fishbane

It is a risk. If the US isn't invited maybe he could apply to participate as a neutral athlete represent AIN or something? Though I don't think any nations weren't invited the last time. It could be a compelling competition at least in terms of wrestling. None of the men's freestyle gold medalist from the 2021 Olympics will be in Paris. It's possible 3 (Uguev, Sidakov, and Sadulaev) will be at this.

I think the timing is better than in 1984. In 1984 they had some events before the Olympic Games and others after. That schedule doesn't seem likely to draw many nations participating in the Olympics, but the 1984 Friendship games were largely supported by teams that were boycotting the 1984 Olympics. This time around, I suspect they think it's more important to try and get teams to do both rather than boycott the Olympics in favor of the Friendship Games.

Kelber and Cross might be a complete list. Who were their college losses? Tom was 159-7-2. He lost at Midlands his senior year to Alan Fried. His junior year he was undefeated. His sophomore year he lost to Dave Zuniga at Big Tens and to Alan Fried I think at an open or maybe an early season dual. His freshman year he was 32-4-2. He lost to Kendall Cross and Jim Martin at NCAAs and also lost to Martin in the finals of Midlands. I'm not sure about the 4th loss. Terry's record is 137-7. He was undefeated as a senior. His junior year his only loss was to Kelber in the NCAA final. His sophomore year he was 33-2. One loss was in an early season open to Gary McCall and the other one may have been that double DQ with Jeff Prescott. His freshman year he lost 4 matches. Two of those were at the Midlands to Larry Jones and Jack Griffith. Not sure about the other two. Maybe Steve Martin at some open?

Russia previously announced their intent to revive the World Friendship Games this year. It is scheduled to be held September 15-29 and wrestling is on the program among other sports. Russian officials states that they expect at least 70 countries to partake. Have any countries announced they are sending a team? Do you think any American wrestlers will compete? Flo has been pushing the idea of Jordan Burroughs trying to make the 2024 World Team at 79kg and the possibility of him meeting Sidakov there. I'm not sure how likely that is to happen, but I also recently saw on social media that Sidakov is planning to enter into MMA. I'd think Dake or Burroughs going to the Friendship Games for another crack at Sidakov at 74kg before he goes into MMA would be a pretty compelling story. Similarly Spender Lee seeking out Uguev or Snyder taking on Sadulaev there would be pretty badass, in my opinion. Almost like something out of a Rocky Movie. For those that don't know the history of the Friendship Games, they were last held in 1984 when Russia and much of the Eastern Bloc boycotted the 1984 Olympics in LA. Athletes from 49 countries participated including nearly all the top athletes in the Eastern Bloc. The only American to make the trip was sprinter Alice Brown who won a Silver medal in 100m LA. She was unable to duplicate her success in Moscow and did not medal at the Friendship Games.

Yes the median is the middle value. If there are an odd number of values this is the one in the middle. If there is an even number of values then it is the mean of the two middle values. Koll coached for 14 years which is an even number. The middle values are 19.25 and 23 points. Up until sometime in the 1990s it was possible to earn 1/4 of a point at NCAAs. A fall was 1 bonus, a TF was 0.75, and a major was 0.5 at some point. The average of these two is 21.125 or displayed to 0.1 precision 21.1. I kind of disagree on the merits of using the mean for NCAA placement, which was the only stat where I omitted it. Often, and especially for lower point totals, a difference of a few points can mean several places. Coaches don't coach that many years so a single off year can move the placement mean more significantly than the points. For Sunderland his mean placement was 14.6 and for Koll it was 13.6. Over 2 points is added to Sunderland's average by a single year, 2002, when they finished 35th. I omitted median from both AA and individual national champs. In the case of champs it was useless - they are both 0. For AAs it didn't seem that useful either. For Koll it's 1.5 and for Sunderland it is 2. I think the mean is more useful here too. I was consistent here. I also didn't count Sunderland's AA placements in his totals either.

Sunderland's record was worse than Lorenzo, Fritz, and Sanderson but it was somewhat comparable to Koll at least at NCAAs. Koll had a much better dual record. Sunderland produced the same number of national champs in 3 fewer seasons than Koll. Sunderland also had 27 AAs in 11 seasons vs 20 in 14 for Koll. in Koll's era there were only 6AAs/weight vs 8AA/weight in Sunderland's. Still as a percent of available AA placements Sunderland's total was higher. Another consideration in this comparison is that not all wrestlers received a consolation berth when Koll coached which would depress his totals. Comparing their team placements which controls these rule differences it's still close. Koll's teams had a medial NCAA placement of 12.5. Sunderland is slightly better at 12. The top performances also slightly favor Sunderland. PSU's 3rd place finish in 2008 was better than any under Koll and Sunderland also produced 4 AAs 3 separate times and PSU never had more than 3 AAs in a season under Koll. Clarion, ESU, Lehigh, Lock Haven, Pitt, and Temple finished ahead of PSU at NCAAs during Koll's tenure. Lehigh, Penn, Edinboro, and Lock Haven, finished ahead of PSU at NCAAs and Pitt tied with PSU one year under Sunderland.

Sunderland coached PSU for 11 years and had an overall record of 115-90-2. This is the worst record of any PSU coach except for Paul Campbell who coached for 4 years during WWII. Sunderland's best dual season was 2005-2006 when PSU was 13-4 and his worst was 2001-2002 when they were 6-12. Sunderland's best Big Ten tournament finish was 3rd, which he accomplished twice, and his average finish was 5.2. His worst finish was 10th in 2001. He coached 7 individual Big Ten champs. His best NCAA finish was 3rd in 2008, though his highest point total was 78.5 in his first season 1999 when PSU was 4th. Their average placement during his tenure was 14.6. They were in the top 5 2x, top 10 4x, top 25 10x. The only season they finished outside the top 25 was in 2002 (35th). Sunderland coached 27 AAs or about 2.45 per year. His best was 4AAs in 1999, 2003, and 2008. His worst was 0 in 2001. He coached 3 individual national champs (Pritzlaff 1999, Hunter 2001, and Davis 2008). PSU's performance under Sunderland was below their historical averages. His immediate predecessor, John Fritz, was the only PSU coach in the Big Ten era other than Sunderland and Sanderson. Fritz's record was 87-33-2 over 6 seasons with his best season being 22-0-1 in 1993 which was PSU's first season in the Big Ten. His worst was 5-12 in 1995. Under Fritz PSU was 2nd in the Big Ten 3x (1993, 1996, and 1998). His average finish was 3.17 and his worst was 6th in 1995. He coached 12 individual Big Ten champions which is 2/year on average. His team's best performance was 3 in both 1993 and 1994. The closest he came too a Big Ten tournament title was in 1993 when PSU scored 123.5 team points only 4.5 behind Iowa. At NCAAs Fritz's teams finished in the top 10 all 6 seasons and the top 5 all but one. Their best finish was 2nd in 1993. Their worst was 10th in 1995. Their average finish was 3.83. Fritz coached 21 AAs or 3.5/season. He had 5 AAs in both 1993 and 1998. The fewest AAs PSU had under Fritz was 1 in 1997. Three wrestlers won individual NCAA titles under Fritz - McCoy 2x, Hughes, and Abe.

I think it is less cool. It's a long drawn out version of LeBron's "The Decision" crossed with Amazon's HQ2 bid process.

Should the president impact culture? Is that really the mark of a good leader? If we made a list of heads of state and former heads of states over history that had the greatest impact on their country's/world culture it would be at least equal parts infamous.

Another approach is to introduce something to perturb the equilibrium. Assume a match starts tied and a TD attempt resulting in an equal chance of either you or your opponent scoring. This might result in wrestlers that do not want to initiate TD attempts. One way to change things is to put one wrestler behind on the scoreboard. Now the wrestler in the lead will have less incentive to initiate a TD attempt as there is a 50% chance he will be losing, but on the other hand the losing wrestler will have a 50% chance of reversing his fortunes with a TD attempt. This is essentially what is done in international freestyle. If no one scores, then by rule one point is given to a wrestler.

NIL was never illegal it was just an NCAA rules violation. I assumed that the limit on backpay for athletes in the original settlement being discussed (2017-2020) was because of some statute of limitations. If that's there case the NC State case could have some problems, but might be able to get some cut from the NCAA using the footage in more recently produced content.

The rise in tech falls could also possibly explain a drop in TDs and scoring actions per match. Since the point value of the TD increased the TF now requires potentially fewer scoring actions. The matches ending in TF could result in lopsided matches being cut short after fewer scoring actions. I don't know if this explains the decrease, but I think a first step in investigating it could be to normalize by wrestling time instead of number of matches. So a match that ending in TF 1:30 into the second period the number of scoring actions would be divided by 4.5, the number of minutes wrested in the match. Alternatively one could look at the per match metric and exclude matches that end early (TF and Fall matches that went less than 7:00).

No, I'm not. I was missing at least 2 - Kolat and Milkovich. Hard to argue against any of these 57. The four retired the longest that are not distinguished members are Scarpello, Kilgore, Burley, and Goldman. Gable is both a Glen Brand Inductee and a Distinguished Member.

I count 55 of these including O'Toole and Starocci who are still active.

I'm inclined to think the days of them not being employees are numbered. When they start writing checks to the players I think they are employees. I could see a path to equal pay prevailing. US Soccer settled an equal pay lawsuit with the Women's national team a couple years ago essentially agreeing to split the World Cup revenue of the men's team with them essentially giving them the same win bonus potential as the men. The women had failed in the courts though they were appealing and I think the settlement came not because its what would ultimately have been the result in court, but because of PR and to avoid the extended litigation. The men getting the short end of the stick, in that the revenue they earn is going to the women is to some extent moot currently given the relative performances of the two teams on the world stage and the relatively small amount of money we're talking about compared to their club contracts. If the men were to somehow go deep into into or win a World Cup only to see their substantial win bonus split with the woman, there might be another lawsuit from the other side. Then again the men are paid quite well from their clubs as it is so it might not be worth the fight. This could end up the situation in NCAA where unregulated NIL funds make up the difference between pay from the school and a revenue player's true economic value. I think that's true. As far as wrestling schools the service academies I don't see impacted by this. Lower division (D2 and D3) and schools that are wrestling up (F&M and the PSAC schools) probably are unlikely to be paying players any significant amount of money. The power 5 schools can probably afford to do this as the limit is set to only about 20% of their average revenue anyway and doesn't include revenue from donations. I would guess the largest area for concern from a wrestling perspective would be FBS schools that are not in a power 5 conference with wrestling teams. There aren't a ton of these (App State, Ohio, UB, Kent State, NIU. Central Michigan, ect.), but if competing in FBS is a priority for them they might drop some other sports to redirect funds.

There will be a lawsuit regardless. There is a fairly widely held belief that the opportunities must balance or at least be proportional to the makeup of the student body to pass title IX muster and that the payments to athletes could be proportional to revenue. I'd be surprised if any power 5 school pays the women's athletic staff as much as the men's. Schools are free to pay based on ability, experience, knowledge, and economic value for these positions why would it require the opposite for players? It seems likely that at least some schools will take this interpretation and run with it. This in turn makes it more likely for others to follow suit since that would put them at a disadvantage recruiting athletes to revenue sports. On the other hand making a flat payment to all athletes regardless of sport/revenue probably gets another antitrust lawsuit. It would seem to deny athletes in revenue sports from making their true worth in the market. Another lawsuit is inevitable regarding this, so I'd imagine administrators will likely choose to take the path that doesn't put them at a competitive disadvantage in the sports that are most important to their institution.

I thought he won U20 not U23.

$50.70 is a pretty good take from them. Just about the best possible. Their terms of service has a liability limitation of $150. What I find especially annoying about Flo is that is your go to their website and attempt to sign up they won't even tell you how much the thing costs until you've made an account. Before you even see how much it will cost you've already given them your information and agreed to their terms of service. Does any other service do this? Seems backwards.

The Big Ten is far and away the dominant conference in NCAA. It's been nearly 20 years since a team from another conference has won NCAAs. I think the changes to the qualifier system has only helped the richer conferences and the changes agreed in the settlement (removal of scholarship limits and ability to pay players) will only make it worse. Adding some inefficiency back into the system could help parity. The problem with using a 0.500 conference record is that you'd expect half the wrestlers to get into the tournament. This would be more than 33 wrestlers per weight. I think it would be interesting is if wrestlers had to qualify for the conference tournament based on their conference dual results. It would make the regular season duals more meaningful and reduce dodging, but it would take away from the team aspect of the conference tournament. Adding inefficiencies is one way to help parity. In profession sports this is often done with reverse draft order, a salary cap/luxury tax/financial fair play rules, roster limits, and revenue sharing. Most of these would be unworkable at the NCAA level. A draft is impossible. You can't send an athlete to a college he doesn't want to goo to because that school is bad at the sport he wants to play. A salary cap is essentially meaningless since NIL collective spending can't be effectively regulated. Roster limits are possibly but adding them at the same time as removing scholarship limits only will be a net negative for parity since the richer teams can add award more than 9.9 scholarship per year. Perhaps the only thing that can really be done to help parity would be to take a page out of the Olympic handbook. Limit the number of qualifiers. The fact that the US and Russia only get one entry at the Olympics and world championship has resulted with wrestlers going elsewhere and raising the level of other teams. Issue the 33 qualifiers to conferences based on the number of teams in the conference. There are 77 schools with D1 wrestling teams. The Big Ten only has 14 of those or 18%, so they only get 18% of the qualifiers. That would be 60 or 6 per weight, which is 1 fewer than expected by the 0.500 record criteria. Parity should be improved, since wrestlers will go to less rich conferences to get a spot at NCAAs. I'm very much in favor of a dual team championship, but I think it won't be as successful financially as the individual tournament. One thing that makes NCAAs a money maker is that it sells out. You have fan interest from 60 teams or so in the event. Fans know where it is ahead of time and are pretty much assured their team will be involved to some degree. With a dual meet title it would be more challenging to sell out. If this is a neutral site it would be extremely difficult. If it's hosted in Tulsa, OK are 16,000 people going to show up and watch PSU wrestle Iowa? This would presumably be the result of some bracket, so maybe a week before PSU and Iowa fans would learn their teams would be involved. Would that many fans make travel plans on a week's notice like that? The FBS bowl schedule has the conference championships 4 weeks before the major bowls. I doubt that would happen in wrestling.

The scholarship limit is 9.9 which was a 20% reduction from the old limit of 11. The settlement removes scholarship limits but imparts roster limits. Not sure what that will be in wrestling.

I tend to think these will be okay. The Big Ten is the money conference and the SEC is right behind it. The annual salary cap is set by 22% of the average revenue in the power 5 conferences teams in these conferences should be above or near the average. Id be more concerned with programs in the ACC and Big 12 which have relatively bad TV deals compared the SEC and Big Ten. I wonder if some non-p5 FBS schools will pack it in and go down to FCS. Whilst I think it remains to be seen whether this will be the doom of non-revenue sports it certainly isn't good for competitive balance in FBS football. It kind of sucks this happens a few years before the playoffs were set to expand. Probably makes it just as unlikely for a non-P5 team to get in as it was before expansion.

The NCAA could probably have a rule that coaches must be faculty, but they wouldn't be able to tell universities that they must have a pay scale for faculty nor that they strictly adhere to the schedule for all faculty appointments including coaches. All it would take is a handful of schools to care about winning to pay more for special faculty appointments. If would have happened if there were billions of dollars being collected and not shared with the players. The $2.75 billion settlement has to be paid, but I think that is over something like ten years. And dollars paid to football players have to come from somewhere, but schools aren't required to pay their football players at all in subsequent season. Will all schools opt to even do this? I doubt it. This will probably be common at FBS schools, less common at FCS schools, less common still at D2 schools, and unheard of at D3 schools would be my guess. You can probably add the service academies (Air Force, Army, and Navy) to the survivors. I don't see how this could take out the programs there. I think you can add Franklin and Marshall to the list of unaffected too. They are D3 for all sports except wrestling where the compete in D1. I don't see them blowing their entire budget paying football players. I'd say something similar about the PSAC schools (Bloomsburg, Clarion, Edinboro, Lock Haven), which are D2 except for wrestling, but they have experienced decreased enrollments and there had been talk of closing entire universities in the system a few years ago. The biggest threat is probably to FBS schools outside of the power 5 conferences. Most of these don't have wrestling. I think the only FBS schools outside of service academies not in a power 5 conference are App State, Central Michigan University, Kent State, NIU, Ohio University, UB, and Wyoming. Oregon State will also be out of the power 5 next season with the dissolution of the PAC-12.

7 different team champs was over 50 years not 30. Over the past 30 years only 5 teams have won team titles in wrestling. There are not 3x as many FBS football programs as there are D1 wrestling programs. If you go back 50 years in FBS football I think it is 22 different champs vs 7 in wrestling over the same period.

A team outside the Big Ten has not won in nearly 20 years (OSU 2006). A single title has been won by teams outside of the Big Ten and Big 12 since 1950.

I mean if each university independently decided to set up an internal pay scale for coach/AD/admin positions it would be fine. If they got together and did this on a conference/division/NCAA level this would violate antitrust law no question. Coaches and ADs know what each other make (or at least those as public universities) due to disclosure laws, so all it really takes is for a few to care about winning in a few sports for them to have to adjust the scale to market rate to get the person they want in the position they are trying to fill. One school decides they really want to win and pays up to get a coach, that fact becomes widely known, and any school that want to compete must do the same. Some students get more out of college than others, whether athletes or not, and some colleges take education more seriously than others, but by and large they provide student athletes with an education. Not doing this has always been against the rules and would remain against the rules after this settlement. Where pay-for-play helps is that in the past when a school didn't take their educational mission as seriously as they should the athlete's only compensation was a shitty education, now that the athlete can be financially compensated too. This makes the deal more fair for the player. Paying student-athletes was never illegal. NCAA rules are not laws. There should be a good reason for something to be "illegal" or even just institutional rules against it. We are talking about paying someone for doing something that generates revenue for the university that shouldn't be illegal. But that's what you described. And this has already happened and has been litigated. Back in the 1980s the NCAA used to sell the football TV rights as a package and distribute money to school. Some schools sued the NCAA for the right to sell the rights to their own games believing they could do better. They won the lawsuit with the NCAA found to have violated antitrust law. A group of schools got together and packaged their football TV rights for sale and swiftly found out they were getting less than what it was worth under the NCAA's deal. In my opinion the NCAA's reputation suffered more attempting to prevent paying the athletes than by this settlement. The settlement itself is tacit acknowledgment that the NCAA behaved unlawfully for years depriving NCAA athletes money that was rightfully theirs. The settlement goes to righting those wrongs. If players become employees like coaches transfers could go down. Professional athletes typically sign multi-year contracts. If Colorado is able to pay their players they might be able to sign a top recruit to a multi year deal and keep them around longer. What makes you think this will happen? How many D1 wrestling programs do you reckon will be around in 5 years?