Jason Bryant

That would be correct.

Close. The original InterMat was started by Tom Owens in 1995. He created databases that tied wrestler IDs to their names and had an entry/import database that was a bit convoluted to someone who didn't build it. In the early days, he put everything behind the paywall, since college sports sites weren't super prevalent at the time and Sports Information offices were still faxing and rarely e-mailing them out. There was a lot of manual entry in the early years. Tom also had a pretty robust webstore, which sold gear. Tom also used that database for The Predicament, giving the Iowa site the same kind of infrastructure. Tom sold the site to the NWCA, with Brute as co-owner, in 2004. He stayed on for a year and then stepped away. The NWCA hired me in the summer of 2005 and I took over operation of the site under the NWCA from 2005-2008. After the prevalence of those school sites, Tom didn't have the dual results fully paywalled after that, making dual scores free and basic tournament results free, usually linking to brackets he'd scanned or PDFs that were attached. The deep dive profiles and feature articles and recruiting rankings were the only things paywalled. After the three wrestlers died in 1997, the NCAA made sweeping rule changes and the NWCA developed and patented the weight management program. One of the byproducts of that was the recording of results along with the weigh-in data. On NWCAonline, there was a separate database system called the NWCA scorebook. By this time, Tom's original database was starting to lose its relevance for full season results, since the scorebook was supposed to have them. Merging the databases was a bit wonky, but the dual meet entry portion was still part of the InterMat site even after I left for Wrestling 411 after the 2008 season. This is where we get into the crossover discussion. One of my nightly tasks was entering the dual meet results - manually - through the old database since the coaches and SIDs were often 2-5 days behind logging that stuff into the scorebook. To have it "timely" and to keep InterMat "in the lead" with results, I'd spend hours updating results from my apartment, my buddy's house, from the bar (if that bar had wifi). It even prompted my best friend to say "What bad D3 dual are you updating now," as I cracked open a Yuengling Lager at his coffee table. I also had a freelance budget where I'd pay people like the Pirate to help me enter results on those heavy weekends. I had 2-3 people that were assigned certain duals/leagues, so we could attack that data better. There was another website that would wait until I took all the results from my e-mail and from scouring websites nightly and just straight copy them, in order, every night. When I inquired about it, the response was "results aren't proprietary!" as if it was a defense for them just straight ripping off my hours of work. Sure, the results themselves aren't proprietary, but rather the display. So no matter what, the hard work you put in, sometimes as part of your job, sometimes on your own (like my old Virginia-based Mat Talk iteration) will be ripped off, copied, and often presented as "better." I've been using a lot of AI tools to help code operation systems, portals, and to tie in my long-running historical research and logging of results that have never shown up on the internet and some that have. I've had to institute various types of protections to try to make sure that doesn't get scraped and just ripped on to someone else's site. So from a perspective of someone that's put in countless paid and unpaid hours chronicling and displaying results and placement data for the sport the last 30 years, I can side with WS to where their work should be compensated and when almost the same data shows up on another side, nearly instantaneously, it's like "why are we cannibalizing ourselves?" I used WrestleStat one year for my Preview Guide. It was good data, but it also didn't align fully with some things the qualification process needed. They've gotten so much better with their results over the years. Dan and Greg are great guys and work tirelessly because the sport needs it. They deserve and have earned our support and our consumer dollar. Sites like baseball-reference have paid staff. They have people that are paid for that work, which enables them to offer it, with their business model, free to a degree. Major college sports also have requirements for live stats, giving the NCAA a repository of live data that they sell that API to CBS, ESPN, Fox, all the sports sites. In college hockey, they also require live scoring, so sites like College Hockey Inc., USCHO, and CHN - sites similar in scope to what we have with Flo, InterMat, et al - pay for that API to display scores on their sites in near live time. Wrestling does not fully have that and the NCAA doesn't require it for wrestling, since their Genius/NCAA Live Stats software can't really get a good ROI on the R&D it would take for them to build that for wrestling and have enough paid schools to justify building it out. We have too many nuances - matches that don't count, team competitions, open competitions, invitational team-scored competitions. So many variables that aren't like team sports where it's "Team A vs. Team B" - go. I still hope for a day that we can have official results from an NCAA/NAIA/NJCAA sponsored repository, but until then, we'll have where it lives. I have my own results backend and historical backend. I don't market it. I put it places where I can quickly access it, but I also don't want the time I spent building those pages and formatting and organizing that data to be ripped off. I also pay the Pirate an annual 'license fee' to use the results he sends out and compiles on his own time, because that has value. So yes, I'm using someone else's compilation for things, but I'm also paying that person for the rights to use it. We don't have a sport that's flush with "money" in the business of wrestling, so when I say it kind of hurts to see people just bailing on WrestleStat because they simply want their time compensated, I say it from a position that I've been there before. When you're paid to do something, there's a degree of responsibility and ownership that comes with it. Someone who jumps in, does something cool for free, then fades away. A lot of sites have come and gone over the years, usually when people go to college, get married, have kids, get a new job that's not as flexible. I've thought about shuttering the Preview Guide because it gets constantly shared by one person who buys it and then gives it away to 40 other people since data is so readily available now, sending a 15MB file isn't painful anymore. If everyone who actually read the preview guide actually paid for it in the way they were supposed to, I know I'd have a lot more financial resources to make it better. Imagine how much better this sport could be if we did invest in the time people Dan and Greg at WrestleStat, rather than recoil in horror at someone wanting to be paid for the hours of time that thousands of people benefit from? Yes, this is preachy. Yes, this is judgmental to a degree, since I've literally lived through this scenario several times. It's why its important as a sport that we support ourselves with the places who spend the money to do things. Ripping off streams and posting them for free takes money away from our sport. The number of people who will claim "more eyes will see it" if its free don't realize that gratitude doesn't pay the bills. I'll get off my soapbox now and tell everyone to get off my lawn. Yours in wrestling, JB

Been building a master D1 men's dual schedule. https://almanac.mattalkonline.com/standings/schedule.html

Got a box of the K-cups in my dorm here in Fargo. It's pretty good. I'm admittedly NOT a coffee snob, but I drink enough to know it's good.

You spend too much time in the dome, you get Domesick.

Rolled sirloin tip roast.

Good to know. The bad takes over there are often rooted in somewhat rational thought and far less tribalistic fanaticism.

Host country used to get all its weights (and teams), but I don't believe that's been the case since post-Athens. UWW is enacting some new qualification routes for 2028.

Floyd adjacent: Anyone ever do the Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon sync?

Reading: Five minutes today. Worrying: Never. Posting: You can see how little I post on these threads - so maybe 2-3 posts on a thread every 3-4 months when I make the mistake of coming across some asinine shit.

How much time do you spend listening to speeches from politicians in states you don’t live in?

Maybe mind your own business - I don’t care about anyone’s political views or stances or whatever gets all y’all’s panties in a bunch and I sure as hell don’t give two sh*ts about what people tell me I should be looking at when they have no idea how I lean, vote, or care. I’m not here to waste brain cells arguing with people who are unable to change their minds on anything. I’m just on this thread to say this whole flag thing is a big waste of everyone’s time, not a big deal, and those trying to politicize it either way need to take off the tin foil hats. You’ll live a happier life. End of my input on this thread. Continue arguing amongst yourselves …

NOT. A. BIG. DEAL.

The guy who designed it is from Luverne - not exactly a hub for political activism or cultural diversity. I liked other flag designs, but if you believe this was Somali inspired, take off the tin foil hats. This state flag topic is about as useful as a parka in the Arizona desert at high noon. Only time a state flag has been relevant is on a geography quiz or bar trivia. Not. a. big. deal.

Wasn’t based on a true story but had a realistic storyline.