How facts are checked

Where the record comes from

The record covers the NCAA Division I wrestling championships from 1928 to 2026: 40,037 bouts across 95 tournaments, 13,306 wrestlers and 323 schools. No tournament was held in 1943, 1944, 1945 or 2020.

The bouts were compiled from the official NCAA championship brackets into a results workbook, which this site reads as its primary source. The 2026 championships come from the final brackets published by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, which also hosts the archived bracket sheets for every earlier year. Historical team-scoring rules come from the NCAA's own rule books and records book.

The source records are preserved exactly as compiled. Nothing is silently rewritten: a change to a record is a logged correction (below), and the original value stays in the database beside it.

How brackets are verified

Each year's weight-class bracket is drawn from the bouts in the record and then checked line by line against the archived bracket sheet: every entrant, seed, pairing, round, score and method. A bracket is published as a board only when that check is complete; until then its page shows the results list, which is complete either way. 865 of the 909 year-and-weight competitions in the record have a verified board, covering 63,004 bracket positions.

Two early tournaments, 1936 and 1948, used numbered rounds rather than a bracket; their champions are recorded as awards from the printed results, and no finals are manufactured for them.

How corrections are made

Where the archived sheet shows the workbook is wrong, the record is corrected. Every correction records the value it replaces (the correction applies only if that value is still present), the new value, the reason in plain words, and the evidence: the URL of the archived sheet and where on it to look. 332 corrections have been made so far, and all of them are in the public corrections log.

A shared surname is never evidence of identity. Wrestlers and schools carry durable identifiers in their page addresses; when two records turn out to be one person, one address survives and the other forwards to it permanently.

Team scores

Team standings are shown as the NCAA published them. The site also computes each team's points from its bouts under the scoring rules of that year, and reconciles the two: 6,033 of 6,804 team-year totals reconcile exactly. Where the published standings do not list a team, its computed total is shown with a star and a note. Points are never compared across years with different scoring systems.

How the articles are checked

The site publishes two kinds of article, checked in two ways. The data pieces (the field guide and the articles on bonus points, upsets, shutouts and semifinals) were written directly from the record: their numbers link to the live searches and record pages that produced them, and anyone can rerun the search. The team histories go through a claim ledger: every number comes from a query against a pinned snapshot of this record, the snapshot is named in the article's working file, and every factual sentence maps to a claim that carries a status (discovered, source inspected, corroborated, disputed, or approved). Only approved claims reach a published team history. Claim types are kept distinct: a fact, a reported recollection, an editorial interpretation and an open question are never merged.

In the team histories, claims beyond the results, such as who coached whom, who was recruited by whom, or what a wrestler said, need a published source that has been opened and read, with the page or timestamp recorded. Family relationships and other error-prone claims need two independent sources or they stay out. Articles use published sources and the record only; there are no original interviews. Where sources conflict, the conflict is recorded rather than resolved by preference. Quotations are attributed as in ordinary journalism.

A few rules of comparison hold throughout: raw team points are not compared across incompatible scoring systems; modern top-eight All-American definitions are not applied to earlier eras that awarded fewer places; the cancelled 2020 tournament is not a failure season; and "first ever", "first observed" and "first in a coach's tenure" are kept apart.

The editorial workflow, and where AI is used

The articles are produced by an editorial team of AI research agents working under a human editor, Matt Grogan, who makes every editorial decision and approves every claim. The agents divide the work the way a newsroom would: a results analyst computes a program's chronology and totals from the snapshot with reproducible queries; a context researcher finds contemporary reporting and official guides; a counterpoint researcher looks for the opponents' accounts, overlooked contributors and evidence that could undermine the obvious story; an evidence critic independently opens every cited source and checks claims, arithmetic, quotations and causal language; and one writer drafts the piece from approved claims only. The lead editor runs a story gate before any outline (an attractive idea the sources cannot carry is parked, and "no strong story yet" is a valid result), a developmental edit before any polish, and a final audit after it.

Drafts are also reviewed by outside AI editors acting as a sports features editor and as a reader with no allegiance to the school, and their reviews are applied by the lead editor. The site's code and its build checks were written with Claude Code, an AI coding tool, under the same review. The record itself is not generated by AI: it is compiled from the brackets, verified against the archived sheets, and corrected only with evidence.

Reporting an error

Every record page carries a "Report an error on this page" link, and every page's foot has the address: matt@marchmatness.app. A report that names a page and, ideally, a source becomes a logged correction or a documented reason not to change the row.

This build

The pages you are reading were built from data release pub_v1_6a313fe4fb6cf762a6949c66, mirrored unchanged from the wrestling-history archive at commit ece605eaf5 (2026-10-06), 971 files verified by checksum. marchmatness is an independent, fan-built project and is not affiliated with the NCAA.