Who has pulled the most upsets at the NCAA tournament?

• 10Wins over a better seed, most in the record
• 8Of them over a top-four seed
• 3Over a one seed, tied for most ever

career record at nationals

19–4

record as the lower seed

10–2

days from the cut announcement to the 2021 final

255

wrestlers with ten upsets in the record

1

In this piece

• The summer the program was cut
• Five bouts in St. Louis
• What counts as an upset, and why the era matters
• The leaderboard
• The seeds that mattered
• What came after
• What this can't prove
• Where the numbers come from

The summer the program was cut

On July 8, 2020, Stanford announced it would drop eleven varsity sports at the end of the coming school year. Wrestling was on the list, alongside men's volleyball, men's rowing and fencing. The university pointed to a projected deficit of about $25 million and the pandemic, and it became the first Power Five school to cut sports on those grounds. The wrestlers were told they could finish one more season, and then the room would close.

They wrestled the season anyway. Alumni and parents organized under Keep Stanford Wrestling, and the team went to nationals in St. Louis that March in black singlets with no Stanford insignia on them. Seven Cardinal wrestlers qualified. Five were underclassmen who, as far as anyone knew, would never compete for the school again.

Stanford had never been a wrestling power. Its first All-American came in 1967, its best team finish before 2021 was eleventh, and in 46 tournaments it had produced exactly one national champion, Matt Gentry in 2004. Its best hope in 2021 was a 165-pounder named Shane Griffith, seeded eighth.

Five bouts in St. Louis

Griffith's path ran through the top seed in the quarterfinals and the third seed in the final. Here it is, bout by bout, from the 2021 165-pound bracket.

The Marinelli bout was the one that turned it. Iowa's top seed had come in with a major decision in each of his first two rounds. Griffith held him to a single point through regulation and scored in sudden victory. Marinelli never wrestled again that weekend, defaulting out of the consolation round. Two days later Griffith beat Wentzel 6–2 in the final, pulled a Keep Stanford Wrestling shirt on over the black singlet, and the arena chanted for the university to bring the program back.

Eight seeds don't usually win. Since every entrant began receiving a seed in 2019, 62 of the 70 champions came from the top four. Only five have been seeded eighth or worse, and Griffith is one of them. Across the whole record, a final won by the lower seed happens in about three finals in ten.

What counts as an upset, and why the era matters

The catch in any career upset count is that the tournament hasn't seeded the same way twice. The 1930s seeded nobody. The 1940s and early '50s seeded four wrestlers a weight. The number crept to six, then eight, then twelve, which held for 35 years, then sixteen, and since 2019 every one of the 33 entrants gets a number. An unseeded wrestler in 1985 beating the ten seed was a story. In 2025 the same thing counts as the 18 seed beating the 10 seed.

So we counted an upset this way: the loser was seeded, and the winner was either unseeded or carried a worse seed. That lets a 1980 unseeded win over a seeded opponent count alongside a modern one. Forfeits, defaults and disqualifications are excluded, since a win by injury default isn't an upset anyone pulled. Then we checked the totals against a stricter cut, upsets over top-four seeds only, which exist in every seeded era.

Full seeding nearly doubles the upset rate compared with the twelve-seed era, and that inflation is why the raw leaderboard below leans toward wrestlers from the last seven tournaments. Keep it in mind. It's also why the second leaderboard, which counts only wins over top-four seeds, is the one we'd trust for a cross-era argument.

The leaderboard

Griffith is alone at ten. Nobody else in 94 tournaments has reached it, and his ten came in just 23 bouts.

Two names on that list deserve a note. Jan Michaels did all seven of his unseeded, in an era when twelve wrestlers a weight were seeded and he never was. Quentin Wright's eight, spread over four tournaments in the twelve-seed era, is probably the most impressive pre-2019 total, and it includes a 2011 title won from the nine seed, the path Griffith would follow a decade later.

The seeds that mattered

Strip the count down to wins over top-four seeds, which every seeded era has had, and the modern inflation mostly disappears. Griffith still leads. So does the pattern of his career: eight of his ten upsets came against a top-four seed, and he never padded the total against the bottom of a 33-man list.

Arujau is the closest thing to a rival here, and his line is arguably purer: all seven of his upsets were over top-four seeds, including finals wins over the one seed in 2023 and 2024. Jimmy Jackson's five came in the 1970s heavyweight bracket with eight seeds, when beating a top-four seed meant beating half the seeded field.

The narrowest cut of all is wins over a one seed. Only two wrestlers in the record have three: Griffith, and Iowa's Mark Perry, who beat the top seed in the 2005 semifinal and then in both of his finals, over Johnny Hendricks in 2007 and Eric Tannenbaum in 2008. Griffith's three were Marinelli in 2021, Evan Wick in the 2022 semifinal, and Mekhi Lewis in the 2024 third-place bout.

What came after

On May 18, 2021, two months after St. Louis, Stanford reversed itself and reinstated all eleven sports, citing new fundraising. Griffith went back for two more years. In 2022, seeded fifth, he beat the four seed 10–4 and the one seed 7–6 to reach a second straight final, then lost it 6–5 to Missouri's Keegan O'Toole. In 2023, seeded ninth, he lost a 2–1 quarterfinal to top-seeded David Carr and fought back through the four seed, the seven seed and, for fifth place, the three seed.

He finished at Michigan in 2024, up a weight at 174 and seeded fourth. He lost a 2–0 semifinal to Carter Starocci, then took third by beating the two seed and, in his last college bout, the one seed. That was Mekhi Lewis, who had won the 2019 title at 165 as an eight seed himself. The only two eight-seed champions at 165 pounds in the record met once, and the later one won 4–0.

Over four tournaments Griffith went 10–2 in bouts where he was the lower seed. Everyone else in that position, across the whole record, wins fewer than three bouts in ten. You can pull all ten of his upsets in Match Finder.

Stanford, for its part, did not close. In 2026 the program that had been scheduled to end five years earlier finished sixth as a team, its best placement ever, with four All-Americans, its most ever. Its champion was Aden Valencia at 149, who came in seeded tenth and beat the two seed in the quarterfinals and the one seed, Shayne Van Ness, in the final. The program that was supposed to end in 2021 instead had its best year yet.

Try Match Finder

What this can't prove

• That the seeds were right. An upset here means the committee's number, not the betting line. A wrestler the field considered underseeded, as many did with Griffith in 2021, still counts as the underdog.
• That eras compare cleanly. The top-four cut helps, but a 1950 four-seed bracket and a 2025 33-seed bracket route wrestlers to seeded opponents at very different rates. Treat the cross-era tables as a description, not a ranking.
• That an upset is an upset. A 3–1 sudden-victory win over the one seed and an 18-over-10 opening-round decision count the same in the raw total. The top-four and one-seed columns are there to separate them.
• Anything about the regular season. The record covers the NCAA tournament only. Griffith's dual-meet and conference results are not in it.

Where the numbers come from

Every count was taken from a local copy of the NCAA Wrestling Data record: 40,035 championship bouts across 95 tournaments from 1928 through 2026. Seeds are as recorded in each year's bracket; an entrant with no seed is treated as ranked below every seeded wrestler. Forfeits, defaults, disqualifications and bouts with an unknown result were excluded from upset counts, which removes 895 bouts.

• The July 2020 cuts: CNN, July 8, 2020 and Stanford's own FAQ.
• The black singlets, the shirt and the crowd: The Stanford Daily, March 21, 2021 and SFGate.
• The reinstatement: The Stanford Daily, May 18, 2021.