After more digging, Buffalo currently sponsors 6 men’s sports and 8 women’s sports. This is the exact minimum of men’s teams a university can have to be considered D1.
“Division 1 schools must sponsor seven men's and seven women's sports at a minimum, or six men's sports and eight women's sports at a minimum.”
Buffalo is trapped with wrestling, unless they want to add another men’s sport to cut wrestling or drop to d2 or whatever that process would look like.
Also, they are saying they will announce the new coach in the coming weeks. Hopefully the AD and Stutzman didn’t get along, and not the AD hates wrestling.
“I do feel that the future is going to be very bright for our wrestling program,” he (AD) said.
Hopefully they’re not looking for an excuse to cut it, but an excuse to better the program.
Seems more like a changing of guards rather than anything else in my opinion. I assume asu will continue to have an RTC, like every other college program. Maybe I’m wrong though.
https://thesundevils.com/documents/2024/2/20/After_winning_over_100_World_and_Olympic_Medals__Sunkist_KIds_Wrestling_Club_Closing_After_Four_Decades.pdf
Florida, GA, Texas (adding one currently) all need a school the recognizes that they are “good” Hs wrestling states and can have success and attract in state talent.
hopefully we see a day where all states have a D1 team, but those three are a good start.
I don’t get how we can’t get a full 10 weights, they’re already doing the event, paying for venue, promotion(?), mats, referees, TV/streaming, etc.
the cost of adding weights is much less than the cost of adding a new sport or whatever’s
I hadn’t heard of this, seems like old news, but still love to hear it!
https://www.northjersey.com/story/sports/college/wrestling/2023/02/01/felician-university-to-add-mens-and-womens-wrestling-in-2024/69855955007/
I’m biased, but they can remove 2 men rowing teams, a women’s rowing team, men+ women’s water polo, and women’s bowling before they start to look at wrestling.
If you wanna tweet something stupid, you wouldn’t be the first. But to constantly double down is so stupid, I was surprised they were willing to go in this podcast (which is huge) to basically explain how stupid they are and that they didn’t learn anything from this experience.
I believe the most recent numbers show over 300k at the hs level. Growth happened but almost solely due to women’s participation growing so rapidly and drastically.