Reason for optimism

[Okie_Pat]

We've been talking a lot about our lack of development with our guys. We are getting a lot of top recruits but ye they seem to underperform their recruiting class rankings. Well FLO came out with a article listing the 2023 All Americans and their big board class rankings. Here are the number of wrestlers for each weight who AA'ed and were out of the top 25 big board rankings.
125) 6
133) 4
141) 3
149) 4
157) 5
165) 3
174) 3
184) 4
197) 5
285) 3
That's a total of 40 wrestlers out of a possible 80 who were not ranked in the top 25 and AA'd. That's 50% of the field.

My point is this, you don't have to be hitting home runs with every recruiting class to produce results and score points at nationals. Its just as much about getting quality wrestlers who you can development in the room than it is with getting top rated guys. Injuries aside from the last couple of years with certain people, we haven't had many guys in the last decade AA who were out of the top 25 in their recruiting class.

 

[Sebastian]

And we’re doing well with neither….

 

[Wrassler17]

I remember Willie writing something pretty interesting a few years ago when he was still at Flo. He looked at the top 25 recruits from the 2013 & 2014 Big Boards. So 50 guys in total. 24 of them never AA'd in college, almost half. And 13 of them didn't even finish their career, they stopped wrestling with eligibility still remaining.

Willie didn't say how many of those were top 10, only top 25. Without taking a deep dive into the names & #s, it still feels like landing top 10 PFP recruits is the key to scoring big points at Nationals. In this year's finals, 12 of the 20 finalists were ranked top 10 coming out of HS, so 60%. If you expand that to the top 12, you pick up RBY & Austin O'Connor. Then it becomes 14 finalists or 70%.

Seems like when you start getting beyond the top 12 PFP, things maybe become more of a crapshoot.