Having trouble fully comprehending college wrestling’s new overtime rules?
Join the club.
The new rules, intended to level the playing field in matches that come down to the 30-second tiebreaker, will definitely add a new and interesting twist to matches that are tied after the one-minute overtime period this season.
This year’s change basically adds a second 30-second tiebreaker and gives each wrestler a chance to have his choice for a 30-second period.
“In an attempt to make the rule as fair as possible for both athletes, they have had to extend the criteria,” said Iowa State coach Bobby Douglas, a member of the NCAA rules committee. “The feedback I am getting from coaches is there should be a simpler way to do it. The overtime rule used to take a paragraph to explain, now it takes two pages.”
Minnesota coach J Robinson calls what the rules committee did to establish the new overtime rules an “exercise in futility.”
“It’s ridiculous, it’s absolutely ludicrous,” Robinson said. “There is no other way to put it. You want simplicity in athletics along with rules that are fair. The new rule is absurd and most coaches don’t agree with it anyway.”
But some do to a certain degree.
“This new rule is better than the old rule where you tossed a disk and gave one wrestler an advantage,” Douglas said. “The new rule seems to level the playing field, but it seems like it is more complicated now. It makes the overtime very, very un-fan-friendly because it is more confusing.”
Douglas said he is not a proponent of deciding matches based on riding time in the tiebreakers.
“Riding somebody is illegal anyway,” Douglas said. “You get called for stalling if you are riding and not working for the fall.”
Douglas said the issue of accurately keeping riding time in the tiebreakers could lead to further problems.
“Keeping riding time is going to be real crucial,” he said. “You really have to make sure the scorers table stays on top of it. I think it will present some real problems for the scorers table because matches could be decided by tenths of a second.”
The matches would obviously end early if a wrestler is awarded a fall, default or disqualification at any time in the overtime.
Confused? Even in its simplest terms, the new rules will obviously take some getting used to.
The changes were implemented in large part to take away the advantage one wrestler was given in the 30-second tiebreaker. The long-standing argument of why one wrestler gets an advantage by having his choice in the tiebreaker in a tied match will be eliminated now.
Nebraska coach Mark Manning said the new rules “confuse our fans” even more.
“We shouldn’t tinker with the rules where it gets this confusing,” Manning said. “I would prefer a non-time limit overtime where a sudden-death takedown determines the winner.
“That makes someone have to score a takedown and factors conditioning into the equation. They need to let the two wrestlers decide the winner, not some confusing system with 30-second periods.”
“When the people who understand wrestling can’t even understand the new rules then you really have a problem,” Robinson said. “The rules committee should get some heat for this. It’s a bad rule.”
Douglas said having wrestlers battle for a takedown is the ideal way to determine a winner in overtime.
“It’s a lot more fair, but how long do you let them wrestle?” Douglas said. “The drawback is you could have two guys out there for an extended period with nobody getting a takedown. Then what do you do?”

Robinson said making a wrestler gain a takedown is the only fair way to determine a winner in overtime.
“Put the two guys on their feet and nobody has an advantage,” Robinson said. “People say the matches will go on forever, but I don’t think that would happen very often. Wrestlers will obviously want to get a takedown in the first minute, not the fifth. The rare matches that do go long will be the best ones that are really memorable.”
Robinson and his fellow Big Ten coaches actually tried to gain approval for their schools to try the no-clock format in overtime where a wrestler has to score a takedown to win.
Big Ten coaches voted 11-0 in favor of using that rule, but the league’s faculty representatives voted it down 10-1.
“We thought we could use it so you could compile some actual data to see how it would work,” Robinson said.
What also will be interesting is to see how all the riding time in the tiebreakers is kept in the early-season open tournaments with as many as 12 mats going simultaneously.
Another new rule involves gaining takedowns on the edge of the mat. A wrestler now only needs one foot inbounds to gain credit for a takedown. In past years, two feet needed to be inbounds.
If that rule was in effect a few years earlier, Nebraska’s Bryan Snyder might have been a two-time national champion instead of a two-time runner-up.
Snyder appeared to have secured takedowns with one foot inbounds in finals bouts with Iowa’s T.J. Williams in 2001 and Minnesota’s Luke Becker in 2002.
Snyder lost both matches when Williams and Becker, who both scored the first offensive points of the match, were given their choices in the tiebreaker and both were able to escape to end the match.
?Williams and Becker both scored the first offensive points against Snyder and then shut it down and wrestled defensively because they knew they had the advantage in the tiebreaker,? Manning said. ?That isn’t good for wrestling either.?


• This story appears in the Annual College Preview issue of Wrestling International Newsmagazine. To subscribe to Wrestling International Magazine, call 1-888-305-0606 or by e-mail at info@win-magazine.com. W.I.N. publishes 12 times per year for an annual second class mailing rate of $29.95. The first-class subscription rate is $47.95.