MNRodent

There are tiers to being blue bloods in wrestling.... True Blue: Oklahoma State, Iowa, Penn State (double digits in titles). Kinda Blue: Minnesota, Iowa State, Ohio State, maybe Oklahoma. (have a title or two and many decades of being good). Light Bluish: Michigan, Arizona State, Cornell, Nebraska (1 or less titles and good for a long time).

Tommy Askey beat #2 ranked Jacori Teemer and #5 Ethan Miller (1 seed) in the same tournament and still only placed 5th. Welcome to the Big Ten tournament!

He was limping after the previous flurry in which Salazar tended to his poked eye. Then he collapsed real quick when Salazar grabbed a single.

True freshmen teammates at Minny, Vombaur and Jamison both knock off top guys.

Vance Vombaur, Minnesota over Beau Bartlett, Penn State.

Rare disease called Messenbrinkitis.

Uncle Rico vibes in his latest interview.

What a weird human being.

Sparks and Kemp both got a takedown on him at NCAAs.

I'm a Gopher fan and certainly admit that it would be foolish to pick Max straight up odds against a 4X champ in their first meeting. Starocci has a certain mat savviness that he would need to overcome. It's possible in a second meeting, but I want to see them wrestle once first before making that call.

Wolbert won 4-0 in the finals of the Cheesehead Tournament.

Yes, they have split wins this year.

Pinnacle puts out quite a few.

Well done. I was thinking Danzig as I was watching.

As a kid I got caught in a few "Dino Bravo airplane spins" on the playground. After about 10 spins, it is very hard to walk. I think the centrifugal forces affect the brain of the spinee more than the spinner, so this could actually be a good finishing technique.

They definitely do a great job and their guys transition well to the college game. They are building quite the conglomerate with I think 6 or 7 locations and maybe 10+ coaches. Most of the guys on the Minnesota roster (as well as the Mirasolas) wrestled primarily at Max Askren's location. It's a good business model and I think the guys can go to different locations to get different partners for a change of pace.

So many questions...breaks for lunch and dinner? bathroom breaks? same ref the whole time? How was the fan experience?

The college refs are not having a good weekend, missing a lot of apparent takedowns. The worst may be at 141 in the Nebraska/Indiana dual. Indiana got charged with a coach misconduct call, when assistant coach Chad Red threw a challenge brick to protest a takedown call that was awarded to Brock Hardy. It was a soft toss that appeared to glance the ref's elbow or side of his body. The ref was directly between the action and where the coaches were sitting, so hard to avoid coming close to hitting him. The announcers laughed and said that Red apologized. After the review, that the Hoosiers lost, they were deducted a team point that they didn't have, so they wrestled almost the entire dual at -1 team score. What are we doing???

This is a good point. Contrary to some people's opinion, wrestling the toughest possible competition in practice all the time, every day is not best way to improve for most people. I think the key to success is finding the ratio of partners you can have success against to partners that don't let you get away with sloppy technique and keep you in your place.

Not rankings, but I like this site for looking at old NCAA brackets. In some but not all of these brackets you can see the seeds. Brackets

I don't see nearly enough rodents on your big board chart.

Whoever Brands decide to go with, I hope they don't Teske him.

Not that I heard, but he was having a good workout during warm-ups and didn't seem hurt or sick.

A few starters out for both teams, so the only really interesting match was 184. Jon "Bones" Jones was mat side, cheering for Gable and the guys. Minnesota 35, Purdue 6 165: #15 Andrew Sparks (MINN) over Stoney Buell (PUR) (TF 20-4 6:32) 174: #21 Clayton Whiting (MINN) over #25 Brody Baumann (PUR) (SV-1 4-1) 184: #4 Max McEnelly (MINN) over Orlando Cruz (PUR) (TF 20-4 5:39) 197: Ben Vanadia (PUR) over Gabe Nagel (MINN) (Dec 7-1) 285: #1 Gable Steveson (MINN) over Hayden Filipovich (PUR) (TF 18-3 2:35) 125: #7 Cooper Flynn (MINN) over Isaiah Quintero (PUR) (Dec 5-2) 133: Dustin Norris (PUR) over Brandon Morvari (MINN) (Dec 14-7) 141: #8 Vance Vombaur (MINN) over Cole Solomey (PUR) (TF 22-6 6:12) 149: #26 Drew Roberts (MINN) over Isaac Ruble (PUR) (MD 13-3) 157: #9 Tommy Askey (MINN) over Wyatt Krejsa (PUR) (TF 21-2 5:00)