SocraTease

This response can be a form of "what-about-ism"? If the other wrestler is pushing the action, yes, it can be a form of stalling. If he is on his knee(s), then, no (not necessarily), because it is an understandable response to the lack of action (aka stalling) initiated by the guy on his knees. Why should he make an effort or step into a trap? Freestyle forces the wrestlers to act (i.e. wrestle). Folkstyle tends to tolerate much more passivity from all positions: neutral, bottom, and top (e.g., parallel rides, two boots in, hooking the leg, etc.)

We could subject this situation to the insightful perspective and understandable response of the innocent person who was lured to the match by a friend and fan of wrestling: "Hey, let's go get some popcorn, nothing is happening here. It looks really boring":

Aren't twins (the Brands) almost by (biological) definition a conspiracy of sorts since they shared the same breath in the womb and probably will continue to do so (in a broad sense) until the tomb? Conspire: literally "to breathe together," from com/con "with, together" + spirare "to breathe"

100 percent stalling. It is also extremely difficult for the other wrestler to attack or be offensive, so it slows down the entire match. It is comparable to a bottom wrestler bellying out or curling up not to get turned. Ayala wrestles from his knees sometimes. Dake has used it in freestyle. I think both Ferraris use it because they are taller and their legs are exposed. I bet both would get taken down a lot more if they weren't allowed to stall. It can be effective as a stall tactic, but it should be called stalling.

Especially in the Big 10 (actually the Big 14) and Big 12 (actually Big 13) conferences.

Anyone else think the potentially dangerous call in the SV part of the Plott-Ferrari match was rather quick and perhaps unnecessary. I would like to see the sequence again, but it appeared to me that Plott was close to the TD and could have worked for it or maybe gotten it with the 3 second exposure rule. The ref seemed to be calling most everything quick and tight

The CHA referee (sometimes)?

Some oxymorons: Rational fan Objective fan Dispassionate fan Fairminded fan If you find any of the above, please hire them as a referee.

Some of the possible semifinals at NCAAs might prove be more exciting than the finals. Perhaps it could be like football, where the matchups before the Super Bowl are more competitive or interesting than the final game. Hendrickson vs. Kerkviliet Haines vs. Hamiti or KOT Barraclough vs. Caliendo Buchanan/Barr/Ferarri (some combination) -------------- Bartlett/Mendez/Alirez (some combination) Keckheison vs. McEnally Shapiro/Kasak/Teemer (some combination) Van Ness vs. Lovett (redux) Robinson/Figueroa/Ramos (some combination)

The Ferrari Family: it's like watching a tacky Jersey Shore family show set in a house full of mirrors. The kids all hanging out in a room full of weights and listening to loud, bad music. The mom pumped up on plastic surgery. The Dad still in love with flashy sports cars in the driveway. The police having to break up late night parties. I'm surprised they haven't tried to make it into a reality show. The boys could invite over the Kardashians and make scatological jokes that are only funny to 9 year olds.

I bet Ferrari is like his brother ... not a team favorite at Iowa

Living on a knee in neutral should be called Stalling ... because it is. Ayala does that too

Can someone put Ferrari on a clock to see how long he wrestles on knee? If he does that on the edge, double the amount of time.

OKS leaving points on the board at 125 (one point shy of a tech fall) and 174. No urgency from Hamiti to get the TD at the end. No urgency from Amine to get out from the bottom. DT needs to slap around some of these guys in the room tomorrow.

Brands is doing a whole of .... nothing

Where's the stall call on Brands? He's lying completely flat

The guy running the clock seemed like he was (inadvertently?) trying to "carver" Fish out of riding time. The RT clock kept accruing for Teemer for more than 20 seconds while Fish rode him. They may have corrected it, and it didn't make a difference in the end, but it looked, um, "Fishy" on TV at least.

Teemer isn't going back to the NCAA finals. No cardio and he can be ridden.

Ramos weighed in and was warming up. His coach "ducked" him against Nebraska's Smith

It would be a rather un-DT thing to do that. But, who knows, power changes (and corrupts) people.

Ramos (or, rather, Manning) just ducked Caleb Smith to preserve his undefeated record. He weighed in and was warming up but didn't go. No other word for it but "Duck".

Thank you for your good work and your generous-minded explanation and account, Iwrite (aka Mike)!

If it ends in a tie, instead of going to criteria, I would like to see DT vs. the Brands Brothers (tag team twins). I think the former can defeat the latter since he never lost a match to Iowa in his college days.

Ok; I sit corrected on the origins and "maintenance" (and bequeathing) of the Hodge Award, but I still stand on the aforementioned points about pins, bonus (aka "dominance"), and a stellar record with an outlier loss. I wonder if WIN (or Mike Chapman, et. al.) j unilaterally "revised" the criteria or how much they (or he) consulted the larger wrestling community. Just curious. My point: what I rarely see enough of in the wrestling community is meaningful transparency about process and decisions—from referees not defending their calls, to coaches hiding athletic injuries, to subjective seeding (or ranking) criteria, to wrestler's "ducking" sometimes and calling it something else. Perhaps it is just a feature of the "game" (match) or simply "gaming" the system but .... it is perhaps worth thinking (and talking) about. I find the wrestling community to be quite (too) conservative or at least closed in this regard—relying on the old guard, authority and often authoritarianism, lack of public record-keeping or sharing, so on. It's actually gotten much better over the years with services like FLO and Intermat, and others in part because journalism (and the Internet) seeks to bring what is hidden to light and to rely on analysis rather than mere custom or authority. You (Wrestleknownothing) actually perform a valued service in this regard because you look at the data, the analysis, the trends, the history of the sport, and so on and try to make sense of things for (us) readers who may be in the relative dark sometimes. So perhaps you deserve an "Honorary Hodge" for your work across numerous seasons and even a few "pins" of facts upon theories and speculation.

That 2022 article just looks like an article (or articles) by Win magazine—a kind of loose reporting. I have never seen anything that is officially put out by the NCAA (or another legitimate body that governs the voting for the award) except what I posted earlier. I wonder if no such document actually exists and Hodge voters are just following reporting done by wrestling services that might actually "get it wrong" so to speak. In lieu of an official document with the criteria that voters are supposed to follow, I find it conceivable that Hodge voters are just following what is loosely seen as common practice now, supplanting the original Hodge criterion (pins) with "dominance" or "bonus rates". If so, that simply represents a change in cultural practice—valuing tech falls and majors as much as pins (which goes against the original language of the award.) I bet pinners like Scalles and Askren and even more recent guys like Taylor, Nolf, and Nickal (who all had 50 plus pins), among others, might find that problematic. It would amount to a form of hijacking the award through interpretative subterfuge. Again, I'm not sure if this what has happened or not, but until we see written confirmation of the actual and current and revised award criteria by a legitimate body that governs the Hodge, this is a distinct possibility. If pins are (or should be) part of the Hodge criteria, then to ignore them is a kind of "crime" against Hodge the process (and maybe even Hodge himself). On a related note, "record" is clearly part of the criteria, but that has somehow been widely and unofficially interpreted as meaning you can't lose a single match and win the award. Personally, I would vote for a wrestler who pinned 20 guys or more (or was completely and utterly dominant in his weight class), and won NCAAs but perhaps lost one match due to, say, an injury default or even an apparent fluke like getting caught in a cradle and giving up four back points (causing one close loss) to a lesser wrester that he had beaten many times previously. Steveson and Mesenbrink, for example, are clearly "dominant" in their weight classes, but if they would lose a pre-NCAA championship match due to injury default (e.g., like Kasak), should they de facto become "ineligible" for the Hodge? Or, if say, Haines wins out, and beats both KOT and Hamiti, shouldn't he at least be considered as a Hodge candidate. Translation: I don't like the "purity" vote and thinking that one has to be undefeated to win the Hodge. There are, it seems, conceivable exceptions to that 'pure' "rule".