Forfeits At Conference Tournaments - By The Numbers
Forfeits At Conference Tournaments - By The Numbers
An in-depth breakdown of forfeits at the conference championships.
Conference weekend in the Division 1 wrestling world is always an incredible showcase of the nation's best wrestlers. While there are a number of takeaways from the past weekend, one disappointing theme emerged - forfeits. How do we stop forfeits from happening? Do we punish the wrestler? Punish the college? Before we answer these questions, it's important to know the problem (or if there even is one). So I dove deep into the numbers to help provide the correct context for solving the forfeit problem. What you'll find below is a purely data-driven analysis of forfeits at conference tournaments over the past 5 years.
First, we looked at every match from the 5 conferences that earn the most allocations for NCAA's - the Big 10, Big 12, EIWA, PAC 12, and ACC. We went back 5 years and tallied up every medical forfeit that took place at those respective conference tournaments. Below is a breakdown of the numbers per year and some handy visual aids to go along with the data.
| Year | Big Ten | EIWA | Big 12 | PAC 12 | ACC | Totals |
| 2018 | 14 | 12 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 31 |
| 2019 | 17 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 27 |
| 2020 | 24 | 6 | 4 | 7 | 4 | 45 |
| 2021 | 11 | 7 | 8 | 3 | 2 | 31 |
| 2022 | 26 | 10 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 42 |
| Total | 92 | 39 | 21 | 14 | 10 | 176 |
The below graph provides a visual of the accumulation of forfeits by conference over the past 5 years.
The graph below provides a visual of the number of forfeits at each conference compared year over year.
Percentage Of Matches Forfeited
The number of forfeits matters, but it's also important to note that conferences like the Big 10, BIG 12, and EIWA are much larger than the PAC 12 and ACC. That means more matches wrestled = more potential matches forfeited. With that in mind, we tallied up the total number of matches wrestled at conferences to find what percentages of those matches resulted in a forfeit. The chart below details that data.
| Big Ten | Big 12 | EIWA | PAC 12 | ACC | Totals | |
| 2018 | 4.83% | 0.93% | 4.00% | 1.67% | 2.50% | 3.28% |
| 2019 | 5.76% | 1.87% | 1.33% | 1.67% | 1.23% | 2.84% |
| 2020 | 8.28% | 1.78% | 1.91% | 7.78% | 4.94% | 4.50% |
| 2021 | 3.73% | 3.64% | 4.29% | 3.33% | 2.56% | 3.66% |
| 2022 | 8.97% | 1.35% | 3.13% | 2.22% | 1.22% | 4.18% |
| Totals | 6.30% | 1.91% | 2.79% | 3.85% | 2.49% | 3.73% |
There are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from the above data but it's clear forfeits are much higher in the Big 10 than any other conference. The Big 12 and EIWA are similar in size and matches to the Big 10 have remarkably fewer forfeits every year. It's also worth noting that the PAC 12 and ACC are about half the size of the larger conferences yet their forfeit numbers track similarly to all but the Big 10.