Penn State grabbed the bar for NCAA tournament scoring and raised it even higher Saturday night in Philadelphia.
One year after toppling a 27-year-old national championship scoring mark, the Nittany Lions rewrote the record with a strong finish at the 2025 NCAA Championships.
Penn State went 11-1 and piled up 10 bonus points in contested consolation matches Saturday morning inside the Wells Fargo Center. Then the Nittany Lions tacked on a pair of championship-round victories Saturday night to race past their 2024 record.
Cael Sanderson’s crew finished the tournament with 177 points — 4.5 more than their 2024 record-setting total in Kansas City — as Penn State finished 60 ahead of second-place Nebraska.
“It’s been a great year,” Sanderson said. “We’re just constantly thinking ahead and everything’s preparation for the next thing, so we don’t really kind of stop and reflect a whole lot. Obviously, we’re learning as we go and we’ll continue to do that. That’s the name of the game.”
Led by individual national champions Mitchell Mesenbrink (165) and Carter Starocci (184), Penn State became the first Division I program to have 10 wrestlers place sixth or better at the NCAA Championships.
“We have a guy (Mesenbrink) that’s a sophomore in the NCAA finals and our other finalist (197-pounder Josh Barr) is a freshman,” Starocci said. “That pretty much tells you kind of where the program is going. We have some young guys making noise.”
Penn State lost four-time NCAA champ Aaron Brooks and four-time All-American Bernie Truax, who combined to score 39.5 points for the 2024 squad that finished 100 points ahead of second-place Cornell. The Nittany Lions filled in with Barr and true freshman 125-pounder Luke Lilledahl, who accounted for 36.5 points.
“It was a great team,” Sanderson said. “Ten All-Americans is super hard to do. You have guys coming in here with injuries. And obviously if everybody’s talking about the expectations and this is the point record or whatever it is, we don’t talk about that stuff. But kids live on their phones. So they’re seeing it and hearing it all the time.
It’s hard. Being expected to do something and do it is probably the toughest thing in sports, right? But that also makes it a fun challenge. Just a great team. All of our teams, we feel they’re special. And we’re excited for next year, too. We just keep getting better.”
