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At the top, especially say top 4 or 5 place winners, absolutely. It may frequently be the toughest end-of-scholastic-season tournament in that regard. But, not so much at the bottom of the field, and that is more or less part of the design. It's a 34-36 man bracket, and I like to think of the first couple of rounds as being "for the broader prep community"; things start to get pretty serious very quickly from there. To dig in further, the National Prep field frequently sports around six nationally-ranked teams, which is only consistently matched by NJ and CA states (only one state tournament in each state). National Preps typically has more Top 10 teams than those state tournaments, however, including this year in which the field featured 4 of the top 10 teams nationally. Despite that, 14 different schools had finalists at National Preps this year. Here's an analysis I did a few years ago of a hypothetical combined National Prep + New Jersey state tournament field, which compares ranked wrestlers. While acknowledging that it was an especially strong Prep field that year, National Preps pretty much hammers NJ states when examining the top 3-4 or so placers in each weight. (NJ, though, is likely harder to place sixth through eighth in most weights most years). This year, when looking at Tennessee's top placers at Preps, the 18th ranked wrestler in Norman's weight (175) finished 5th, and a Fargo junior freestyle runner-up placed 3rd. At 106, Tran beat the 14th ranked wrestler for 3rd/4th, the 3rd ranked wrestler was majored in the finals, and the 6th ranked wrestler missed weight at the MD qualifier or the weight would have been deeper still. At 138, Roark had to beat a Top 25-ranked wrestler to take 3rd as well. Off the top of my head, Ryder Smith finished 6th behind five top-20-ranked wrestlers at 215, and I recall Ryder being in those rankings as well throughout the year. But, that competitiveness is more or less by accident and is due to private school athletics nationally continuing to become more and more elite across a number of sports. The bottom of the field at National Preps is definitely not "Top 4 state" material. Not every region is particularly tough or "deserves" as many bids as they receive; Texas, for instance, will continue to get their 3 bids per weight (the same as Tennessee), even though they struggle as a region to earn a single Top-8 finisher overall each year. But, the league likes decent representation from that region, and they like hyper-elite schools (regardless of region) like Kinkaid in Houston, where the Bush family went, to have a shot at representation in the field. The best microcosm of this dynamic at National Preps might be this 1962 168 lbs. bracket below. Two names will pop out to discerning eyes (one requires slight appreciation of TN state wrestling history): Unrelated to the above, in looking for previous bracket, I also stumbled upon this Unlimited weight class bracket from 1967 National Preps, which pits a certain NFL hall-of-famer against who is likely a very familiar foe in the finals:

The articles on the Rokfin channel are exclusively created by volunteers who want to help recognize and increase exposure for Tennessee wrestlers. Nobody gains compensation for these articles, and everyone who contributes could literally be doing anything else with their time. Anyone who wants to contribute is more than welcome to. There were 120 different brackets to comb through at this year's US Open. I'm sorry someone was missed. You could have helped us "do better" by pointing out the omission so we could update the article and bring that athlete well-deserved recognition, but you instead chose to mock and ridicule while contributing nothing constructive. All of the wrestlers listed either grew up wrestling in Tennessee or are wrestling in Tennessee now. I'm sorry that doesn't meet your definition of what "counts" as a Tennessee wrestler, but somewhere along the way Tennessee coaches have put a lot of effort into each of these athletes' wrestling journeys.