From the NSAA Wrestling Manual:

NSAA Rules for District Seeding Meetings will be as follows:
a. head to head
b. common opponent
c. Point System as follows if steps 1 and 2 don't determine seed:
1) 1-point state qualifier immediate preceding season
2) 1-point returning state medalist immediate preceding season.
3) .5 point winning % difference 0-5%.
4) 1 point winning % difference 5.1-10%.
5) 1.5 point winning 5 difference 10.1 or more.
d. If points are tied, draw those tied.
e. If there are 3 or more people tied in steps 1 and 2, go to point system, after one person
shakes out then go back to Step 1, head to head.
f. Draw the byes.
g. Then place losing records by percentage.

Let's go over the steps.
a. head to head. Best criterion. What is the chance that that all 4 district champs will have
head to heads for seeding in state? If 2 district champs have a head to head what do we do
about the 2 district champs that have no head to heads? Are they automatically seeded 3 and
4? What do we do about a round robin (A beat B, B beat C, C beat A)?
b. common opponent. Second best ctiterion but same headaches as in head to head.
c (1) State qualifier immediate preceding season. Sorry, state champ of 2 years ago who was sick
or injured last year and couldn't wrestle in districts.
c (2) Returning state medalist immediate preceding season. See problem outlined in c (1).
c (3), (4), and (5). See my tons of statistics taken from 2008 state tournament. Records
are not statistically significant when all wrestlers have had different strength of
schedule. And, since there will be very few head to head or common opponents the seeding
will usually be determined by record.

Following is the best system that I can devise for seeding district winners. Keep in mind that's not very good because this year the 4 district champs were in the semi-finals in only 6 of the 56 weights so we are seeding for about 11% of the classes.

1. head to head
2. common opponent
3. state tournament history (If he has been in state more than one year use the latest year.
It may show which way he is trending.)
state champ
second place
third place
fourth place
fifth place
sixth place
qualifier record 2-2
qualifier record 1-2
I would not consider qualifier with a state record of 0-2 because too many of these
qualified with no or very few wins in district.
4. If still tied, draw all 4 wrestlers.



Be prepared to handle these questions. I don't have answers. In all cases there are no head to head or common opponents. We are seeding 145: "A" placed second at 145 last year. "B" won 125 last year. Who is seeded higher? Or, last year a wrestler placed in a particular class (A-B-C-D) then one of 2 things happened. 1) He transferred to a school in a different class or his school changed classes because of co-op or change of enrollment. Do we disregard the change of class or try to put some kind of weighting on it? Or, a wrestler placed second last year in Pennslyvania and another wrestler in his class placed first in Nebraska last year. Who do we seed higher?

It's a long way from perfect but I think the concept of seeding in football is reasonably accurate for 2 reasons. 1) There is little or no inter-class competition. Each team's schedule is against teams in the same class. Granted, there is a huge talent difference within the class but between the district and non-district schedules most teams play a fairly wide range of talent. 2) Almost all games are played against other teams from Nebraska. So there's not the problem of trying to determine how good that out of state team is because of no head to head or common opponent with other Nebraska teams.

I don't see that system working in wrestling because there is a huge amount of inter-class competition. The Nebraska Duals, which is an excellent and very competitive tournament, typically has teams from all 4 classes. Some teams wrestle teams in other classes to get better competition. Other teams do it to pad their records. Competition has nothing to do with classes. It has to do with how good the wrestlers are that are on that team.

Another problem with using this system for wrestling is that some teams compete in lots of out of state elite tournaments that bring in outstanding teams from all over the country. Most of their individual wrestlers get much better from this tough competition but don't have a tremendous record because of that level of competition. And, because most Nebraska schools don't wrestle those out of state teams so there are few or no head to heads or common opponents.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Frank Ryan,

The system needs to be simple. I don't know if you need to consider out-of-state competition because of the difficulty in keeping track of that many more records of wrestlers.

We need a standard results report. It's crazy that wrestling is the only major sport that has yet to do this. With the popularity of Dual Tournaments rising you're seeing more & more 30+ win records coming to State & not placing.

Just keep it simple because no one at the NSAA is going to go for a paperwork nightmare.

That being said, we have a starting point now with the work Frank has put into this project.

Should we consider useing multi-year state tourney results in a situation where seeding upperclassman? If wrestler A got 4th as a freshman and 3rd last year is that better than wreslter B, a junior who got 2nd last year and didn't qualify before that? I'm not trying to complicate things even more, just asking. At least in Frank's #3 give some credit to three time placer.
Football, basketball, and others have a power point/ wildcard situation. Someone keeps track of wins, losses, strength of opponents, and so on. I realize wrestleing has more matches x 14 wt. classes, but someone could keep track and use a simular formula as in basketball. I know everone will think this is a crazy idea, but I'll through this pitch and see how many of you knock it out of the park. Go one step further and have wildcards. If you have a power point system based on wins, pins, and stength of scedule, then take the top 3 placers from each disrict and the next top 4 ranked kids to make a 16 man bracket. This would do several things, keep out a few of the looseing records [if he got 4th at his disticts], give a kid who had the flu or was injured at districts another chance, where you have a district with 5 or 6 very good wrestlers you don't leave home a kid who could have beat 1/2 the kids or more at state, give a better chance to a excelent freshman who because of lack or seeding points didn't make it through districts. If we do this for football and basketball then why not wrestleing? You still take the top 3 from each district, then fill the other 4 with the best wrestlers. This idea might change a few guys wrestling ways if you gave more power points for tech falls or pins. Allright go ahead and take your swings.
Afrter looking at the heading of this tread I realized it says districts, my comments are more toward state seeding.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: cowcatcher,