77 member institutions and over 2,400 student athletes. Those are the number of young wrestlers who started the 2024-25 NCAA wrestling season with hopes of making it to the national championships. However, with the regular season over and done with, there are still over 700 hungry, young athletes who are in the race to earn the limited spots for the NCAA Championships.

Before they can make it that far, these elite prospects will have to go through a second gauntlet, aka the postseason. By the time they’re done, only 330 student athletes will qualify for a chance to wrestle for the national title. So of the thousands of aspirants, only a handful will make it to the ultimate stage. Thankfully, there’s more than one way to qualify for the remaining 700.

How wrestlers will qualify for the NCAA Championships

The golden number (330) remains unchanged, but here’s the kicker. How the NCAA decides to divide those spots varies, as per the official Road to the Championships page. For example, the official page states that by default, the NCAA Division I Men’s Wrestling Committee selects the athletes to fill the 60 at-large spots after the rest of the spots have been filled up.

However, thanks to a March 1 report from the NCAA.com, we know that the NCAA has already pre-allocated 287 spots for the upcoming conference tournaments. This leaves only 43 at-large spots for the NCAA Championships. Additionally, those 43 spots aren’t equally divided across the ten weight classes in the national tournament.

The NCAA has pre-allocated 29 spots for every class except two. These are the 157 lbs (27 spots) and 184 lbs (28 spots). This means these two weight classes will have a total of two and one extra spot, respectively. While the athletes of these classes will have the opportunity to vie for these three precious spots, the NCAA didn’t give all eight conferences an equal footing.

Not all conferences are equal

The conference that won the most pre-allocated spots at 87 is the Big 10. While that may sound unfair at first, in college wrestling things are constantly changing. Take the EIWA as an example. Last year, the EIWA earned 53 spots for the NCAA Championships. Unfortunately, this year six Ivy League colleges (Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, and Cornell) broke off.

These six colleges competed amongst themselves, earning 26 spots in the tournament. Meanwhile, the schools that remained in the EIWA earned 22 spots for 2025 as per NCAA.com. This split has also put the conference’s 133, 149, 157, and 184 weight in a precarious position with just one Championship qualification spot for each of these weight classes.

So while the 287 athletes who finish high enough in their respective conference tournaments will book their tickets to Philadelphia, the competition for the 43 at-large spots will be fierce. So, with the stage set for the 2025 NCAA Championships, fans can catch the Selection Show on March 12. Finally, those looking to catch the action at Wells Fargo Center on TV/streaming can do so on the ESPN network starting March 20.