does anyone have results from baldwin?

Was Oak Park MO as good as the national rankings? I see they beat some of our best teams at Baldwin.

Yes, Oak Park is that good. And they sat out two of their top wrestlers....171-pounder Dusty Gleason and a 215-pound starter named Bradshaw. They have a very strong program, with numerous All-Americans in their lineup. They had wrestlers with below .500 records that were placing high. They were a great addition to the tournament.

The cool thing was at the seeding meeting their coach didn't argue for any seeds that I felt some of his younger wrestlers deserved because they hadn't placed at state yet. It was also interesting when their coach read who their losses were from, El Reno Ok, Iowa City Iowa, and so on. These boys definitely go find the competition!

Missouri schools have a huge advantage over KS schools. KS puts too many restrictions on athletes. When you look at the number of matches a MO wrestler would have vs a KS wrestler.

That is not an accurate statement, to be fair. Missouri and Kansas each have participation rules. Kansas rules are 30 competition points (see whole other thread).

Missouri limits you to six tournaments and ten individual duals. (caveats: you can only participate in two-day tournaments between the last two weeks in Dec/first week in Jan; and there are number of team restrictions on tournaments). Further, you are resticted to no more than 50 matches prior to the state tournament series.

The reason that wrestlers in other states have more matches lies in the tournament formats. Nearly all of them are either dual or pool-format tournaments. Teams will not compete unless they are guaranteed their five matches. Furthermore you are seeing an increase in "Challenger" format tournaments (i.e. Leavenworth hosts one). These are where they simply pool the kids according to skill level and wrestle - no team points are kept.

That is why you are seeing Missouri wrestlers with 50 matches by early February and Iowa teams with dual records of 25-4.

RedStorm has a whole post devoted to this elsewhere. A prediction is that you will see more tournaments move to a Baldwin pool format, Leavenworth Challenger, or Colby duals in the coming years. As that occurs the number of matches will increase.

The biggest disparity between Kansas and Missouri is on our feet. That Metro Classic last year still seems like a bad dream.