Alright, the pre-regional rankings are live.
We've spent the last month tinkering with our ranking system, tweaking things, breaking things, fixing what we broke. It's better now. Definitely not perfect, but better. We'll keep improving it.
Here's the thing about ranking Illinois high school wrestlers that most people don't think about. There are roughly 431 high schools in this state with wrestling programs. That's 132 in 3A, 133 in 2A, and 166 in 1A. Each varsity roster holds 14 spots. Do the math and you're looking at over 6,000 wrestlers we're trying to evaluate.
Nobody can watch all of that. It's just not humanly possible.
So Here's What We Actually Do
First, we pull together as much data as we can get our hands on. Match results, tournament placements, all of it. Then we bring in people who actually know wrestling. Real humans with real opinions who've been around the sport and understand what they're seeing. We feed everything through an Elo algorithm (which, honestly, took us forever to dial in... it has like 8 different stages of adding and removing points before we land on numbers that work for about 85% of cases). And finally, we do one more human review to catch the weird stuff. The edge cases. The situations where the numbers just feel off.
It's not a perfect system. But we think it works pretty well, and more importantly, it lets us run these rankings more often without losing our minds.
A Few Things You Should Know
Weight classes are going to shift. Some of these guys will drop or bump up for the state series. We'll update everything after regionals shake out.
Injuries mess with rankings. If someone who was ranked early in the season stopped wrestling, their presence (or absence) still ripples through everyone else's scores. It's frustrating, but that's the reality.
Mid-season weight changes are tricky. A wrestler might have a couple tough losses at one weight, then absolutely dominate after moving. The early losses still show up in the data.
Wrestling up complicates things. When a kid wrestles one or two weight classes above where they'll actually compete, those results don't always reflect their true ability. Especially when they're jumping up multiple classes. We try to account for this, but it's not always clean.
The transitive property argument. Oh man, we hear this one constantly. "But wrestler A beat wrestler B, and wrestler B beat wrestler C, so how is C ranked above A?" Look, we consider head-to-head and common opponents, but wrestling is weird. Some matchups are just funky. A lower-ranked guy might have another wrestler's number every single time they meet, but when you look at everything else they've done? Totally different story.
Out-of-state competition matters. Some wrestlers spend their season traveling to brutal national-level tournaments. They're getting tested against the best in the country, not just the state. That means their record might show more losses, but those losses came against absolute killers. We'd rather reward someone who went 25-8 against elite competition than someone who went 35-2 against weaker schedules.
How you win matters too. A wrestler who's pinning ranked opponents and racking up tech falls is going to score higher than someone squeaking out 3-2 decisions in the same matchups. Dominance counts.
What's Coming Next
Team dual rankings drop next week, right before team sectionals. Then we'll have updated individual rankings before sectionals.
Stay tuned. And if you've got feedback (agreements, disagreements, things we clearly got wrong), hit us up in the comments on Instagram or shoot us a DM. We're listening.