5 Penn State Wrestling Statistics from the 2024 NCAA Championships

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 scored the most takedowns and gave up the fewest (per match).

Penn State was dominant on their feet at the 2024 NCAA Wrestling Championships. They scored a total of 97 takedowns, coming out to 1.8 takedowns per match. Second place in TDPM was Northern Iowa with 1.71. Penn State only gave up 21 takedowns, coming out to 0.39 takedowns per match, beating out second place Cornell with 0.59 takedowns per match.

Penn State only got ridden out once out of all the times they chose bottom.

PSU chose bottom 44 times in the 2024 NCAA Championships, and of those choices there was only one instance where they didn’t score an escape or reversal (Nagao vs. Orine). Bottom was by far their most common choice (83%); they chose neutral 15.1% of the time and top only once (1.9%).

They scored first in 74.1% of matches.

Penn State hung the first points of the match on the scoreboard in 40 of their 54 matches. Of the 14 matches in which they didn’t score first, they came back to win 8 times.

They scored 20 points from riding time.

Not only was PSU dominant on their feet and on bottom, they excelled on top, too. They scored riding time in 20 of their 54 matches (37.0%) second only in percentage to Harvard, who scored riding time in 2 of their 4 matches. However, when you don’t count the 15 matches that ended in early terminations, their riding time percentage goes up to 51.3%, and if you assume they would have scored riding time in the early termination matches that they won, that goes up to 63.0%.

They were the most dominant NCAA wrestling team in history.

Penn State set the record for both the most team points scored at the NCAA tournament (172.5) and margin of victory (100). Only 34 of those points came from bonus points, so take those away and Penn State still wins by 66 points. In fact you could take away all the points scored by their 4 champions and they still would have won the team title with 76 points scored by Davis, Nagao, Bartlett, Kasak, Mesenbrink, and Truax. Staggering performance.