Now that the season is over and we have time to examine things, don't the rest of you coaches out there feel it's time we came up with some form of set seeding criteria for tournaments in Kansas?
There is vastly too much abuse of "common opponents" when it comes to seeding, espeically when it comes to getting kids with sub-.500 recods seeded. You know the one: Kid A (20-5) is beating Kid B (15-7) 10-0 in a dual meet. Kid B hits some freak move and accidently pins Kid A. A week later, Kid C (8-20) pulls out an overtime tie-breaker win over Kid B. Two weeks later at Regionals, Kid A is the obvious choice to be top seed at the Regional, OOPS, until Kid C's coach tries to get his top seed based on the above scenerio.
I can see in a direct head-to-head situation allowing a kid with a losing record to have some consideration for the last possible seed. But to completely throw off the seeding process by abusing the "Common opponent" entry it silly and leads to four-hour seeding meetings. Let's come up with set criteria and all learn to live with that.

if you are good enough to hold the number one seed, then it shouldn't matter where you are in the bracket. Plus, don't get pinned. period!

Common oponents mean more than records. If everybody wrestled the same people the best record would be great but since they haven't the common oponent thing is very important. I kniow it can get hairy but it is the best method.

Jeff - Records are like water...they will always seek to find their own level. Kids with better than average records tend to beat kids with lesser records. Seeding meetings are designed to allow the best records to meet in the finals. Coaches who try to maneuver their wrestlers to better seeds may do so to improve their team's overall chances for team points, trying to 'one up' their peers in the meeting or genuinely trying to allow their kid the best opportunity to reach the finals (which I hope is prevalent).

I think that most coaches will agree that the top 4 (or 8) wrestlers in any given tourney usually wind up as the top 4 - consistently. If the kid is truly a champion he'll win from anywhere.

Similar to your discussion on regional sites, this one may be too hard to establish objective, quantitative criteria as a rule. Nice discussion though. Tim