CHROMEBIRD

He should start a business selling beds. Call it Coleman's Cot.

Along similar lines, I wonder if NIL makes it harder for AJ Ferrari to find a landing spot, because having him on the roster could hurt NIL deals for your other wrestlers. Most fans here can separate AJ and his antics from his teammates and program, but brands can be pretty risk-averse. Maybe an NIL sponsor passes on making a deal with a kid because they're afraid consumers will connect the kid with the program & AJ. Idk.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm on pins and needles here waiting to see which 7 schools Bo will cut tomorrow

But if we send AJ, imagine what the Russians would offer us to take him back

I hear you. I just meant that if times & records are decided by fractions of a second, then it's a roll of the dice whether the wind was blowing the right way or that the technology started and stopped the clocks at exactly the right nanosecond, or that the competition surface was favorable, or someone's uniform was made of the right material or whatever, and therefore kind of stupid. It gets worse (more boring) as these elite athletes approach theoretical limits of human speed.

It's like 6 weeks after the Olympics, so maybe it'll see a lot of B-Team talent, if teams show up at all. For wrestling, it would overlap with U20s and be about a month before U23s and Worlds. So my expectations are low.

According to Brands, their dad was an abusive alcoholic which is why TnT don't drink.

Didn't she retire from WFS right after winning the Olympics? I guess that's another challenge, when wrestlers who win move on from the sport when people pay attention. Like Gable, sort of, and Cejudo. Rulon had a great opportunity after he beat Karelin and then mounted a comeback the next cycle. Idk what happened there.

I see what you're getting at. A guy I know was an Olympic hopeful in archery, says all of the "judged" sports need to be cut: gymastics, artistic swimming & diving, ski jumping, figure skating, etc. Says there's too much subjectivity for them to be real sports. I will say that a lot of the racing sports are approaching BS territory. When you're reaching absolute human limits and event times are decided by tenths or even hundredths of a second, it's not superior athleticism, it's chance. And also equipment.

Gotta take the good with the bad!

Consider who retweeted Hrovat in the original post.

I don't really buy the defeatist, niche sport argument. MMA, beach volleyball, and sport climbing were niche sports until they weren't. A big challenge imo is that wrestling doesn't really have any big charismatic personalities that have broken through outside of the sport. JB and Chamizo are popular, but they're not household names like you see (since women's sports were mentioned) in women's swimming, gymnastics, tennis, basketball, and soccer. Even non-sports fans are able to connect with names like Katie Ledecky, Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, Diana Taurasi, and Alex Morgan. That gives them a reason to tune-in and watch. Wrestlers otoh tend to be more subdued and humble, stick to generic talking points, and don't amplify rivalries as they should. So there's little reason for the media to pick up on wrestling. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why wrestling doesn't get more mainstream attention. The lack of personalities to love or hate just doesn't do the sport any favors.

Dang. Out before the game even started. That's rough, like losing the pigtail matches of recruiting.

AJ's t-shirt: Bono is my homeboy Starocci's t-shirt: Ferrari is my ride

Kind of a boring tactic to stay relevant over the summer, but maybe he's doing it for more than attention. 7 is a strange number of schools to cut each week, but doing so gets him down to a top 10 around the start of the school year. That gives him some time to spread the word and get people to start paying attention as we turn our focus back to college wrestling after the Olympics. Then if he eliminates 1 school per week from his top 10 he could build enough engagement to drive up his marketing valuation and create an NIL bidding war among his top 3 or 4 schools, which I'm sure he already has in mind. At least I'm hoping he's being strategic about this social media stunt.