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tigroscr

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I have wondered this for a few years, but never asked anyone. Now that im in this group, i figure i could get an answer.  Why do they use a bracket with more places than wrestlers, creating 4 or so byes. Cant you just use a smaller bracket?

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If all sectionals had 8 teams that solution would be possible.  

 

However, with more than 8 teams per sectional you end up with a 16-man bracket and thus byes occur.  The 16-man bracket allows for the none seeded to have a equal chance of drawing into any position.  Unlike if you created say a 12-man bracket, which would then limit where those byes could be placed. 

 

After sectionals this is no longer an issue since the exact amount of wrestlers advance that are needed for the bracket.  

Edited by MattM
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11 minutes ago, tigroscr said:

I have wondered this for a few years, but never asked anyone. Now that im in this group, i figure i could get an answer.  Why do they use a bracket with more places than wrestlers, creating 4 or so byes. Cant you just use a smaller bracket?

Matt answered this in part, but to be clear: brackets are always set up in multiples of 2 so that byes and forfeits occur only in the first round and not later. So always 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 or 64 and nothing in between those numbers. Otherwise, you would be stuck giving byes in later rounds. If you have 10 wrestlers, you can obviously match them all up in 5 matches, but then you have 5 left in round 2 and then what do you do? Instead, you have a bracket of 16 if there are 10 wrestlers, give 6 first round byes, wrestle two matches, and have 8 left in round 2 and therefore no more byes the rest of the tournament.

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3 minutes ago, maligned said:

Matt answered this in part, but to be clear: brackets are always set up in multiples of 2 so that byes and forfeits occur only in the first round and not later. So always 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 or 64 and nothing in between those numbers. Otherwise, you would be stuck giving byes in later rounds. If you have 10 wrestlers, you can obviously match them all up in 5 matches, but then you have 5 left in round 2 and then what do you do? Instead, you have a bracket of 16 if there are 10 wrestlers, give 6 first round byes, wrestle two matches, and have 8 left in round 2 and therefore no more byes the rest of the tournament.

[panegyric]Now this is a Hall of Fame worthy reply![/panegyric]

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3 minutes ago, XCard said:

[panegyric]Now this is a Hall of Fame worthy reply![/panegyric]

 Ha...The trick is to just mix in a lot of numbers--even with a simple bracket explanation, it starts to sound super smart eventually.

Edited by maligned
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16 minutes ago, maligned said:

Matt answered this in part, but to be clear: brackets are always set up in multiples of 2 so that byes and forfeits occur only in the first round and not later. So always 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 or 64 and nothing in between those numbers. Otherwise, you would be stuck giving byes in later rounds. If you have 10 wrestlers, you can obviously match them all up in 5 matches, but then you have 5 left in round 2 and then what do you do? Instead, you have a bracket of 16 if there are 10 wrestlers, give 6 first round byes, wrestle two matches, and have 8 left in round 2 and therefore no more byes the rest of the tournament.

Or you can do what international wrestling does or at least used to.   Move all the wrestler vs bye matchups on one half of the bracket and put all the wrestler vs wrestlers first round matches on the other half.  So then it looks like the most lopsided brackets ever created.  They may have stated moved away from that recently,  as they started using the new seeding/separation critetia system.  

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1 minute ago, MOWrestler said:

Honestly did not see this nuanced level of response coming....

Based on tigroscr's initial question I thought Matt pretty much explained it.

I’ll take the assist from maligned any day, he’s always good for some great details.  

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19 minutes ago, MattM said:

Or you can do what international wrestling does or at least used to.   Move all the wrestler vs bye matchups on one half of the bracket and put all the wrestler vs wrestlers first round matches on the other half.  So then it looks like the most lopsided brackets ever created.  They may have stated moved away from that recently,  as they started using the new seeding/separation critetia system.  

True...but as Mad Mardigan would tell you, even that used multiples of 2 in deciding how big the first-round bracket would be.

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1 minute ago, Branden McKinney said:

Why not use 12 man brackets?

My second post of this topic basically covers that one.  The 12-man brackets looks cleaner, but it limits the random draw-in that the IHSAA likes.

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