NC State wrestling was not able to turn its ACC regular-season title into a conference championship at the ACC Tournament March 3 in Chapel Hill. Although the Wolfpack set out to pair its dual title with another trophy and did not, the team learned a valuable, but tough, lesson.
Especially in wrestling, after beating an opponent once, it’s harder to do it a second time. Four matchups that went the Wolfpack’s way in the regular season went the opposite direction at the tournament, and there were others where comfortable wins turned into nail-biting decisions. The most surprising was senior 141-pounder Kevin Jack, who lost the ACC title to a competitor he beat 15-0 in the regular season for his first loss to a conference foe since the 2015-16 campaign.
However, it was a better lesson for head coach Pat Popolizio’s crew to learn at ACCs — after which they can still make adjustments — than nationals, where after a competitor is knocked out of the bracket his season is over.
“I think the biggest thing we took away from there was to make our adjustments when we wrestle somebody the second time,” the sixth-year coach said. “It’s something we didn’t do a great job of and our opponents did, they were able to do that against us. We were still able to win a lot of them, a couple of them we didn’t. We know that now we have to mentally and physically make those adjustments when we’re wrestling a guy for the second time.”
Popolizio and his staff will get plenty of chances early at NCAAs to see if his grapplers learned their lessons. Several ACC finals rematches could happen at the three-day event that starts Thursday at noon, in addition to other bouts featuring wrestlers that met earlier this year.
The fifth-seeded Jack could see Virginia Tech’s Brent Moore, who is unseeded but stole the ACC crown away from him in overtime, in round two.
Redshirt junior 125-pounder Sean Fausz, who also enters seeded fifth, is likely to see No. 12 Louie Hayes in a round-two rematch of the ACC finals if both win their opening bout.
Top-seeded 157-pound redshirt freshman Hayden Hidlay could see Pittsburgh’s Taleb Rahmani — who he has beaten twice, including an overtime win at the ACC Championships — in round two as well.
If No. 14 seed heavyweight Michael Boykin wins his first match, he’ll likely face No. 3 seed Nick Nevills, who he beat earlier this year.
There are even rematches guaranteed to happen — fifth-year senior Pete Renda, the four seed at 184, will face Oklahoma State’s Keegan Moore after beating him 3-0 in Italy earlier this year and 197-pound classmate Michael Macchiavello, who was also seeded fourth, opens with Cal Poly’s Tom Lane, who he beat 16-4 in December.
More matchups that were contested earlier in the year are sure to happen throughout the double-elimination tournament.
“We could be in the driver’s seat if we do things right and make these adjustments and are mentally ready for those rematches,” Popolizio said. “You don’t want to look up in the third period and wonder why the score is different than what it was the last time when you were on the winning side of things. That’s something I think we didn’t do a great job of at the ACCs and we’re going to do a much better job of knowing and understanding what guys are doing to us when we’re in these situations again.”
With a school-record nine automatic qualifiers — the team qualified all 10 starters to nationals last year, but had to rely on four wildcards to make it happen — Popolizio’s squad has plenty of entrants in the tournament to make national noise.
Seven claimed seeds (the top 16 wrestlers in each weight’s 33-man bracket are seeded) with five starting the tournament in a top-five position. The top eight finishers at each weight class earn All-America honors, and Popolizio is not backing down from setting another school record in his team’s sights — breaking its highest NCAA finish ever of seventh, set in 1993.
“I don’t want to overanalyze things, but I think that’s what we need to do first to break through on the program side,” he said. “Seventh in the highest we’ve finished as a program, so we need to attack that first. Once we take care of that first, we can move on to the next phase.
"As we sit here and talk, analyze, it’s something we haven’t done yet [with Popolizio in charge] and it’s been a very long time since we’ve done that. I think that’s a good stepping stone for us right now.”
FloWrestling, the leading online publication covering wrestling, has made several projections that make such a finish seem plausible.
In their tournament team score projection based on seeds (which doesn’t count bonus points), they had the Pack in fifth place, 0.5 points away from bringing home a team trophy, which the top four receive.
In their weight-by-weight predictions, one of their writers predicted NC State to have six All-Americans, which would shatter the single-season school record of three, last done in 2016.
They also did a simulation of the tournament 10,000 times based on the seeds and even concluded NC State has “a chance to win a title” — though that is a long shot. However, after averaging the team scores from the 10,000 simulations, it projected the Pack to place fourth, two points ahead of Michigan.
Of course, things don’t always go as expected at the national tournament. Popolizio has been in the business long enough to know projections at NCAAs are fool’s gold — these matches aren’t wrestled on paper. There are more upsets at the NCAA Wrestling Championships than its more popular March Madness counterpart on the basketball floor.
“I think as time goes on and the more you are able to be a part of this tournament, you realize it doesn’t really matter that much,” he said of wrestler’s draws and projections. “Now I think the best thing that we can do is just going into this tournament mentally and physically ready, and obviously being healthy is a huge part of it. As long as we’re all close to 100 percent then we’re going to have a good tournament and let things play out the way they should.”
However, he’s excited to see how his team does in Cleveland. Everything is out in front of his team and they have a chance to atone for not claiming the ACC crown by making some history on a bigger stage that would make that performance easy to forget.
“That’s what I like about wrestling — it’s in your hands at the end of the day,” he said. “You have the opportunity and if you took advantage of it, you got what you wanted out of it. If you didn’t, there’s nobody else to blame but yourself.
“We’re ready for Thursday. It’s finally here.”
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