You're the AD: give the bag to a coach or a wrestler? 💰💰💰

[Paul158]

On 7/15/2025 at 12:52 PM, ionel said:

How do you break Cael's record?

You could go undefeated for 5 years and win 5 NCAA titles. Oh wait we are out of the Covid crisis. No can do.

[fishbane]

Perhaps another interesting way to look at this issue is through the career of Cael Sanderson since he is both the GOAT wrestler and a GOAT coach.  Was he closer to winning a team title as a wrestler or a head coach at ISU?  The same is true of Dan Gable, but he coached and wrestled at two different places so less variables are controlled.

At ISU with Sanderson as a wrestler they placed 4th, 2nd, 6th, 2nd.  They also had 6 national champs and 16 AAs.  In his three years as a head coach ISU was similarly good.  They finished 2nd, 5th, and 3rd with 2 national champs and 15 AAs.  That's more individual national titles/year with the Sanderson the wrestler and more AAs/year with Sanderson the coach.  Team finishes are very close.  The same best finish (2nd) and median (3rd) with a slightly better mean. 

The teams with Sanderson the wrestler were probably a little better with higher team point totals even accounting for scoring differences. His senior year they had three champs and his freshman year might have been the best.  They had 109.5 points and lost by only 6.5 team points.  Three ISU wrestlers lost overtime finals matches that year including one to an Iowa wrestler.  Iowa won the title so if that OT match had gone the other way ISU wins.  Still the closest to winning a title might have been 2007.  They finished 2nd to Minnesota 9.5 points back, but the Gophers only scored 98 team points.

Looking at Gable ISU finished 2nd, 1st, and 1st with him on the roster.  They had 20 AAs and 9 national champs those three years.  They year they finished 2nd they had three champs and were 2 points back.  In his first three years as the head coach at Iowa the Hawkeyes were similarly good.  Gable took over a team that had just won the team title and they went 3rd, 1st, 1st under him. They had 17 AAs and 3 national champs in that time frame.

It's unclear If the start of Sanderson and Gables coaching careers exceeded the team accomplishments when they were wrestlers.  Its more of a guess how this would go if they had wrestled/coached at a small program.

[MPhillips]

Good stuff @fishbane...