I don’t believe you have to have 17 matches to qualify for the tournament if you get one of the automatic spots via your conference tournament. However, the matches are used for the RPI rankings, which I believe require so many matches to have you ranked. There’s also the coaches ranking which require 5 matches and wrestling within the last 30 days (and being designated the starter). Lastly is winning percentage. They use these to put wrestlers in a bronze, silver or gold tier (basically if you’re top 33 in one of those, you’re bronze, two, you’re silver, three gold). If you do NOT automatically qualify, they use all the golds first, then silvers (sometimes seemingly at random), THEN bronze.

So if he didn’t wrestle until, say February, he could be in the coaches and winning %, which may be enough, but also may not. Coaches polls are notoriously unreliable across all sports, not because the coaches are bad judges of ability, but because they’re usually so singularly focused on their own team, that there’s bias as well as just standard ignorance (with a healthy dose of looking at others’ rankings and using that to influence yours). It’s not their fault, it’s just a bad situation to be in for an ACC coach to know where to rank some guy from Cal Poly or Utah Valley University.

That said, if you get an auto qualifier spot, all of this is moot. Devin Carter did it... I believe Joe Smith did as well last year (don’t quote me...).

I’m interested to see what the coaches think is best. It’s definitely a difficult situation to be in. Korbin is most likely the best of all three, but I think Prata could qualify and maybe win a match or two with how hard he grinds, and Sam has a ton of potential as he grows into his body and gains more college muscle and conditioning.