Another Final X is in the books! There's still one senior level world team spot to be decided (57kg in women's freestyle), but 29 other spots in all three styles were determined in Newark, NJ in one single day on June 10. 

Complete Final X Results

Now that the dust has settled and bloody head wraps and nose plugs have been properly disposed of, our Pick Em Contest responses can be calculated and processed. Having already done that before we started writing this blog, we can now take a look and see how just how sharp the wisdom of the crowds was when it came to picking winners. 

We didn't add point spreads to the Final X series, so the margins of victory or whether or not the series went to two or three matches was not a factor in either the contest or our takeaways. All that matters was if you picked the wrestler who made the world team. 

So How'd Everyone Do?

We received nearly 1,000 contest entries, and in all those entries across all 29 matchups, the correct winner was picked 65.6% of the time. Pretty good!

Folks picked about the same percentage of winners in men's freestyle (67.2%) as they did in Greco-Roman (67.1%), but the accuracy dipped slightly for the women's freestyle matchups (62.0%).

We found quite a bit more variation when we broke out the percentage of correct picks by matchup, which you can see in the table below. The column on the right is the percentage of entries with the correct pick.  

Tokyo Olympic gold medalist Gable Steveson was picked by the highest number of contest entries and was thus the biggest favorite to win according to the wisdom of the crowds. 99.2% of the entries correctly picked Steveson to be our 125kg men's freestyle world team rep.

Conversely, according to the wisdom of the crowds, the biggest upsets (as determined by winners who were picked by the smallest percentage of people in the contest), were Zane Richards over Thomas Gilman, Chance Marsteller over Jordan Burroughs, Ema Bruntil over Forrest Molinari, Zac Braunagel over Alan Vera, and Nick Lee over Yianni Diakomihalis. 

All four of those winners had about a 25% chance or less of winning their Final X matchup according to our contest participants. Zane Richards was the biggest underdog winner, with just under 5% of the contest entries picking him to win the 57kg wrestle-off.

Here's a closer look at just the upset winners. 

And that is why they determine winners on the mat, and not via online pick em contests. 

So Who Won The Contest?

No one picked all 29 winners correctly. Nor did anyone pick 28, 27 or 26 Final X winners correctly. But someone did pick 25 winners. 

We're not sure if Wesley wants his full name and email address plastered all over this website, but Wesley is the winner! Congrats to Wesley!

Wesley has been contacted via email so if your name is Wesley and you played the Pick Em Contest but you DIDN'T get an email from someone at Flo, sorry, but it was a different Wesley who won. 

The winning Wesley picked a perfect 10 for 10 in Greco and only missed three picks in men's freestyle and whiffed once in women's freestyle. 

Wesley can now claim to be the best picker in the entire wrestling community. A very braggable accomplishment. Everyone should be impressed and respect Wesley's prognosticating capabilities!

And much thanks from us to everyone who participated! You contributed to a valuable piece of wrestling history and are now forever immortalized in this blog post. 

Hope everyone plays next time we run a pick em contest. Who knows, we may even splurge for real prizes for the winners!