Tomasello Ranked No. 14 in Coaches Panel Due to "Clerical Error"

Nathan Tomasello entered the season as the top-ranked lightweight in the country. He is a former NCAA champion, and is roundly considered one of the strongest wrestlers in the sport.

So when his name showed up tied for fourteenth in the country on the NCAA Coaches Panel rankings this week, fans and journalists alike were stunned.

cancel the coaches ranking #NATO pic.twitter.com/S3vqMQRffy

— Christian Pyles (@CPyles8) February 8, 2018

Certainly there must have been some mistake. Tomasello, though he missed 12 weeks of the season due to injury, made his triumphant return in January, promptly dispatched Minnesota phenom Ethan Lizak, and showed by he was so well regarded by his peers, NCAA coaches and analysts.

His upset loss to Iowa freshman terror Spencer Lee was seen as a surprise, but as much a testament to the special nature of the young Hawkeye than a sign than that something was wrong with the former champ. The loss, to date, is his only regular-season misstep in two years.

"Only coaches are capable of such brilliance. I'll leave it at that." head coach Tom Ryan said when first asked about the ranking debacle.

As it turns out, the issue was a good, old-fashioned clerical error.

left him off for an (understandable) reason/clerical error.

— Willie Saylor (@WillieAtFLO) February 9, 2018

Ryan provided some additional insight on the situation Friday afternoon.

"Clearly there was a mistake," he explained. "The coaches that ranked the 125-pound weight class, they missed Nate. When all the rankings came in, he wasn't on a couple of the polls, so it brought his ranking down."

Because Tomasello was completely left off some panelists' ballots, the final ranking was perhaps the most puzzling in the history of the panel. His coach reiterated that somewhere between first and fourth "is where he belongs," and that while it made of a social media dustup midweek, It was a mistake, nothing more.

The situation did, however, give Ryan a chance to make a bigger point about the NCAA's approach to ranking and seeding its athletes for the postseason.

"Wrestling needs to progress," he said. "They need to get coaches out of the ranking business, and get people who follow the sport more closely than the coaches in the business of ranking."