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5 NCAA Wrestling Championships Statistics - 2025

You guys see that heavyweight match?

April 09, 2025

Welcome to Mat Stats! Wrestling statistics are woefully unavailable and I want to change that. Often the numbers are out there, but are tucked away in obscure corners of the internet and exist merely as raw data. My goal is to try to compile what I can find and output a newsletter that will highlight the most interesting findings. Each newsletter will cover wrestling statistics from a particular event, time frame, athlete, or team. If you like this kind of analysis, please consider subscribing to get each new edition delivered straight to your mailbox.

Penn State and Nebraska led offensive scoring.

Penn State and Nebraska were the top two teams in all offensive scoring categories (takedowns, nearfall, and riding time). Penn State had a mind-blowing 100 takedowns in the tournament, while Nebraska led nearfall points with 55 total. Riding time points should be taken with a grain of salt, as early terminations prevent earning those.

Bonus Points are up, techs are slightly down.

The three-point takedown caused the number of tech falls and majors to shoot up last year, and that held steady in 2025. Taking the average of 2024 and 2025 and comparing the data to the average of 2022 and 2023, tech falls are up 371% and majors are up 26.6%. Pins returned to the pre-3-point-takedown range after a down year last year, and techs dropped slightly from last year, but still dwarf 2022 and 2023 results.

Penn State led all things bonus.

Not exactly breaking any news here but this Penn State team was utterly dominant. They led the field in majors, tech falls, pins, total bonus, and bonus rate.

Takedowns and riding time are trending downwards.

One of the main reasons cited for changing the takedown value from 2 to 3 points was to incentivize scoring more takedowns, and a commonly posed concern was that this would de-incentivize mat wrestling. Looking again at the NCAA championship data from 2022 and 2023 and comparing the data to the post-3-point-takedown era, both takedowns and riding time are down considerably. There were 1299 takedowns in the 2025 championships, compared to 1521 in 2022, although 2024 takedowns did surpass 2023. More years of data are needed to draw any statistically significant conclusions, and it should be noted that advances in defensive techniques are likely more responsible for this shift than the scoring format. The heavy drop in riding time points does seem to indicate that top wrestlers are more willing to spend time on their feet in favor of working for turns on top.

Nebraska outperformed their seeds like crazy.

Nebraska had a staggering 38 point seed-place difference, calculated by subtracting placement from seed and totaling the score. Non-AAs are scored as the highest place from the round they got eliminated in e.g. Lenny Pinto is counted as 9th place because he lost in the bloodround. This was buoyed by AA finishes from Jacob Van Dee, Christopher Minto, Silas Allred, and Camden McDanel, who all reached the podium from double-digit seeds.

Sources