Is 285 the most overrated weight class of all time?

[peanut]

Everyone knows that heavyweight matches are the least dynamic. For one thing, moving all that weight around is pretty tough.

It's also fairly obvious that heavyweights are an extreme end of the size spectrum. So that means the talent pool at heavyweight is smaller than the talent pools at other weight classes. 

Further, heavyweight is almost certainly thinner than the other extreme of 125 because there are other good non-wrestling options for athletic big dudes -- like football or basketball -- whereas there aren't a lot of similar options for the 125 pounders. So it would make sense if heavyweight were normally the absolute thinnest weight class.

Now when you look at Hodge winners over the past few years, four out of six have been heavyweights. What is the deal there? I don't know enough to draw conclusions, so please chime in.

 

 

[wrestle87]

There is no weight class that has yielded more US olympic and international success than heavyweight.  Not overrated.

Bruce Baumgartner

Steven Neal

Kerry Mccoy

Rulon Gartner

Tervel Dlagnev

Nick Gwiazdowski

Kyle Snyder

Gable Steveson

Also, thin (lol)? Is there a spate of teams failing to recruit heavyweights? I think this does the big guys some disservice.  The physics are very different at that weight, but that doesn’t make them less sophisticated wrestlers.

Heavyweight has been home to the best technical rivalries internationally for the better part of the past decade (akgul, petriashvili, steveson, and whatever that iranian dude’s name was).