrestling season, the Rules Committee introduced a massive change: for the first time since points were introduced in 1940, takedowns would be worth 3 points instead of 2. This came as a result of much discussion that takedowns in practice were generally only worth a single point due to the rate at which they are followed by an escape. Immediate response to this rule change was mixed, with one sided arguing that the new rule more properly rewarded takedowns for their relative difficulty compared to escapes, and the other side arguing that this heavier emphasis on neutral wrestling would shift folkstyle away from being a three-position sport. Other rule changes included adding a 3-point nearfall, eliminating the hand-touch takedown, a requirement for the top wrestler to work for a fall/nearfall, and a few others less pertinent to in-match tactics.
Qualitatively, discourse on the 2023-2024 season seemed to indicate that most people did not feel that the rule changes diminished the values of folkstyle significantly. Obviously major trend changes take longer than a year to fully develop, but the consensus was that the 3-point takedown was at least not a net-negative for college wrestling. However, now that the season has concluded, I wanted to analyze the actual data from the last three NCAA Men’s Wrestling Championships to see if there was a noticeable difference in this year’s results.
One caveat before diving into the results. While it is possible to identify some trends, the comparisons between years are not direct, as the fields for each NCAA tournament are not the same. Wrestling has a plethora of styles and dominance levels; some athletes tend to score more frequently in certain positions than others. In a sample size as small as 640 matches per tournament, a handful of prolific scorers or stallers can skew the data. As much as it would help to analyze entire seasons over a longer timespan, these analyses take considerable time so it was most practical to focus on three NCAA tournaments. In other words, take these trends with a grain of salt as any year or handful of years could be anomalous.
First, easily the most notable impact with the higher-valued takedowns was the amount of bonus points scored. Comparing the 2024 results to the average of the 2022 and 2023 results, major decisions increased by 23.2%, tech falls increased by 423.8%, and falls decreased by 17.4%. By increasing the values of takedowns, the threshold for majors and tech falls was effectively lowered. It’s hard to say definitively that this directly influenced the decrease in pins. This could be a result of wrestlers aiming for point scoring sequences instead of pins, matches being terminated by tech before a pin could be secured, the styles of this field of NCAA wrestlers, or any combination of those variables.
Next, let’s look at positional choice across the three years. Some believed that this higher emphasis on takedowns would affect the choice of position. In actuality, bottom was still the prevailing choice, accounting for 80% of all choices. Neutral (17.5% of overall choice) did have a 21.8% increase over the average of the previous two years, and Top (2.5% of overall choice) had an increase of 12.7% over the average of the previous two years.
Next up is stall calls (yes, I’m burying the lede, the big one is coming after this). Stall calls went up by 13.8% over the average of the previous two years. I wasn’t able to quantify these by position, so it’s hard to definitively attribute this to the emphasis on working for a turn in the top position, but this certainly could be a factor.
Alright, this is the one you’ve been waiting for: how did instances of point scoring change at this tournament? Well the short answer is the number of points went up (obviously) but the number of scoring instances went down. Side note: for this analysis, I did not include stalling, cautions, or penalty points as they were either difficult to quantify or not relevant to this discussion. When tallying takedowns, escapes, reversals, riding time, and nearfall, points scored in the 2024 NCAA championships compared to the previous two championships increased by 18.0%, while the number of scores decreased by 5.3%.
Breaking the instances of scoring down by technique and comparing the 2024 NCAA championships against the average of the previous two championships, number of escapes decreased by 1.2%, number of takedowns decreased by 4.0%, riding time scores decreased by 20.1%, number of nearfall scores decreased by 13.8%, and number of reversals decreased by 18.3%.
This data presents possibly the biggest indication of a shift in match tactics. This year’s data for escapes and takedowns actually falls in between the data for 2022 and 2023, so it could be considered to be statistically consistent with the previous two years (taking a few liberties here, many more years would need to be analyzed to actually calculate statistical significance). Nearfall and reversals decreased by 13.8% and 18.3% respectively, and these are typically only scored in situations where both the top and bottom wrestlers are committed to exchanging sequences in the top and bottom positions. Riding time decreasing by 20.1% is perhaps the most telling statistic of all here. Riding time by definition requires the top wrestler to commit to wrestling in the top position for an extended period of time, so the drop here could indicate that wrestlers as a whole are opting to forsake mat wrestling in favor of more point-valuable neutral opportunities.
Let’s talk limitations. First off, thank you to Trackwrestling for making this raw data available in some form, though it did take lots of work consolidating to get it to a point where it could be analyzed. There are definitely some takeaways that can be assumed from this data, but to really identify trends it would take many years of data both before and after the rule change, and even then the field of NCAA wrestlers and prevailing technical trends change so much that a true comparison is not possible. To really point out if wrestling as a whole was taking place less on the mat and more in neutral than in previous years, it would require an analysis of the amount of time spent in each position, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no easy way to access that data.
In conclusion, there are some indications that the rule changes this year could be shifting the emphasis away from mat wrestling and towards neutral, but more data will be needed to make that definitive. If the goal of these rule changes was to encourage more scoring, that was accomplished solely by inflating the value of points; number of scoring instances has either held steady or slightly decreased in this year’s NCAA championships. If the goal was to tweak the relative point values so that the “best” wrestler wins, that debate goes far beyond these statistics and requires a more philosophical conversation about how we evaluate wrestling performance. In terms of the “product” for fans and viewers, again that is up for debate, but, anecdotally, the discourse I’ve seen has not indicated that people find the core values of folkstyle wrestling to have been diminished.
Sources
Trackwrestling.com, 2024, www.trackwrestling.com/seasons/MainFrame.jsp?TIM=1711822422892&twSessionId=podvvmikzp&loadBalanced=true&pageName=%2Fseasons%2FResults.jsp. Accessed 30 Mar. 2024.
Trackwrestling.com, 2023, www.trackwrestling.com/seasons/MainFrame.jsp?TIM=1711822458151&twSessionId=podvvmikzp&loadBalanced=true&pageName=%2Fseasons%2FResults.jsp. Accessed 30 Mar. 2024.
Trackwrestling.com, 2022, www.trackwrestling.com/seasons/MainFrame.jsp?TIM=1711822515112&twSessionId=podvvmikzp&loadBalanced=true&pageName=%2Fseasons%2FResults.jsp. Accessed 30 Mar. 2024.
