I think you summed it up pretty well about how it has been done on this site for 20+ years of rankings. Usually, the long term rankers like Humint, The Girls ranker, Lecher, Marshall, Jeff Cox, even myself during the first 10 years, and too many others to pull out of my memory, all followed patterns like this. I would have my list of 30+ wrestlers per weight in the all-class and would spend every Sunday morning uploading the brackets from my email to the web site. This was all before Trackwrestling so many of the current users probably have no clue how it was back then. I would read the brackets, going from right (champ) to left in the brackets to catch the most important matches, record the significant result in each wrestlers results slot on their spreadsheet record, and then move them around based on the most current head to head result, and tournament placing, etc. As far as nationals, I always looked at that, and that would affect the pre-season rankings, and would give those wrestlers a "head start" in the rankings. This is how most of the rankers do it but they have leeway to research and evaluate as they see fit.

Any way you look at it, it is a tremendous effort by those that are doing the rankings. I wish I could name them all by name, to give them recognition for their service, past and present, that they have done for the wrestling community. A couple of current members list their names, but most prefer to remain anonymous, and all are unbiased. As Humint One said, 10 hours a week for him on 2 groups. It is always a big undertaking and I always try to get the fans to realize the hours these folks put in for you.

I think in this day and age that they are often taken for granted and many people just expect to have rankings for free like it is a constitutional right. Without the folks I mentioned, it doesn't happen, so I hope everyone reading this will take that into consideration. It kind of reminds me of a song long ago by Joni Mitchell with the famous line "you don't know what you got till it's gone..." (young folks, look it up). I hope you have all enjoyed the ride.