The NCAA released their allocation of bids for the Championship Tournament, and because we are in pandemic times, things are a little different than usual.

Over the last decade or so, a complicated but generally very robust and accurate formula is applied to the list every coach submits as their postseason starters that spits out the number of allocations each conference gets at each weight, to be earned at their respective conference tournament. Because of covid-shortened schedules, however, this year we're going back to the old method, where the last five years of results determines this year's NCAA automatic qualifier (AQ) numbers. 

So here's what the NCAA decided.

This was done by adding up how many spots each conference had earned over the last five years and determining their year's allocations by the averages. 

Additionally, each conference would get one AQ per champion. The rest would be at-large wild cards, up for grabs for anyone in any conference.

And here's what I would do.

Before I explain how I arrived at this distribution, a quick aside to mention that If I had my druthers, the NCAA would just use the NCAA coaches' poll and give the conferences an allocation at each weight where they had a wrestler in the top 20. Then add in the conference champs where no wrestlers for that conference were ranked and you have about 12 or 13 wild cards left per weight class. 

It's not perfect but no option is at this point. 

Anyway, for the other chart, I started by adding up all the national qualifiers the teams that will be competing in the 2021 postseason earned over the last five season.

The main difference was I made adjustments for teams that aren't wrestling in the 2021 post-season and for teams that changed conferences or shut down their programs. Those differences were as follows:

• The MAC gets all the EWL schools
• Ivies did not count for EIWA
• EMU & ODU did not count for MAC
• Boise State did not count for Pac-12
• F&M did not count for the EIWA
• UNI was split between the MAC and Big 12
• SIUE was split between the SoCon and the MAC

I did not remove Davidson from the SoCon because I did all the math before I heard this unfortunate news but also Davidson has not had a national qualifier since 2015 so it's moot.

I then summed the qualifiers for each conference and divided by the total to get the following percentages, which were then multiplied by 196 to get the AQs per conference.

The other thing I'd do differently is I'd let the conferences decide how to spit these AQs, dropping them into whichever weight classes they saw fit. I think it's safe to assume that with being charged with this task, the coaches would hew closely to what they already decided upon in their coaches' poll, and that how you get the distribution I posted earlier.

I'll paste it again here just so you don't lose your place or wear out your thumbs scrolling up. 

So there you have it.

And again, this is not a perfect method, as there are no perfect methods. And the method the NCAA used is still basically fine. The wild cards will be able to take care of almost all of the injustices once the conference tournaments are over, leaving only the marginal cases, which, although heartbreaking for those left on the outside looking in, will likely not amount to anything too blatent. Approximately half of all the D1 starters will be at Nationals. 

And also it's a pandemic year. Asterisks abound no matter what!