Jason Bryant

Transferred from Lassen Community College.

Until we see Division I de-emphasize conference affiliations across the board, any format that fractures a conference-based structure is a death sentence, IMO. That being said, I like where you're going with it @killdozer, providing balance and logic to the topic - which we know isn't something we always like to apply to the sport.

I really loved doing the show with Matt. COVID zapped that … as Rudis had to decide different places to invest its money, mainly with its people. Matt’s had a bad run of health issues since so I really don’t know if we would have continued if there was no shutdown. I liked where Cody Goodwin and I were going, but I need to find the right co-host if I’m going to do a topical show. Matt and Cody were great minds for that.

As stupid as this sounds, from an administrator's point of view, it's Director's Cup points.

Tournament scoring as a whole is just bad to begin with.

There were 69 Previous Placewinners in this year’s field 26 of them DNP (37% of returning placers DNP) Including 3x All-American Brock Mauller 52 returning placers from 2023 15 of them DNP (28% of returning placers from last year alone) Including returning finalist Matt Ramos.

The coaches vote on both the season and tournament coach of the year awards. This is their decision.

Checks in at 258 pages this year. Outside of the cover, back cover, thank you page, table of contents and plugs for longtime shooters Mark Lundy and Tony Rotundo and supporters Resilite and Compound, should be 249 full pages of actual content.

So instead of “All you need is love,” we get a bunch of joker cards people haven’t paid attention to in 20 years … and a bunch of Faygo? Of note: Saw ICP live in 98-99 … real fun show.

The configuration for the Xfinity Center wasn’t at its 18K layout. I’d assume it was maybe 14K available but I was told 12k was sold pre-event.

Another Hint: He’s a current head coach in the NAIA.

I thought it was military service, I'll have to check again. BTW, these questions are great. Even though I have tons of the data at my disposal, some of these questions don't jump out at me and when you post something that I have to look up, it often leads me down a different rabbit hole. Every educational, not just for me, but for everyone. It's important that we share our "pre-internet" history of the sport, because there's a lot of great stories and situations that unfolded in those times.

Interviewed Al last year for Rummy Macias’ 100th birthday. Interesting guy.

Site does a couple stories a week. Recaps, previews, feature. I’ve noticed the main scroll doesn’t always update with the most recent story, but Shannon Scovel does a fine job - remember, that is a general information type of site. Our sport as a whole doesn’t mandate NCAA stats, so we don’t provide a score API like most of the team sports do. I wouldn’t think any fan of any niche sport would go to their site for breaking news - that’s what sites like this are for. I’ll often include the features in my newsletter - but if anyone expects them to provide things our sport doesn’t provide ourselves already, you need to reset your expectations of what their .com is.

@Fadzaev2 I'd recommend looking at 1969 as the start of the modern era, since that's the first year (save '47) freshmen were eligible, so we get to the "four timer" era.

Borrowed my wife's kindle a few years ago for a trip when I was doing through The Hunger Games trilogy and I just blew through those books in weekend. I don't think I'd ever read three books so fast. Granted, I ended up being sick and laying in bed the whole weekend, but the kindle was a pretty good experience.

I’m not dogging audiobooks, but for this resolution, I want to physically turn the pages.

Pick up my annual Preview Guide at wrestlingpreviewguide.com - it’s great for winning and hosting things like this. This year’s won’t be available until Tuesday(ish) before D1s.

I will tolerate zero Ollie hate. He’s awesome.

I feel like this is a real life Dave Skylark situation going on ...

Having only been to Moscow in Russia, I didn’t find the subways to be notably better than anyplace else I’ve traveled overseas (I’ve been to 29 countries). I found the old Russian subway cars pretty unforgiving and the subway itself reeking of cigarettes - which isn’t uncommon in Eastern Europe and Russia. From my experience, the Moscow subway is pretty easy to navigate, despite not knowing much Cyrillic.

I made a simple New Year's Resolution to read more books. I'm starting slow, trying to read a new book a month. As an avid podcast listener, I have to get back into the habit of turning pages. January: I completed Prisoners of the Castle by Ben MacIntyre, which chronicles the numerous stories of the escape attempts from Colditz, a German POW camp housed in an old castle. February: Currently reading Trash Talk: The Only Book about Destroying Your Rivals That Isn't Total Garbage. I was interviewed for this one, so it was sent to me and the author reached out to come on the show to talk about it. So when I have a guest on the show who wrote a book, I want to read the book so I'm educated on the topic. This one dives into the psychology of trash talk, interviewing some of the great sports villains across the ages. I'm about halfway through it. Pretty fun stuff and I get quoted in spots, although I do feel I'm being presented there as a pro wrestling journalist rather than a pro-wrestling journalist. I also listened to an audiobook two weeks ago using the Libby app (local libraries) called Games of Deception by Andrew Maraniss, which talks about the first U.S. Olympic basketball team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler-run Germany. I'd previously listened to his book about the first U.S. Olympic women's basketball team in 1976 in Montreal, so while its about roundball, I dig Olympic sports history and that one featured a former great from my alma mater. I don't "count" audiobooks in this exercise as reading, because you're not actually reading.

We were the Bulls (or Islanders or Bull Islanders) and in my era, we played Bulls on Parade by RATM. Nationally ranked at the time, so my thinking was when we played it, it added that intimidating edge to the poor local team we were about to beat 78-3.

Yeah, this is a puzzling comment since Tommy and Kevin are still putting out episodes. They just released episode 453 this week. Their website and feed address hasn’t changed ever.