Conference weekend has come and gone, all across the nation we were treated with high-level wrestling. Wrestlers vying for a chance at a national title, with plenty of highs and lows all around. With 8 separate conference championships this year, it can be tough for the casual fan to keep up with everything that goes down in the 4 day span. So, lets take a moment to look at some of the key takeaways from this weekend.
The Pac-12’s were rockin’
10 weights, 4 teams, 1 mat, on a Thursday, and it was awesome. I wasn’t there, but it was obvious how much energy the crowd had for the entire event. It helps that there were compelling story lines to follow, between the tight team race and ‘deep’ 4-man brackets. The most interesting results include Nasir Bailey, Jordan Williams, TJ Mcdonnell, and AJ Ferrari winning 133, 149, 184, and 197 respectively. TJ Mcdonnell is an especially interesting result, as he came into the tournament as the 4 seed and avenged two losses from earlier this season, one of the losses being by tech! But don’t just take it from me, even more prominent wrestling media felt the energy from Corvallis.
125 is back to being absolute chaos
125 doing what 125 does, the previously undefeated and unanimous #1 at the weight, Purdue’s Matt Ramos, lost in a big way to Penn State’s Luke Lilledahl in the Big Ten semis. On top of that, Returning NCAA Champion Richard Figueroa lost to NDSU’s Tristan Daugherty. Daugherty had an 8-11 record going into the Big 12 tournament before he made the conference semi finals. So, who has the upper hand going into the NCAA tournament? It’s really tough to say, NC State’s Vincent Robinson has had a phenomenal freshman campaign with one legitimate loss to Virginia Tech’s Eddie Ventresca. Oklahoma State’s Troy Spratley looks poised to make a title run in Philadelphia with just a few missteps in his season. The only thing that can be said for sure about 125 is it will be must-see TV from March 20th to March 22nd.
Here are the top 8 at 125 via Intermat’s rankings:
| Name | Team | Record | Notable Wins | Notable Losses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matt Ramos | Purdue | 26-1 | Spratley, Ventresca | Lilledahl |
| Eddie Ventresca | Virginia Tech | 18-3 | Robinson X2, Smith | Ramos, Spratley, Moore |
| Luke Lilledahl | Penn State | 20-2 | Smith X2, Ramos | McCrone, Peterson |
| Richie Figueroa | Arizona State | 16-2 | Strickenberger | Daugherty |
| Jett Strickenberger | West Virginia | 17-6 | Spratley X2 | Figueroa |
| Vincent Robinson | NC State | 19-2 | Spratley | Ventresca X2 |
| Troy Spratley | Oklahoma State | 20-4 | Smith, Ventresca | Strickenberger X2, Robinson, Ramos |
| Caleb Smith | Nebraska | 19-5 | Peterson | Lilledahl X2, Spratley, Ventresca |
there are 3 2 ‘absolutes’ entering the ncaa championship
At first I had this list at 3, with Mitchell Mesenbrink winning the title at 165 as all but guaranteed. But, after his 4-1 win against Michael Caliendo, he looks mortal. Which is crazy to say, he’s teched or majored everyone outside of his Big Ten finals match. He’s given up one takedown and that was in his Big Ten semis match against Beau Mantanona, he ended up winning via 25-8 tech fall. Someone on Instagram commented saying ‘Mitch is like an Elden Ring boss for Caliendo’, which is very accurate. If you don’t get the comparison, just understand that it’s going to require many attempts to beat ‘Mitch the Elden Ring’ boss, but it’s possible.
Nothing is guaranteed, especially in this sport, and I know how much of a contradiction that is to the heading of this section. But, it is hard to argue against the facts that show Penn State is going to win the team title and Gable Steveson is going to win 285. The Nittany Lions have title contenders at 125 (Lilledahl), 141 (Bartlett), 149 (Van Nes), 157 (Kasak), 165 (Mesenbrink), 174 (Haines), and 184 (Starocci). It would be very unlikely to see them win at all of those weights, but if there’s one thing that Cael Sanderson and company have proven, it’s that they always show up for the NCAA Championships. For the 2020 Olympic Gold medalist, Gable Steveson, this season is a bit of a farewell tour. He has tamed an incredibly deep heavyweight field and shown that he is a step (or five) ahead of everyone else. Now, miracles have happened before, no one is safe whenever they take the mat and wrestle in March. But, it will take some monumental heroics for any of these titans of the sport to not finish on top at the end of the season.
The EIWA Will Miss the ivy league schools
Prior to this year, the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association hosted the 6 Ivy League universities that had a wrestling program (Cornell, Princeton, Penn, Harvard, Columbia, and Brown). However, the Ivy League made the decision to depart from the EIWA and host their own conference tournament. The implications weren’t super obvious in terms of how this would impact the college wrestling scene, at least not when the decision was announced. But, looking at the allocations given to each conference (EIWA has 22 and Ivy League has 26) it is a bit more apparent. The Ivy League has 2 teams ranked in Intermat’s top 30 teams (Cornell at 9 and Penn at 30) and the EIWA has just 1 (Lehigh at 19).
When looking at the past three seasons of allocation data, the EIWA had 42, 45, and 53 from 2022, 2023, and 2024. This year with the total between EIWA and Ivy League being 48, the overall allocation distribution hasn’t changed. But, when 6 teams leave a conference and bring more than half of that conference’s allocations, it has an impact. I’m not sure what’s best for the sport when looking at the team distribution between conferences and the allocations that follow, but there’s definitely a ‘limit’ in terms of how many conferences is too many conferences.
David Taylor’s Cowboys are Poised for a Deep NCAA Run
(There’s really a lot to look at from the Big 12 Conference Championship, so pardon the rants.)
It wasn’t pretty, but the Oklahoma State Cowboys won the team title at Big 12s. And to say it “wasn’t pretty” isn’t fair, Doug Schwab has a phenomenal team at Northern Iowa. To put a stop to the Panther Train in just your first year as a head coach, it really is a spectacle. Oklahoma St had 6 wrestlers in the conference finals (Spratley, Jamison, Hamiti, Plott, Surber, and Hendrickson), UNI had 4 (Happel, Realbuto, Keckeisen, and Voelker). If UNI lost one finals match and OKST won one finals match, the team race was locked. The affair wasn’t settled until the last night of the match, where Wyatt Hendrickson got the job done in a 5-3 win over Arizona State’s Cohlton Schultz. The biggest takeaway here is probably the fact that team races are A LOT of fun. This Cowboy team, while not without its faults, is a darn good one. One of the biggest questions I had going into the weekend was ‘what will Teague Travis look like’? He hadn’t wrestled since November 17th, and that was up at 157 (coincidentally, it was against Ethan Stiles who is also down at 149 now). He finished 4th, qualified himself, and looks like a guy who can end up on the podium in Philly. This team can easily put 6 on the podium, with the remainder of the team not out of the question to also find themselves coming home with some hardware.
Big 12s, as a whole, was a phenomenal tournament, between the team race, several upsets, and high-level competition. Northern Colorado and West Virginia both had two champs (Serrano and Zerban for UNCo, Strickenberger and Hall for WV) and North Dakota State University had an overall exceptional performance, having a seed-place differnce of 21. The match of the tournament, and probably match of the weekend, had to be Keegan O’Toole vs Dean Hamiti. It was a hyped up match and it lived up to that expectation, and then some. O’Toole came away with the win but Hamiti showed that he absolutely deserves to be in the title conversation at 174.
That’s all for this post, I hope you enjoyed reading! There’s plenty more to look into from conference weekend, but these are my initial/high level thoughts. Leave a comment if you have any feedback on this format or type of content. Thanks!
The Barn Session 
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