MJD

Hahahahaha... It's hard to believe any coach would take that risk.

I can see that! How do you think it'll go down?

So I'm a bit out of the loop...been so busy the past few months. Is AJ a likely champ this year? No? He's ranked #4; is this accurate?

Keep your team healthy for the NCAA tournament, the only thing that matters for a coach's pay and an athlete's record. The other season tourneys are worthless. It's only about NCAA.

The average age of an Olympic medalist in freestyle is 26. Biologically speaking, physical prime begins to decline at 27. Wrestlers may try to continue to complete longer for certain monetary reasons, but that doesn't change the age of natural biological decline. USA wrestlers are starting to wrestle freestyle full-time WAY too late. Getting started full-time at 24 (like many in the usa do), is always going to yield inconsistent results in the long term. For that reason, I think men's college wrestling should open up to freestyle. Keep folkstyle for those schools which have the fans, have a chance of getting a wrestler on the podium regularly, and have a historical vested interest in it. The other colleges, basically the majority of the 76 div 1 schools, should transition to freestyle.

USA spends 95% of wrestling energy, time and resources on folkstyle, so it's hard to maintain quality in freestyle. Most men don't get to work full time on freestyle till after college (if they aren't too banged up), which means that they are 23 - 24 years old. That's too old to have any consistent success. Physical prime starts to wane at 27. So, regrettably in my opinion, our wrestlers spend most if their prime years on folkstyle. I know a lot of people like folkstyle, but I really think we should introduce freestyle to college, too (and high school). There's really only a small number of schools competive in div 1, and one school dominates everything. Let them compete in folkstyle. They have the fans, they like it. Go for it. But introduce freestyle for the others. It just makes sense. Most div 1 school have very little chance of even getting an All-Amercian. They should switch. And maybe div 2 and div 3.

Yes, it needs to be cleaned up. No point on having the main button being a career politician. It's a bit annoying to see, honestly, as I don't like his politics. But I wouldn't want to see any button of a politician, even of ones that I support.

We shouldn't think of wrestling as a feeder for MMA. MMA is, for 98% of those involved, a financial disaster. (And it's getting more corrupt).The reason American wrestlers do well in MMA is not so much the style but the ethic of wrestling itself (freestyle and folkstyle), which is founded on competition. Everybody who wrestles is preparing to compete. Most who do martial arts are not competing. I did both wrestling and martial arts. Wrestlers, in my experience, had no problem walking into a dojo or martial arts club and completely demolishing folks with all the fancy belts. The reason? Us wrestlers freakin' practiced everyday for hours, went hard the entire time, and competed in long, grueling seasons. If Judo (or any martial art) were in US high schools and they went as hard as wrestlers do, no doubt they would be the main feeder to MMA.

What American fan base? Outside of a couple of high profile matches in a few states and the NCAA tournament, college wrestling match attendance is dismal. I wrestled in Cali in the 80s, and the sport is loved there. But it's getting to be a hard sell now to parents in a era of hyper-capitalism and the turbo-charged desire for quick fame (social media) and money. Kids simply don't have the same opportunities anymore, and will likely be worse off than their parents. How can kids be expected to dedicate so much time to a sport that's over after college? Universities in Cali don't put much into wrestling because they don't see future opportunities with it. Everything's about capitalism now, how you can get by, get health insurance, pay the rent. The big names in folkstyle don't want to face this. The reason is that the 2 or 3 states that are fairly competitive at college wrestling, that have all the money, still see fairly decent crowds and therefore aren't getting the picture, or at least not wanting to look at the bigger picture. Time to switch to freestyle. At least there's international prestige that can lead to bigger sponsorships, and wrestling outside of schools.

Divion 1 wrestling is dying, and it's hard to fathom why so many people can't see what this means. After high school, Div 1 college wrestling is the pinnacle of the sport -- that's it. There's no high level future of the sport internationally or professionally. Some drastic moves need to happen now, or wrestling is gone in 10 years. Most of the coaches in the six figure salary range don't want to talk about this, primarily because their living is set and they don't want to risk anything. So they'll lead us over a cliff and then, in their twilight years say, "Golly gee, I don't know what happened." Yeah right. The switch to freestyle, the main international style, should happen now while the infrastructure is still hanging on. There's no way schools are going to start adding div 1 programs when ADs are noticing more and more that historically the sport is totally dominated by just a few schools, and now just one. Furthermore, ADs know that with folkstyle, the sport ends when school ends. Of course there's no guarantee that a switch to freestyle will save college wrestling, but I think it will. And for heaven’s sake it's worth a try -- and at least give athletes better chance internationally and not waste their prime years on a school sport that's twitching on its last gasp of air.

I think the USA team did well, and they deserve praise for their hard work. Women's wrestling is still quite new, so we can't compare numbers yet. It's growing and they are doing an excellent job; I look forward to the bright future there. I don't read the college forum much, as I'm more interested in freestyle, even though I mostly wrestled folkstyle in my younger years since that was what was mostly available. I think wrestling can grow in the USA, but not with folkstyle. It's shrinking at the college level, and college is the only outlet for folkstyle after high school. A sport cannot thrive and grow if it's just a school thing, in a few selected states, with one program absolutely dominating every aspect of it.

That's pretty much what I do these days!

I agree, freestyle is more exciting. But there's another reason to switch to freestyle: folkstyle is a dead end; it's literally just a school sport in selected states, with wild disparity between states and regions. It's not fair for these athletes to spend so much time on folkstyle when it leads absolutely nowhere. Why not focus on a style that has international tournaments, world and Olympic championships? Folkstyle wrestling is struggling because it has no opportunities outside of high school and college. We've given it a long time to grow, and it hasn't. It's time to make the switch.

I think the US freestyle team did fairly well, and has historically done well. The problem with folkstyle is that it's a school sport, and doesn't exist in any substantial way outside of that context. So wrestlers spend most of their energy on a sport that abruptly ends after high school or college. There's literally no way to grow such a sport. At least with freestyle there's an international stage, and perhaps more colleges would be interested in programs if they thought it actually could lead to something greater.

I think college and high school should transition to freestyle. Most college sports feed fairly seemlessly into their international or professional equivalents (baseball, basketball, football, etc). Folkstyle wrestling is a dead-end after college. It goes nowhere. Think about it: It's not until most US wrestlers are 23 or 24 that they can finally work full-time on freestyle. That's too late. After all that hard work, if their bodies are even still healthy, they have to make a risky switch of styles to keep competing. That's ridiculous.