What a season for Penn State. The Nittany Lions won their seventh NCAA championship in eight years, all under the tutelage of head coach Cael Sanderson. 

And although the PSU won the 2018 NCAA championship with a staggering 141.5 points and four individual champs, this season's team title was no foregone conclusion. Penn State was in a dogfight with Big Ten rival Ohio State throughout the season and did not clinch its eighth team championship in program history until the final session of the NCAA tournament last month in Cleveland. 

To get a better sense of the ups and downs of the Nittany Lions' season, we took each week's projected NCAA team tournament points based on our individual rankings from the entire season and plotted it on a graph. The annotated results are below. 

To see those week-by-week projected point totals in table form, see below.

The Nittany Lions' big guns remained consistent all year long. Jason Nolf, Bo Nickal, and Zain Retherford went wire-to-wire as the #1-ranked of their respective weight classes. Neither Mark Hall nor Vincenzo Joseph dropped below #3 in the rankings at any point during the season. 

Elsewhere in the lineup, Nick Nevills bounced between #3 and #8, while Nick Lee, once his redshirt was pulled, stayed in the top eight for the rest of the year except for a brief dip to #11 after the Big Tens. 

Most of the drama in Happy Valley revolved around what would happen at 197 pounds. Fifth-year senior Matt McCutcheon appeared to have the inside track on the gig, having already qualified for three NCAA tournaments and reached the round of 12 in 2017 at the weight. But by midseason, it would turn into a two-man race between Anthony Cassar and Shakur Rasheed. The lowest any of the trio would be ranked this year was #11. 

In the end, it would be Rasheed representing the blue and white in the postseason. Rasheed finished seventh at the NCAAs, one of eight Nittany Lions to reach the podium in their thrilling championship season. All of which, we assume, was part of Sanderson's plan.