So what. Just looked at a 321A regional with a bracket with only 8 wrestlers----Track even said that weight class was an eight man tournament.

OPENs all over every regional in every class. Just did a numbers finger drill. Of 1736 possible opening slots in all brackets in all regionals, there were 385 first round "OPENS"----or in otherwords 1351 filled opening round slots. That's a 78 per cent fill (1351 divided by 1736== 78%. Opening round fiil slots by class was 89% fill in 6A, 84% fill in 5A, 68% fill in 4A. 321A regionals show more filled slots in a 16 bracket tournaments--not many, but a few--but they have 22-23 schools per regional tournament.

Another interesting stat: Using opening round numbers of wrestlers in each class---6A actually qualifies 57% to State (224 of 393 wrestlers), 5A qualifies 58% to 5tate (224 of 383 wrestlers), and 4A qualifies 39% to State (224 of 575 wrestlers). Not as bad as the old statements on State qualifiers of 50% in 6a and 5a, or 25% in 4a. 6a and 5a thus have less than the 2 to 1 advantage claimed by many 4a fans---but stiil a lot of inequality in qualifying to State.

If my numbers are wrong it must have been my calculator's fault.

More to follow!!