Below is our first weekly NC State Wolfpack wrestling notebook, with all the latest news and happenings prior to the squad's season opener.

Check back later this weekend for a complete team preview ahead of the Jan. 3 opener at Gardner-Webb:

We'll go in depth on the individual national rankings later, but the top-line item to know is this — NC State wrestling goes into the season ranked among the top eight tournament teams nationally according to all six major polls that compiled such listings.

Their highest standing comes at tied for No. 3 according to FloWrestling, along with Oklahoma State and Iowa State. It's important to note that Iowa State will drop when the rankings are updated next week due to the medical retirement of Austin Gomez.

Another poll, from WrestleStat, lists the Wolfpack at No. 4, the last position that earns a team trophy at the NCAA Championships (something NCSU did in 2018, becoming just the second ACC team to ever do so).

The others list head coach Pat Popolizio's Pack anywhere from No. 5 to No. 8, not quite team trophy position but certainly within striking distance.

The 2020 NCAA Championships were canceled, but NCSU has finished among the top 20 at each of the last six championships (and they've been an even stronger dual team, finishing No. 3 in the coaches' poll last year, their fifth-straight campaign with a top-10 finish). It would've been interesting to see how high they could've climbed last year (the top 10 was a beyond safe bet).

However, this season, with the former No. 1-ranked recruiting class in the country as fifth-year seniors, has long been pointed to as "the year" for NC State to make national noise and climb onto the podium again.

On a FloWrestling Podcast this week, host Christian Pyles noted he felt there were three teams running in front for NCAA trophies — Big Ten powers Iowa, Penn State and Michigan — with the No. 4 slot a little more open. He chose Oklahoma State as his last trophy team, while co-host (and former two-time NCAA champion and UFC fighter) Ben Askren picked the Pack.

"I think NC State is going to have a great year, they seem to improve year over year. … I feel like they have a really solid lineup," Askren said.

After some back and forth, Pyles established the Pack as a favorite within the ACC and concluded: "A Pat Pop-coached team, what we've seen him do at NC State, you can't count them out [for a team trophy]. You know they're going to be really good at the end of the year."

The Wolfpack's traveled to Penn State for a freestyle match Dec. 22. In addition to serving as a "dry run" in the coronavirus world, there isn't a tougher test in college wrestling. The Nittany Lions have won eight of the last nine NCAA championships.

"I loved it," Popolizio said. "I wanted to deal with the adversity [the team will face this season] — traveling; not knowing until the day of who could go, not go. When you compete, you want everything easy — but that's not what it's going to be like this year.

"On top of that, we got really good, tough competition. Our schedule is a little smaller this year, but regardless of if it goes on our record or not, it was really good, healthy, tough competition. We were in a dog fight at almost every weight."

Three observations from the event:

• He's Back: Arguably the biggest two takeaways from the event came from wrestlers who technically lost their matchups. Fifth-year senior 197-pounder Nick Reenan has battled injuries the last two-plus years, basically ever since he established himself as one of the most dangerous grapplers in America, including those who had already graduated from college, when he won the 2018 World Team Trials challenge tournament in the spring of 2018.

He wrestled through a torn ACL during the 2018-19 season, and the Pack mathematically wouldn't have been able to claim that year's ACC title without his contributions. However, he's clearly been compromised since then, usually wrestling with a bulky knee brace, until he had to be shut down for good early last season.

He has now shedded the brace and against Penn State's Michael Beard he was as offensive as he's been since suffering from the original knee injury. Despite falling behind 6-2 early, Reenan battled his way back, shot several times and finished a few takedowns before falling 10-6.

It's not the desired result, and he may not be 100 percent still, but that was as good as he's looked in a while. If Reenan is at his best, that would make one of the biggest questions in the lineup an area of strength for the Pack.

• He's Back, Part II: Similar to Reenan, classmate and 141-pounder Tariq Wilson has also battled injuries and adjustments while moving up in weight. Wilson was arguably the national breakout star of the 2018 NCAA Championships, which he entered unseeded before the redshirt freshman shocked everybody and placed third.

One of the keys to his 5-1 NCAA run was that Wilson secured 24 takedowns over his six matches while giving up only two.

Wilson has been solid since then — he was one win away from All-America honors in 2019 at 133 pounds, then earned the No. 15 seed for NCAAs last year at 141 — but not quite the same.

The Tariq of old showed up Dec. 22. In one of the most-anticipated matches of the card, Wilson secured the first takedown early and never let up in an exciting 14-10 loss to Nick Lee, who has proven himself as one of college's best 141-pounders (he was the No. 2 seed for NCAAs last year and placed fifth nationally the previous two seasons at 141).

Wilson never backed down, secured four takedowns plus two pushouts and proved that many may be underestimating him by ranking him in the double digits nationally coming into the season. If he can hang with Lee in neutral, he can be right there with anybody in the country at his weight class.

• Freshman Turns Heads: Rookie Ed Scott was a consensus top-40 recruit nationally, but expected to come in and redshirt, likely at 157 pounds.

But with the NCAA giving all winter athletes a free year of eligibility this winter and an opportunity to immediately break into the starting lineup, Scott dropped to 149, won the team's wrestleoff and had the most head-turning win against the Nittany Lions, a 10-8 victory over Terrell Barraclough.

Barraclough went 18-4 as a redshirting freshman last year and had a big win in one of the Nittany Lions' earlier freestyle cards, topping former Lock Haven All-American Kyle Shoop, a four-time NCAA qualifier. The transitive property doesn't always work in college wrestling, but that's a very impressive victory for Barraclough and now Scott has a nice win of his own.

Almost all, if not all, wrestling outlets won't rank freshmen in the preseason, but as we examine below, last year's starter, A.J. Leitten, is currently listed in some polls. It won't take long until Scott breaks into them.

Scott looked like a veteran out there — showing great awareness and urgency, winning with about two seconds left. That's not the type of stuff often seen from a true freshman in his first college match. Even if it was an unofficial one, it was being broadcast live with the wrestling world watching, happened in Scott's home state so it was a big moment for him and any win over a Penn State wrestler is a good one.

All 10 returning starters from last year appear in the top 30 of at least one major preseason poll:

The second entry in this space, at least this week, is a look at where all ACC wrestlers appear in four of the major national polls, sorted by average national ranking. It gives great perspective on just how tough the six-team ACC is in the sport:

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