Wrestleknownothing

I was just about to respond with something similar. The question was not who is better (what I think DiBatista was talking about), but who was better than their competition by the most. More of a differences in differences analysis than a straight comparison. That said, a very valid objection is that in the early days not many teams made the trip to the NCAA tournaments for a variety of reasons. It was mostly down to finances, but there was even a year where many east coast and midwest teams were no shows due to local flooding.

Take a perusal of the Iowa media guide. It has some great detail on their seasons. https://archive.org/details/iowa-wrestling-2023-24-media-guide-2023-11-c/page/93/mode/2up

yep. see it aint that hard.

Because scoring has changed radically over the years, I find it best to do these comparisons in percentage differences rather than absolute differences. You can define dominance a bunch of ways. Here are two Top 20 lists. If largest margin of victory is your thing then it looks like this: In the 1930s the only way to score points was to place in the top 3 or via pinfall. There were no advancement points or other ways to score bonus. In that era first place was worth a whopping 56% of placement points (it is worth 24% today). So the 30's really was a winner takes all era. That Sanderson's PSU, Gable's Iowa, and Smith' Oklahoma State teams are even on the list is pretty remarkable. Another way to look at it is by the percentage of the total points available to be scored. Currently, the max score for a team is 300. PSU's 172.5 is 57.5% of that max. Reordering by % of max available yields very different results. Now the Gable era teams get the respect they are due. By this metric Dan Gable has the top 5 teams of all time, and 11 of the top 20. While only his third highest total, Gable's 1991 season is actually his most impressive. Scoring changes made it possible to score more in 1986 and 1997, but based on this metric, those are less impressive. Sanderson's 172.5 still ranks above Gable's 170, but still comes in sixth. And check out Jim Gibbons. Dude could wrestle with the best, color commentate with the best, and coach with the best. The early days Oklahoma State teams disappear from the list.

Infinity is notoriously difficult to graph.

Yes, I was focusing more on the NIL element, though. Which I think was the motivator in these cases. Also, while many grads take the opportunity to move on, not all do, and it certainly is not a requirement.

Agreed. PSU really has the logjam problem. But the far more interesting ones would be starters getting pried loose with the pay day.

There is an absolute whack job on the Rutgers board who claims to be Tony Surage, two-time AA for Rutgers in the 80's, saying that Rutgers will get 2-4 PSU guys and 1-2 Iowa guys this off season who are "Suriano level guys", or something like that. There is also another guy on the board who claims the first guy has a long history of BS and problematic posts. The guy claiming to be Surage is currently going after Shayne Van Ness and his father for perceived lack of loyalty to Rutgers. So there is that too.

As soon as I hit send, I thought that might be the response. But a case can be made that if ASU had Parco and Teemer to go along with Figueroa, they would be a top 5 team. Who else, beside PSU, would have three guys with a realistic shot at the finals?

The non-profit owns a for-profit entity. Altman works for the for-profit entity, not the non-profit. Yeah, when everyone threatened to quit and the board of the non-profit was threatened with having their asset decrease in value, things changed. We have a President how got reinstated after being caught in untold lies, why do we care what a private company does? No idea about the sister. The more interesting thing to me is this is some high level rich guy trolling. Musk's bid is not all that serious. It is just designed to make it very expensive, and therefore very hard, for the for-profit entity to buy itself from the non-profit entity. This while Musk is also suing to prevent the transaction. Good stuff.

Haven't we already seen it with Iowa bringing in Buchanan, Parco, and Teemer this year? All three have been rumored to have gotten large payments. And all three have been ranked #1, or #2 at some point this season. Not quite the same with Oklahoma State bringing in Hamiti and Hendrickson, but both are title contender types (or at least before Steveson came back). It seems the big buyers at the moment are Oklahoma State and Iowa. Michigan has been there before, and may return. But The Cowboys and Hawkeyes have known deep pocketed supporters of wrestling. So for me the question boils down to whether one of those two (maybe three) can knock someone loose from Penn State, Ohio State, or each other? I would not say it is impossible. If the money is right, any one of the big 3-5 programs should expect to get poached.

A champ with no bonus scores 20, 16 placement points and 4 advancement points. Eighth place is worth 3 placement points. On the back side advancement points are 0.5 per match. To get to the eighth place match after losing the first requires 4 straight wins. There are no advancement points in the final matches (1st, 3rd, 5, 7th). So Team A has 20 Team B scores (3+ (4*0.5))*10 = 50

That was the conservative estimate. Using Flo rankings the chances are 13.4%.

The Race For The Podium ...Just got a little more interesting. Based on the newest set of Intermat rankings Iowa's room for error is slipping away. After a tough couple of weeks Iowa's expected lead over Oklahoma State has shrunk from ~23 points on Jan. 21 to the current ~7 points. Intermat has Iowa wrestlers ranked lower than Flo at 5 of the 10 weights (125, 133, 157, 174, and 184). The most consequential from an expected points perspective is Patrick Kennedy at 174. Flo slots Kennedy in at #7 while Intermat has him at #11. Meanwhile Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio State, Northern Iowa, and Virginia Tech are just too close to call for the fourth, and final, spot. Of course, I am cherry picking a bit. Flo and Wrestlestat each have it at about a 15 point lead for Iowa over Oklahoma State. A Perfect 10? Meanwhile, in Penn State news (because I know there has been a real lack of coverage of these plucky upstarts), their odds of matching 2007 Minnesota with 10 AA's keeps creeping higher. It now stands at 11.8%.

Every now and again I will check into one these threads to see if the usual level of dumb is being maintained. It is.

Altman trolling Musk now

The whole "our transfers are virtuous, yours are an indictment" thing is so tired

If that were true they would not move down in the rankings once results are factored in. Cornell and Missouri are doing more with less. I think the fair way to characterize it is that Iowa is making up for recruiting deficiencies with strong transfers. There is more than

There weren't nearly enough. I cut the tables off at a minimum of 2 in the category.

And for completishness, here are the 21 - 40

Correct. Heil was #15, so he is in this group: Dieringer would have been in the 2012 class.

I have spent some time cleaning up the Big Board data @Husker_Du so kindly shared. Who knew Shakur Rasheed was Corey Rasheed in high school? I am sure some of you did, but I didn't. I also updated the results to include the 2023 class and the 2024 results. Last time around I pulled data from Flo, but this time it is just the Real Big Board data from Willie. So there will be some differences based on that. For this round I am focusing on the Top 10 recruits. Like Jesse James with banks, that is where the money is. The Top 10 only produced 39% of the AAs in the sample, but they produced 77% of the Champions. So, it seemed like they should be their own category. The next 10 (11 - 20) produced 18% of the AAs and 16% of the champions. That seemed like their own bucket too. The next 20 (21 - 40) produced 19% of the AAs and that gets us to 76% and that is enough. As suspected, Penn State and Ohio State dominate the Top 10 recruits with 18 each. If you were to rank the recruiting classes without knowing what the results would be for the whole 11 years, it would probably look like this. A tie between Ohio State and Penn State with Oklahoma State a little way back, and Iowa/Michigan a long way back. If you re-rank those classes based on results, I think it would look like this. Penn State runs away with it. While Penn State and Ohio State each had 18 Top 10 recruits in 11 years, the Penn State recruits produced a whopping 33 trips to the finals and 25 total individual titles. Bo Nickal was right. That's what they do. Oklahoma State drops from #3 to #7 once you see the results. While their 12 Top 10 recruits produced 16 AA's, they only had 1 title out of 6 finalists. Iowa also slips a spot from #4 to #5 as their 7 recruits produced 6 trips to the finals with 3 titles. Michigan drops from #5 to #10 having gotten only 9 AAs and 1 title from their 7 Top 10 recruits. Meanwhile Missouri and Cornell did more with less. Missouri moves up from #12 to #4 once you factor in their 5 titles from 5 trips to the finals with only 3 Top 10 recruits. Cornell jumps from #7 to #3 on the strength of their 6 titles from 6 finals with 5 top 10 recruits. Arizona State hangs in there at #6 in both the before and after rankings.

No one else is curious why they don't wrestle 285?

You don't know what that word means.