3 Comments »

• Bill Miller says:

  Fri, 12/12/08 at 11:55 pm

  Matt, I’m curious in your thinking behind your Corey Jantzen ranking. As someone who does rankings, I realize how difficult they can be to get right, and I also know there’s a great deal of effort put in to making rankings supportable by the results.

  After Corey’s win last weekend, WIN Magazine immediately ranked him number one. Now after last week’s prescient calls with the Iowa win and OSU win I’m impressed. Not because you simply called it, but you picked each and every upset spot on. You picked Tsirtsis as the key match in the Iowa win, and the score was almost spot on you 18-12 vs actual 20-15.

  In the Oklahoma match up you Picked Foster(15) to win over Lapotsky(8) and unranked Parks over No. 12 Bailey. You picked every key match up correctly.

  Consequently, I know that there must be some madness behind you selecting Corey 5th. Can you share your thinking?

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• Matt Diano says:

  Sat, 12/13/08 at 12:56 am

  Sure, Bill…I’d be happy to share.

  However, before I do, allow me to exercise some humility and publicly acknowledge that while I did hit correctly on the 197-pound bout, I was incorrect in forecasting the overall winner. Granted, I do think the injury default at 133 may have been a key factor in Oklahoma reigning victorious in the Bedlam Dual for the second consecutive year. But alas, no excuses. Congrats Sooners on proving this journalist wrong.

  With regard to Corey, a lot of my ranking was based on a feeling that it may be inappropriate to take a wrestler who entered last week unranked (or in the mid 20s depending on which set of rankings you subscribe to) and immediately elevate him into the top-3.

  In addition, because I realize that LHW is a Long Island based website, I wanted to be certain to safeguard against any belief that my rankings could be swayed by any personal bias that I may possess.

  Hence, in an attempt to avoid being unfair to any non-LI wrestlers, I may have actually ended up being unfair/low balling the one wrestler who does call Long Island home.

  In hindsight, I feel that Corey was probably deserving of either the #2 or #3 spot behind only Tsirtsis and perhaps Gallick….Thus far, Tsirtsis has a quality win over Gallick, and equals Corey with each owning a win over Drouin.

  Gallick, as a returning All-American is by nature going to get the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, despite the loss to Tanelli from Wisconsin, I evaluated the ISU Cyclone as someone who like Jantzen, owned a win over the defending NCAA Champion, Jaggers (albeit, it does not technically count per the rules set forth by the NWCA)…Plus, since I knew I was going to move Tsirtsis into the top spot, I had to take into consideration how close the match between he and Gallick actually was. In other words, how can I say that an individual who came .001 seconds from sending the match into SV is anything other than one spot below the person ranked ahead of him?

  Russell at #3 is the the hardest to justify. Much like the majority of people who follow the sport on the national level, I got swept away in Russellmania (no pun intended). I’ve followed him since his freshman year at Blair and have always been one who openly predicted at least one, if not more, National Championships for him. Therefore, when evaluating him, it became easy to look past the loss to Rappo from UPenn by justifying it as a fluke. It became just as easy to forgive the loss to Nauman, because Nauman has always had Russell’s number dating back to their senior year’s of HS…Kind of like the stranglehold that Padden had over Rosholt during their battles in the Big-12….Reflecting on the situation with Kellen, I did for him what I refused to do for Corey; I allowed my personal bias to cloud my judgement.

  Now that I had a chance to put it all down on paper (excuse the somewhat rambling presentation…It’s almost 2 a.m. and my gas tank is teetering on the “E”), I think my revised top-5 would be:

  1) Alex Tsirtsis (Iowa)

  2) Corey Jantzen (Harvard)

  3) Nick Gallick (Iowa State)

  4) Keith Sulzer (Northwestern)—Only issue with him is lack of big wins

  5) Kellen Russell (Michigan)

  Reply to this comment »
• Bill Miller says:

  Sat, 12/13/08 at 7:14 am

  Matt, I understand the effort to fight personal biases from invading the rankings. It’s difficult when the wrestlers are both quality competitors. As I suspected, a lot of thoughtfulness went into your selections, and I correctly figured that your analysis would be interesting, thus why I asked.

  Based on my ranking criteria, Corey would not have made the top spot either.

  When I do rankings, my most important criteria is obviously head-to-heads, but many times you don’t have them and a wrestler is doing phenomenal, you suspect that he may be better than one of the higher ranked wrestlers, and that’s when other criteria factor.

  Scores really don’t mean anything in rankings. You can’t say because wrestler “A” defeated a common opponent worse than wrestler “B” that wrestler “A” should be ranked higher. While not perfect, my approach is to give the benefit of the doubt to the more accomplished wrestler until there is a head-to-head or a common win, where wrestler “A” defeats a common opponent that wrestler “B” lost to.

  In some cases when doing a state ranking where the wrestlers never get an opportunity to wrestle one another until the state tournament, you may have to include some subjective information: like some subjective conclusions from performance against uncommon opponents, but the less of that kind of criteria the more likely the rankings will reflect the results from the big tournament at the conclusion of the season.

  Overall, Matt, great job on the DI rankings!

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