We're almost finished with another college wrestling season, friends. Hard to believe it, but Ohio State will wrestle just two more regular-season meets yet this school year, before turning all attention toward the Big Ten and NCAA wrestling tournaments.
Sidebar for a moment: this weekend's contest vs. Northwestern is your last chance to see top-ranked seniors Luke Pletcher and Kollin Moore wrestle on their home mat as collegians. They'll finish the season at Penn State, so if you want to watch two Buckeyes wrestling the best matches of their careers one last time and don't want to leave Central Ohio to do it, here's your last shot.
LAST home match of the season is THIS week. We celebrate the senior class on Sunday at the Covelli Center when Ohio State hosts Northwestern.
— Ohio State Wrestling (@wrestlingbucks) February 3, 2020
On to the topic of the post.
I realized I haven't done much this season in the way of "Wrestling 101" type articles of forum posts. The Eleven Warriors community has embraced the team and the sport to such a degree over the three seasons I've covered the program that I've spent time in past years covering things like why there are multiple sets of rankings and other such oddities of the sport.
Earlier in the week I got a note from a well-meaning reader thinking I've been making some pretty obvious grammatical sins, so I thought this might be a good time to answer one of the more common questions folks have when they first take to the sport:
When two teams face one another in competition, pitting their 10 wrestlers in a series of one-on-one matches, this is called a Dual (Meet), not a Duel.
There are other non-tournament arrangements where a team might wrestle more than one team at a time, but these "tri-duals" like those Ohio State has hosted over the weekend are simply co-locating multiple dual meets at a single time and place. This is different from a tournament format, where individual wrestlers from a team are seeded in a bracket and wrestlers from two given teams may or may not actually wrestle one another.
To clarify, although I've never found a good explanation of the origin of the term, you might think of it this way: the word dual means "consisting of two parts, elements, or aspects," and a dual meet consists of two teams competing.
What other questions, quirks or oddities about wrestling can I answer?
Have you enjoyed watching this year's Ohio State team? Despite being what some might consider a "down" year, the Buckeyes are in a pretty good position to finish in the Top 3 nationally once again this season, which is something very few teams have been able to say consistently as long as Ohio State has under Tom Ryan.
