Glossary
Wrestling and archive terms, defined once. Pages link a term to its entry here the first time it appears.
- Fall
- A pin: one wrestler holds both of the opponent's shoulders to the mat, ending the bout immediately.
- Technical fall
- The winner built a large enough point lead — the modern threshold is 15 — to end the bout before time expired.
- Major decision
- A decision won by 8 to 14 points, worth an extra team point beyond a regular decision.
- Decision
- The bout went the distance and one wrestler won on points.
- Superior decision
- A result code used from 1972 to 1987 for a decision won by a wide margin, typically 10 points or more. The category sat above a major decision until the modern major-decision and technical-fall split replaced it.
- Default
- One wrestler could not continue, and the other is recorded as the winner without the bout being finished — an injury or other issue outside disqualification or forfeit.
- Medical forfeit
- A wrestler was unable to compete for medical reasons, and the bout was not wrestled.
- Forfeit
- A wrestler did not appear or was not eligible to compete, and the opponent won without a bout.
- Disqualification
- A wrestler was removed from the bout for a rule violation, and the opponent is recorded as the winner.
- Time advantage (TA)
- A historical scoring measure from a handful of early tournament years — the difference between each wrestler's control time — used instead of a fall or a points-based decision. It is not the bout's elapsed duration.
- Calendar gap
- A year with no NCAA championship tournament at all — 1943, 1944, and 1945 during wartime, and 2020 when the tournament was cancelled — kept visible in the archive rather than treated as a missing or zero-result year.
- Verified bracket
- A bracket whose full path from the opening round to the final has been checked against an archived bracket image, not just the recorded matches.
- Reported points
- Team points exactly as the NCAA published them for that tournament.
- Reconstructed points
- Team points calculated from the recorded matches under that year's scoring rules, used where the archive has no published standings to report.
- All-American
- A top-8 finisher in an NCAA weight class, drawn from the final and the 3rd-, 5th-, and 7th-place bouts.
- Seed
- A wrestler's tournament ranking entering the bracket, as recorded by the source. Not every year or every wrestler has one.
- Recorded zero
- A seed or score explicitly recorded as zero in the source, distinct from a blank value the archive never received.
- Consolation round
- A bout in the bracket's second-chance ladder for wrestlers who have lost once, leading to the 3rd-, 5th-, and 7th-place bouts.
- Placement bout
- A bout that decides a specific final place, 1st through 8th, as opposed to an earlier bracket round.