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