Wrestling Rankings Don't Always Tell the Whole Story

A few years ago, I attended a wrestling tournament that would likely pit the top two wrestlers in the state in a particular weight class against each other. As it turned out, I did not get to see them go at it, because neither one of them reached the finals.

That was when I first realized that wrestling rankings don't always tell the whole story. While some of the wrestlers who were ranked lower certainly deserved their rankings, some of them also deserved to be higher.

I saw one kid out of El Paso that was supposed to be one of the top two wrestlers in the state. All I had heard about all season was how he was going to be there in the end, wrestling for a state championship.

As it turned out, the kid was smoked by another wrestler from Dallas who was sixth in the state in the wrestling rankings. I could not believe that it was such a one-sided match, so I decided to investigate a little.

What I soon discovered was that the kid from El Paso had a very impressive season record, but had only faced a few truly difficult opponents. Of those tougher opponents, he had lost to two of them.

The wrestler from Dallas had lost five times that season, but they were to other top-ranked wrestlers, and some of them were from a private school that produces some of the better wrestlers in the country.

The wrestling rankings were accurate in some regards, as the youngsters who took third and fourth place at the meet were probably the third- and fourth-best wrestlers in the state, but one of the young men who wrestled for the tournament championship came into the competition ranked seventh overall in the state, and in some blog posts I read, nobody really gave him much of a chance.

His story was that he also played football for a school that had a very long run in the playoffs, so he did not have as many matches as some of the other wrestlers, and I guess his standing suffered because of that.

I did get to see a very good match in the championship, just not the one that I was expecting. It is kind of funny how things seem to turn out that way a lot.

I do believe that wrestling rankings serve a purpose in that they provide a frame of reference for the average wrestling fan to follow and provide some type of idea about who people can expect to see at the state tournament. They also provide records of those wrestlers and key match-ups, typically, but just like with most things in life, I really believe that they are to be taken with a grain of salt.