Everything You Need to Know for the NCAA Wrestling Tournament

The Cowboys go for their 35th NCAA title this Thursday thru Saturday and here is everything you need to know to follow along.

Brackets were posted last week.

I broke down the basics of the rules and scoring here. For anyone that doesn’t follow closely, I encourage you to jump in here. The NCAA tournament really is a lot of fun.

The NCAA tournament is a big event for the sport and ESPN covers all of it. They literally cover every single match in the tournament. During each session they’ll have every mat running on ESPN3 or WatchESPN. ESPN, ESPN2 or ESPNU will have whatever the biggest match that is currently going on playing on their channel.

With that setup the easiest way to specifically follow the Cowboys if you have a Twitter account is to follow OSU wrestling on Twitter. They’ll say when someone is coming up and what mat they’re on and you can just flip over to it. When I don’t physically go and am watching from home, I nerd out on it and hook up 3-4 TV’s to cover most mats and just use my laptop to switch around to the specific mats that I don’t have on a TV. Obviously that’s not something you have to do, but it is an option.

If you’re at work or whatever and can’t watch the OSU wrestling Twitter account does do a good job of painting a pretty solid picture of each match, updating scores, etc… as does Trackwrestling and Floarena. We’ll also provide recaps each day and keep you updated with detailed assessments throughout the tournament.

I did a lower weights and upper weights preview earlier this week. I know some fans don’t necessarily follow OSU wrestling especially closely and may just now be jumping in to follow the NCAAs, but the Cowboys aren’t the favorite to win the team title here. They do have a deep team though and have been wrestling well lately. Even if they don’t win a team title you want to see them finish as high as possible because they have a very young team and three big time redshirts that when they enter the lineup next year could bump OSU to the front of the pack. If they finish high enough this year they could be one of the favorites as they move into next season.

Also the top 4 bring home a trophy, so even with PSU and tOSU as stacked as they are watch for that as you definitely want to see the Cowboys bring home some hardware.