The NCAA D1 record for a school with the most individual wrestling champions in one year is five. Penn State will be rolling into Cleveland with 10 competitors and seven number one seeds. Will the Nittany Lions break the record first set in 1986?

The Iowa Hawkeyes were the first team to crown five champs in the same year. Dan Gable coached five champs in 1986, and then tied his own record in 1997, in his final season at the helm in Iowa City. 

John Smith's Oklahoma State Cowboys then matched the feat in 2005. Cael Sanderson was the next coach to place half his team at the top of the NCAA podium, doing so in 2017 and then again in 2022. 

Obviously, the 2026 Nittany Lions have the potential to break the record. Technically, any team with at least six qualifiers does. But what are the odds of it actually happening? 

We assigned approximate odds of winning a title for each of Penn State's 2026 qualifiers. There was much internal debate about these numbers, but here's what we settled on.

125: #1 seed Luke Lilledahl - 30% 

133: #3 seed Marcus Blaze - 20% 

141: #14 seed Braeden Davis - 1% 

149: #1 seed Shayne Van Ness - 70% 

157: #1 seed PJ Duke - 60%

165: #1 seed Mitchell Mesenbrink - 99% 

174: #1 seed Levi Haines 174lbs - 95% 

184: #1 seed Rocco Welsh - 55%

197: #1 seed Josh Barr - 90%

285: #9 seed Cole Mirasola - 2% 

Then we asked the all-powerful A.I. platform, ChatGPT, to calculate the chances Penn State has six or more champs, based on those odds. ChatGPT helpfully then spit out the odds of Penn State having zero through ten champions, which is displayed in the table below. 

And if you add up all the probabilities of having six through ten champs, you get to just over 40%, which suggests that Penn State has a two in five chance of breaking the record this year. 

As for merely tying the record, we estimate the Nittany Lions have about a 75% chance, or three in four odds, of getting it done. 

The calculation is pretty straightforward. Don't ask me to do it without a computer but it's just math derived from odds we assigned to wrestlers. You can quibble with those, of course, and adjust accordingly. If you lower them, you'll get a lower probability of Penn State breaking the record, and vice versa. 

As another example, I asked ChatGPT to recalculate, but after lowering each individual's odds of winning a title by five percentage points. That gave Penn State a 25% chance of crowning six champs and about a 55% chance of claiming five titles. Increasing everyone's odds by 5 percentage points, changed the odds of PSU coming home with six championship trophies to about 55% and the odds of getting five champs goes up over 85%.

Your mileage may vary with regard to how likely you think each individual title will be. I think we can all agree that six (or more) Nittany Lion champs is a very real possibility. We'll find out if they get it down in Cleveland! 

And just for fun, here are the five winners from each of the five teams that either set or tied the record.