NCWWC Team Race Preview - Can Iowa take down the champs?

We’re now just a day away from the 2024 National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championships, so this may be the last chance you get to hear what I’m about to say before the collective frenzy of a national tournament consumes us all for a period of 36 hours or so.

The Iowa Hawkeyes, already widely viewed as the gold standard of their budding sport despite being less than one full season into official existence, are not the national title favorites this weekend.

The Iowa Hawkeyes, undefeated in dual competition (16-0) against the best that both NCAA and NAIA divisions have to offer, are not the national title favorites this weekend.

The Iowa Hawkeyes, sporting 11 top-five ranked wrestlers in their lineup – including double-digit title contenders – are not the national title favorites this weekend.

In fact, other than some skewed perception by those less familiar with the women’s collegiate wrestling scene, nobody with intimate knowledge of the landscape entering these 2024 NCWWC’s would claim that the Hawkeyes arrive in Cedar Rapids with the best team in the tournament.

That distinction, as it often does in sports, belongs instead to the reigning champions – #1 North Central (IL).

If you haven’t already read my weight-by-weight preview of the national tournament I’d encourage you to do so as it provides more specific context behind the challenge that lies ahead of the second-ranked Hawkeyes in this impending team race.

But if I may quickly sum up one of the predominant themes that jumps out when one pores over all 10 brackets set to be contested this weekend – North Central is simply loaded everywhere you look.

As good as Iowa is/has been, and for as much greater as the program will only continue to become with each proceeding season of existence, right now in many places the Cardinals are just deeper and/or better.

Difficult as that notion may be for Hawkeye fans to fathom – especially after Iowa defeated North Central (21-20) for a National Duals title back in January – that’s what happens when an excellent coach and a motivated school have a five-year head start in building a championship program before yours ever even got off the ground.

North Central has amassed, and I mean amassed, tons of high-level talent during its rise to the top of the sport since establishing its women’s program in 2018.

If you’re curious how that effort has manifested in a more numerical sense, how’s this for a few highlights:

• The Cardinals entered this season with 21(!) past All-Americans on the roster, combining for 37 honors between them. Those athletes make up 14/15 spots in the current postseason lineup.
• The Hawkeyes, meanwhile, boast just seven such former All-American placers (15 total honors between them), and only three are among the 15 women Iowa is rolling out at nationals.
• If that weren’t a stark enough contrast, 19 of those 21 previous All-Americans for North Central are either juniors or seniors.
• Iowa only has 26 athletes on its entire current roster, 18 of whom are either true or redshirt freshmen. On Friday morning the Hawkeyes will send out a lineup 80 percent comprised of wrestlers in their first or second year of college.
• North Central (53-deep at last check) more than doubles the challenger in overall numbers, and somehow dwarfs it even further when it comes to experience – rostering 33 upperclassmen on its Naperville campus compared to just eight who call Iowa City home.
• And though experience – much less talented experience – is nice, even better is championship-caliber know-how. The Cardinals have that too, with nine different athletes who’ve either won or competed in an individual national final – winning seven titles combined.
• Those figures are just four and two respectively for the Hawkeyes.

This is the reality facing the Iowa team on Friday and Saturday.

So, how big is the gap?

Based on the seeds entering NCWWC’s, by my math (always a dicey proposition) North Central is projected to score 160.5 team points based strictly on advancement and placement.

Iowa is looking at 124, a 36.5-point gap behind the reigning champs (roughly the equivalent of one first and one second-place finisher).

Meanwhile, perennial contender King University (TN) – runners up at each of the last three NCWWC’s – is forecasted to score 120, just four shy of the Hawkeyes.

I mention King because both its reputation and its 2024 lineup warrant such inclusion, but I don’t believe it possesses the depth/upward mobility necessary to challenge North Central.

A poor showing by Iowa would absolutely leave it vulnerable to being passed for second. That said, this is an article about the chase for the title, not runner-up. And if anyone is going to run down the champs, I think it’ll be the Hawkeyes.

As a refresher, per the NCWWC Championship Manual, the team scoring procedures are as follows for the national tournament:

• Scoring wrestlers will score points for advancement, 1pt on championship side, 0.5pt on the consolation side.
• Wrestlers will score advancement points for a bye IF they win their next match.
• Wrestlers will be awarded 2 bonus points for Fall, DQ, FF, or DF.
• Wrestlers will be awarded 1.5 bonus points for Technical Falls (win by 10 or more pts)
• Placement points: 1^st=16, 2^nd=12, 3^rd=10, 4^th=9, 5^th=7, 6^th=6, 7^th=4, 8^th=3
• Wrestlers from the same team may not score bonus points against each other, only advancement points.
• Team scoring is final after the normal bracket is complete. Any true fourth matches do not count for team scoring.

(This handy graphic is also a great resource for fans.)

In addition, only the top-scoring athlete from each of the 10 weight classes will score points for their team. For instance, should Emilie Gonzalez garner 20 team points (16 placement + 4 advancement) en route to a first-place finish at 101 pounds and her teammate Sterling Dias finishes second, totaling 16, only Gonzalez’s points would count toward Iowa’s team total.

Broadly speaking, the easiest ways for Iowa to cut into North Central’s (projected) lead are to A) have its own wrestlers place higher than their original seed, and B) have members of the Cardinals underperform as to theirs.

So, if that is going to happen, where might one want to look?

Shrinking the deficit

The first place my eyes go are to weights at which both Iowa could conceivably ‘overperform’ and North Central fall short of expectations.

How about 116 pounds, where either #3 Brianna Gonzalez or #4 Felicity Taylor could improve upon their seeds, potentially winning a national title in the process. Do the latter, and they’d immediately tack on 6.5 extra points to the original projection for Iowa at the weight.

Meanwhile, should #2 Sydney Petzinger (North Central) finish just slightly lower – let’s say fourth – that’s another 3.5 points off the overall deficit. Suddenly the original 36.5-point gap is down to 26.5.

Now what if at 136 pounds Iowa’s Lilly Luft (the #8 seed) outperforms her projection much like I believe she will – finishing fifth as opposed to eighth? There’s 4.5 more points for the Hawkeyes.

And if you were to combine that with #1 Yele Aycock dropping a close semifinal, then wrestling back for third place – a 6.5-point drop from her pre-tournament expectation – now the deficit is down to just 15.5.

An additional eight-point swing could easily come in the form of #2 Reese Larramendy upending #1 Alara Boyd in the finals at 143. One single (key) match with a Hawkeye topping a Cardinal and you’ve promptly made the team race significantly tighter.

From there, could either/both unseeded Hawkeyes Ava Rose (123 pounds) and Emily Frost (130) battle their way to an ‘unexpected’ lower podium finish, picking up a few extra points in the process? Sure, why not?

Is a fourth-place finish not doable for #5 seed Jaycee Foeller – a two-time national finalist at 191 pounds? That one extra step up the podium is worth 2.5 points.

If all those things happened – none of which are farfetched individually – the aforementioned 36.5-point gap would be gone entirely.

But Iowa doesn’t need all those things to fall in its favor, nor a few other reasonable hypotheticals that I could have offered up as well. All Iowa needs is for it to be close enough – close enough for what may ultimately prove to be the deciding factor in this team race to come into play.

Bonus points

Everyone knows that bonus points are invaluable in college wrestling – be it in a dual or tournament setting.

But on the women’s side of things, it can be even more impactful given the freestyle rule set that not only lends itself to more tech. falls (worth 1.5 extra points) but removes the folk-style intermediary of the major decision (worth 1 extra point) entirely.

Pins obviously remain the ultimate prize (worth 2 extra points), but the minimal half-point difference from a tech. fall means that the overwhelming objective for an athlete should be to ensure that they get any bonus points rather than specifically going for the two-point fall.

In other words, it’s often not worthwhile to pursue that harder-to-attain extra half-point if in doing so you risk missing out on the other 1.5.

All of this lends itself to an NCWWC’s in which teams can supercharge their point totals by racking up bonus points.

In its 2023 championship performance North Central scored 42.5 of its 198 total points thanks to bonus (roughly 21.5 percent), and you can be sure the Cardinals will be looking to do the same this go-around.

Luckily for Iowa fans, the Hawkeye women have been absolute monsters all season long in this aspect, routinely routing even high-end competition whenever the opportunity presents itself.

If the Hawkeyes are within striking distance in terms of their placement/advancement points, this could very well be the deciding element in a team race for the ages.

We’ll just have to see how things play out across the two days of competition.

Not only will every match and every Hawkeye win matter, but Iowa fans should consider any regular decision win by a North Central athlete to be a pseudo victory of its own for the team in Black & Gold.

Conversely, any occasion on which a Hawkeye is able to secure an unexpected pin or chase down a late tech. fall in the waning moments should be cause for at least minor celebration. The margin between these two heavyweight programs this weekend really could be that thin.

Closing thoughts

I want to express again – for one final time – that the tournament favorite in Cedar Rapids is unquestionably North Central.

They’ve earned that status with their performances both this season and last, and if Iowa wants to unseat the defending champs it is going to take one monumental effort to do so.

As I’ve laid out, the path does exist. But theorizing about it from a thirty-thousand-foot view and actually walking down it in the face of the best collegiate competition in the country are two vastly different matters.

For Iowa fans, I just hope this preview has provided some context into the titanic battle the wrestling community is in store for beginning on Friday morning.

Not only would this be a historic achievement for the Hawkeye women if they were to come away with the 2024 NCWWC team title, but one that likely required them to rise to the championship occasion in some pretty incredible ways just to accomplish.

Over the past four years – the entirety of the NCWWC’s existence – the national champion has scored an average of 196.5 team points. There’s a chance multiple teams will clear that mark this weekend, with the all-time scoring record (209) very much in the crosshairs as well.

This is going to be such a fun tournament, you guys.

So, clear your schedules as best you can, tell a friend (or twelve) about what’s going down in Cedar Rapids, and enjoy the heck out of some awesome wrestling.

I know I will.