By Allen Smith
PSWC Membership Co-Chair and Website Committee
Welcome to another installment of this series, started last year. If you had a chance to read both “Chasing 170” and “Chasing 170: The Sequel” last year, you will understand the depths I went through to analyze Penn State’s chances of topping Iowa’s NCAA Wrestling Championship record team score of 170, set by the 1997 Hawkeyes (“Chasing 170”), followed by the story of how the Penn State wrestling team broke that long-standing scoring record (“Chasing 170: The Sequel”).
Those articles are buried a bit, so if you are interested in reading them, they are on about page 6 or after, under “NEWS”, then “Latest News” on the Penn State Wrestling Club website or contact me at asmith684@verizon.net and I will email them to you.
To be honest, last year I was lukewarm about Penn State’s chances of scoring more than 170 points, and my first article had that vibe. Those lukewarm feelings were pointed out by my friend and former Penn State wrestler Andy Voit and others. The possibility was there, but I honestly thought the chances were 50-50 at best. Now, as we know in hindsight, the Lions did set the team scoring record, now 172.5, as they won the 2024 championship by a resounding 100 points.
It was a performance for the ages. The question now is, am I a bit premature in calling last year’s result “a performance for the ages” when here we are only one year later and again talking about an even deeper Penn State team heading into the NCAA Wrestling Championships, with the potential to reach an even loftier team score?
Enter the 2025 version of the Penn State wrestling team. On paper this team is good, very good. It is so good in fact that it MAY BE the best overall group of college wrestlers ever assembled. I say “MAY BE” because the measuring stick for TEAM greatness, the one I use, is team points at the NCAA Wrestling Championships, and as of this writing, that event is still three weeks away for this year’s team. These “team points” of which I speak are a great indicator; I would say the best we have. Contained within are the team’s successes and disappointments of any year’s championship all rolled into one. For sure there will be more successes than disappointments when setting records, but disappointments happen too and are very real and tangible. Great teams can overcome those things. If you read “Chasing 170: The Sequel”, you will read about the 2024 Penn State wrestling team’s many successes and the disappointments.
Getting back to the 2025 Penn State wrestling team; does team greatness lie ahead? Will they set a new team scoring record in Philadelphia, one year after breaking the previous record which stood for 27 years? This article will give insight into exactly those questions. To start, I will give the reader an introduction to this year’s team and comparisons to last year’s team. Then I will take the leap into one way to forecast the majority of team points; namely ADVANCEMENT and PLACEMENT Points, which are defined later in this article. That will be followed by a review of BONUS Point potential. Lastly, all of that will be tied up with a neat little bow as I wrap up the analysis.
Two Lions wrestled their final bouts in a Penn State singlet at the 2024 NCAA Wrestling Championships. Their eligibility now done, super-scorer Aaron Brooks (1 st at 197 pounds, 27 team points at the 2024 NCAA Wrestling Championships) and steady Bernie Truax (5 th at 184 pounds, 12.5 points) combined for nearly 23% of Penn State’s total team points in their final collegiate appearance last March. One other Lion that wrestled in Kansas City, Aaron Nagao, has been sidelined with injury this season and has not competed. The absence of those three starters from 2024 set in motion the search for puzzle pieces (i.e. wrestlers) that would make the 2025 Penn State wrestling team the best possible mix of talent with the best chance of scoring maximum team points in Philadelphia. In an unusual twist, as compared to the previous dozen or so years, the Penn State line-up was settled quite early this season. Close battles have always existed, and often not settled till after the New Year and the start of the Big Ten Conference season. Several injuries, to wrestlers battling for starting nods, surely played a part in settling at least two weight classes this season, and there were no real extended battles for starting nods.
The 2025 line-up consists of Luke Lilledahl at 125 pounds, Braeden Davis at 133, Beau Bartlett at 141, Shayne Van Ness at 149, Tyler Kasak at 157, Mitchell Mesenbrink at 165, Levi Haines at 174, Carter Starocci at 184, Josh Barr at 197 and Greg Kerkvliet at 285. Only three of those wrestlers -Bartlett, Mesenbrink and Kerkvliet – are at the same weight class as last season. In total, three wrestlers are new to the line-up compared to 2024; Lilledahl, Van Ness and Barr. Davis, Kasak and Starocci are up one weight while Haines is up two! This is a different team with several new faces, yet a healthy dose of familiar ones from 2024. It will be fun to do a comparison!
My method for comparison is fairly simple; use the most recent rankings and assume those are the final placements for each Penn State wrestler at the NCAA Wrestling Championship. Then make an educated guess at the Bonus point contribution to the team total and voilà, another minute or two of simple math and I will have a projection. Note that the final placement has clearly defined Placement and Advancement points; 20 for 1st Place, 16 for 2nd Place, 13.5 for 3rd Place, and so on. My assumption is that you the reader have a solid level of knowledge regarding tournament scoring so that you can easily follow along. A brief reminder here though, for anyone that needs it; there are three (3) and only three aspects to team scoring in tournaments. They are; ADVANCEMENT POINTS, BONUS POINTS, and PLACEMENT POINTS. Having a slightly better- than-basic knowledge of all three, and you are on your way to a solid understanding of tournament scoring. For ADVANCEMENT POINTS, wrestlers earn 1 team point for winning a bout in the championship bracket and ½ team point in the wrestleback bracket, up until the placement bouts. For BONUS POINTS, wrestlers earn team points by winning a bout by bonus points; 1 point for a major decision, 1.5 points for a technical fall, and 2 points for a fall, disqualification, forfeit or default. For PLACEMENT POINTS, the top eight wrestlers only get team points, or 16 points, 12, 10, 9, 7, 6, 4, or 3 points for finishing from 1 st through 8th place respectively.
As I am writing this the final regular season rankings are done, so it is a great time to use those rankings. The regular season is history, and only the conference championships are left to impact the seeds. For transparency-sake and for your information, I am using both the Intermat and Flowrestling rankings, averaging them to avoid any outliers. Interestingly, both services’ rankings for Penn State wrestlers were identical except at 133, where Flowrestling had Davis No. 4 while Intermat had him No. 6. I will use a fifth place finish for my analysis. This “sameness” gives credibility to my Placement assumptions, covered next.
The following rankings and associated Placement+Advancement points that would be earned for that NCAA finish by the Penn State starters are; Lilledahl (8th , 5.5 points), Davis (5th, 10 points), Bartlett (1st , 20 points), Van Ness (2 nd , 16 points), Kasak (1st , 20 points), Mesenbrink (1st , 20 points), Haines (2nd , 16 points), Starocci (1st , 20 points), Barr (2nd , 16 points), and Kerkvliet (2nd , 16 points). Adding up the points for each wrestler and I get 159.5 points. I am sitting here thinking “WOW, that is a big number!”. By comparison, and again considering only Placement plus Advancement points, Iowa’s 1997 team had 138 points, and Penn State’s 2024 team had 138.5 points. Those ARE the two highest point totals ever for those two aspects of team scoring, giving us all pause, or at least me, when I see a number like 159.5.
Next, I wanted to take a stab at estimating Bonus Points for the Nittany Lions at the national tournament. Last year saw Penn State score 34 bonus team points, with 24 or their 52 bouts wrestled won by bonus. The 34 points is Penn State’s highest ever, yet I believe this year’s team actually has higher potential, and could score more than that. Eight of Penn State’s wrestlers could be seeded No. 1 or No. 2. Last year’s team had six. As a result, the Penn State wrestlers are positioned overall to be stronger favorites for bonus point wins this year as compared to last. Because every wrestler is seeded now, and has been since 2019, a first or second seed will get the No. 31, 32 or 33 seed in the first round, and the No. 16 or 17 seed in the second round. These could/should be mostly bonus point wins for the Lions. The Penn State way, generally, is exciting, and known for point-scoring. It is possible that these 16 bouts are all, or mostly of the bonus point variety. Add the fact that a No. 8 seed faces a No. 25 seed and a No. 5 seed faces a No. 28 seed in the first round, and Lilledahl and Davis could win by bonus too. As the tournament goes
on the competition gets increasingly tougher each round over the previous, at least in theory. However, four Penn State wrestlers have a season bonus point win percentage above 80% – Mesenbrink (100%), Starocci (94%), Barr (83%), and Kerkvliet (81%) – and this team could rack up bonus point wins well after the second round. To be honest, none of the Penn State wrestlers have low bonus point percentages, as Van Ness (78%), Haines (61%), Lilledahl (61%), Bartlett (50%) and Kasak (50%) are also at or above 50%. Last season, Penn State scored 13.5 bonus points AFTER round 2 in the championship bracket, or round 4 in wrestlebacks!
The question is what to do with this bonus point information. My decision is to be conservative. I believe more than the 2024 numbers (24 bonus point wins, and more than 34 points) are possible, but it does take a leap of faith to guess a higher number given all the variables. So, I’ll go with 34 points, same as earned by the 2024 team.
CONCLUSION
It is simple math to add the 34 Bonus points to the speculative 159.5 points for Placement and Advancement points, which total to 193.5. Again, this number gets a WOW! from me. Math does not lie, but we cannot lose sight of the theoretical nature of these numbers. My spin, knowing that the wrestlers still have to wrestle the bouts is to simply say that this team has more room for error (upset losses) in topping last year’s team points than I would have guessed before starting this analysis. The opposite is also true; upset wins along the way give an even greater margin of error, to be fair and balanced.
Now that we have a “number”, the next discussion point is naturally the upside and downside scoring potential for the wrestlers and their assumed seed. I will start with Penn State’s five No. 1 seeds. The absolute best they can do equal their seed, so there is no “upside” scoring potential for Placement and Advancement points for these five wrestlers, or half the team. The difference between a first place finish and a second place finish is 4 points, first and third is 6.5 points, first and fourth is 7.5 points and so on. Is it reasonable to assume that all five will finish first? That is a tough question, one I will leave unanswered here, but I will remind you of an earlier statement made, that this article is about the potential for a new scoring record and that this team has a margin of error of about 21 points in the estimation above. The next subject is the three No. 2 seeds (Haines, Barr and Kerkvliet). Their upside is one placement, 2nd to 1 st , which is worth 4 points, but all three will be underdogs in the finals, to Keeghan O’Toole, Stephen Buchanan and Gable Steveson respectively, a tall order for sure, so their situation is not unlike the top seeds, but with a slight upside chance for higher team points. Lastly on this topic, the No. 5 seed (Davis) and #8 seed (Lilledahl). In total, their contribution, theoretically, is noted at 15.5 points (10 for Davis, 5.5 for Lilledahl, sans Bonus points) above in paragraph five. My heart and head are hopeful for an All-American finish for both, but their weight classes (125 and 133) are peppered with talent above and behind them. Davis felt the heartbreak of losing in the blood round, or round of 12, at last year’s NCAA Championships, one win shy of an All-American finish, and freshman Lilledahl faced defeat at Ohio State in the dual after building a lead. Both situations could serve them well heading into the national tournament, as Cael-coached wrestlers learn and improve after losses. In the end, I’ll say that 15.5 points before Bonus points for these two wrestlers “feels” about right when looking at their weight classes.
Hinted at in the last paragraph is the thought of upsets at the national tournament. Always an unknown and one aspect that make the NCAA Wrestling Championship so exciting are the upsets. I have done many analyses over the years and upsets occur in approximately 20% of bouts. Using seed as the basis, about one in five bouts are won by the lower seed!! Think about that for a second. The point I am making here is that nothing is given at the championship, everything is EARNED. The tournament is the best of the best, so being prepared every bout to give one’s all is a critical aspect of winning. Wrestling loose and having fun are part of being prepared, as is being focused, all being a trademark of the Penn State process. For this article, upsets cannot be ignored or dismissed. They are a factual part of the tournament, but history indicates that Penn State has dished out more upset wins during the Cael years than suffered upset losses. This bodes well for the 2025 Penn State wrestling team, and the chance for a new scoring record. My final conclusion on this matter is that a new scoring record is not only possible, but likely in a cautiously optimistic sort of way. The data is convincing, but the wrestlers still have to wrestle their bouts.
Here’s to a successful NCAA Wrestling Championship!!
