Foul Territory

The tournament starts today. No, not that tournament. The NCAA Division I Wrestling tournament, which, oddly enough, takes place in the same city as the Final Four two weeks from now. Oklahoma State is the odds on favorite to win and stretch their title streak to three years. John Smith has done an outstanding job in the time that he's been in Stillwater, but there are a few other teams looking to knock of the Cowboys, like Illinois and Lehigh, with Iowa State and Nebraska lurking in the shadows.

I did a quick comparison of the two tournaments. There are 64 teams left in the basketball tournament after the play-in game. Of those 64, according to my calculations, there are 20 schools that also have wrestling teams, with Bucknell making it 21 when they restart their program next year. I'd say this is understandable, as there are 327 Division I basketball teams in the country compared to only 86 Division I wrestling teams, so it would be foolish to expect most of the basketball schools to also have wrestling. Put another way, of the past 10 national champions in basketball, only Duke, Maryland, and Michigan State have wrestling teams, and only Michigan State has a team that is nationally competitive.

There are far more opportunities for competing in college basketball than college wrestling, just in terms of the comparison between high school and college. In 2003, approximately 541,000 boys played high school basketball while approximately 240,000 wrestled. In wrestling, only the starters get to wrestle (in most cases). Allowing for injuries, position battles, and teams that don't fill all 10 weights, I'd say there are about 12 athletes that see significant action on a typical college wrestling team. In basketball, there are between 12 and 15 athletes on a team, but I'd say only 8 or so see significant action. In all divisions, there are around 224 wrestling teams and 1002 basketball teams for 2004-2005 according to the NCAA website. I'm going to leave out overall team size from this calculation, as there is no easy way to accurately determine it for all 1226 teams under consideration here, and I'm only looking at athletes who get significant competition opportunities. These numbers equate to approximately 8016 playing opportunities for NCAA basketball and 2688 opportunities for NCAA wrestling. This means that there are around 67 high school basketball players for every college spot and around 89 high school wrestlers for each college spot that sees significant action. This is not taking the NAIA or NJCAA into consideration, and there are far more NAIA and NJCAA basketball teams than wrestling teams, further skewing the ratio toward basketball.

Basketball is just more popular than wrestling, and it will likely always be so. Good luck to all the athletes in both tournaments that kick off today, but for basketball, you should root for the schools that also have wrestling. Sorry, Wake Forest.