No need to keep anyone in suspense: Everyone already knows that the Big Ten was the best wrestling conference throughout the 2016-17 NCAA season.

But how good was it?

You can count up the raw numbers here and judge for yourself. Or you can read ahead to the pie chart and graph below.

We assigned NCAA placement points to each place-winner to provide more context and added up the total points scored in this manner by each conference. 

As you can see in the pie chart, the Big Ten ran away with the contest, and it wasn't even close.


Big Ten wrestlers absurdly scored over half of all the placement points available at the NCAA tournament last month in St. Louis, more than every other conference COMBINED.

The bar graph below provides additional perspective for just how dominant the Big Ten was this year. 



Part of this dominance can be explained by the Big Ten having 14 teams. When the total placement points are divided by the number of schools in each conference, things get a little more competitive, but the Big Ten still comes out way ahead of everyone else.

Total Points/Team

1. ​Big Ten: 25.1
   
2. ACC: 11.3
   
3. Big 12: 8.8
   
4. MAC: 7.4
   
5. Pac-12: 4.0
   
6. EIWA: 3.2
   
7. EWL: 1.7
   
8. SoCon: 1.1
   

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but the Big Ten is quite good. 

We won't even attempt to answer the question of whether this arrangement is ideal for college wrestling, but as far as determining just how dominant the Big Ten is at wrestling, I think we can safely conclude that the answer is "very."