CHROMEBIRD

I'm also bad at 'rithmetic and have no idea what that means, but I'm fairly sure it has something to do with stalling

Agreed. The adjustment must be tough, esp with a language hurdle. I thought he looked completely lost in his match last year. Granted, he was thrown into the fire and it's just one data point. Six months is also an eternity in college sports time and I'm sure we'll see a big jump, but he's got a lot of muscle memory to overcome. He'll be a solid next man up since Figs has been battling injuries and will need a bit of load management

Easy there, I am proud to say that I can proficiently read and write at a 5th grade level. 6th if you don't get too crazy with the syllables

Yeah, spill the tea!

Yeah, participation and reach matter but freestyle seems to be more popular in higher revenue markets and it has gender equity, both which are very attractive to the IOC

I agree that if the Olympics wanted to get rid of Greco the spots wouldn't be reallocated to the other styles, but that's not exactly what we're talking about here. Rather, if the UWW wanted to use GR as a bargaining chip, it could propose cutting Greco in exchange for 9 weight classes for MFS & WW with 16-person brackets or perhaps 10 weight classes with 12- or 13-person brackets. Current 6-6-6 (MFS-GR-WW) w/ brackets of 16: 96 competitors per style, 288 total, 72 medals Propose 10-0-10 w/ brackets of 16: 160 competitors per style, 320 total, 80 medals Propose 9-0-9 w/ brackets of 16: 144 competitors per style, 288 total, 72 medals Propose 10-0-10 w/ brackets of 12: 120 competitors per style, 240 total, 80 medals Propose 10-0-10 w/ brackets of 13: 130 competitors per style, 260 total, 80 medals Propose 10-0-10 w/ brackets of 14: 140 competitors per style, 280 total, 80 medals A 9 weight, 16-person bracket would be no change in the eyes of the IOC, and a 10 weight 12-person bracket would reduce the size of the competitor pool (a key metric for the IOC) so much so that it would offset the 8 additional medals. 10 weights with 16- or 14-man brackets would likely be non-starters unless some other compromise was made (shorter matches, fewer medals, less time between matches & sessions).

Does this mean you'll stfu with the fake "PSU's going to lose" bullshіt posts for the next couple of seasons?

Folks will find loopholes if they really want to, but I believe the honus for reporting deals is on the athletes, not the sponsors or schools. My impression of the clearinghouse rules/NIL Go system is that they rely on honest self-disclosure by athletes, educational outreach, and the threat of audits and loss of eligibility to work as designed. And who knows if the clearinghouse will have the bandwidth to effectively review deals as they become increasingly complex (e.g., compensation in equity, crypto/NFTs, financial derivatives, revenue sharing)

Good analogy. Greco also sounds really cool on paper, esp to casuals, but doesn't meet the expectations of most at the highest levels.

Sam Cartella, 149 at NU. Tough kid.

The UWW says they want to preserve Greco because it has tradition, technique, and popularity outside of our freestyle-centric view in the US, Iran, Japan, etc. but I think they're reluctant to make cuts to GR because it gives FS and other styles an inroads in the Scandinavian, Nordic, and Northern European countries where people like Greco. I'm not sure the needle has moved very much for MFS/WW there, though

We all want to see more Olympic weight classes, but 10 FS & GR weights has only happened 7 times ever in the Modern Olympic era, and it was back when the Soviet/Unified Team competed. Remember, the current 6-6-6 model was adopted as a compromise to save wrestling's place in the Olympics after it was voted out for 2020. Also, idk if this is an IOC by-law or something, but they have a hard cap on the total # of competitors for the Olympics with the participant pool trending smaller each cycle, so adding more weights would mean reducing competitors in other events (a pretty tough sell) or making sacrifices to wrestling's existing styles (e.g., cutting weights from one style to add to another; smaller brackets; true bronze). It might just be a matter of time before the current styles are scaled back to make room for Beach Wrestling, anyway. Beach seems like a good strategic fit with the IOC's programming goals, for better or for worse.

Why not both? I don't know about "incentivize" but I thought the US had always been a T-shaped model where kids are encouraged to try out multiple sports with the option to go deep if they find something they really love or are good at, while still having the option to dabble in other sports. I hear people say that money and hypercompetitiveness are pushing more kids towards 'B', but I don't know how true that is. I also don't know if devoting a kid's life to one sport, like the sports academy model in Europe and other countries, is the best thing for them, especially at a young age where burnout and repetitive use injuries are prevalent. Arguably, competing in multiple sports exposes youth to multiple types of athleticism and athletic strategies, and skills you pick up in one sport can be beneficial in another, leading to higher overall athletic intelligence. Plus, 'A' offers a breadth of lifelong skills and broadens a kid's social circles and helps develop them not just into well-rounded athletes, but well-rounded people.

Haha yeah, what the heck? Probably bad data or some goofy anonymity threshold thing. Also who are the FCS/Non-football D1 schools that are giving out $10k+ deals to wrestlers? And who is funding men's gymnastics?? It'll probably be an interesting tool once they have a good data set. It would be nice to be able to export a table rather than deal with those klunky graphs and filters.

I'm not sure if this is where they landed, but I thought the proposed House settlement terms included the sharing of sanitized FMV data. I agree that the whole RoC calculus is a shіtshow waiting to happen

Academic qualification and US academic prestige become lesser concerns when it's harder for wrestlers to get a visa to study here, aren't eligible for pay while everyone else on the team is, and have to mostly ditch their style of wrestling.

Frank was asking if there are ways to bring in more international wrestlers today, not 10 years ago. Re-read the last paragraph of the post you just quoted.

I think in basketball the loophole was to compensate international players with "no labor" gigs, like dropping their name or image somewhere without the athlete having to actually do anything. Dunno how it would work now if the institutions rather than just the athletes bear the risk. Would love to see more of it, though. The RTC model is a great entry point

Also IIRC someone suggested previously that Ono would be on a J-1 (cultural exchange visa) with PSU, but I don't think it gets him around NIL & compensation. He's going to PSU because he loves the sport and is willing to wrestle under Cael on his own dime. Probably not a ton of guys out there like that.

The problem is that international athletes aren't eligible for NIL under their F-1 visa. There were loopholes to the employment & compensation restrictions, but it sounds like it's even more of a grey area after the House settlement and the risk would shift from the athlete to the school now: "Historically, NIL-related immigration compliance was seen as a concern only for individual athletes. If international student-athletes violated the terms of their F-1 visa, the consequences —- visa revocation, deportation, or reentry denial —- were theirs alone to bear... [But] with schools now positioned to directly compensate athletes, they face heightened exposure to legal risks, including civil and criminal penalties, reputational harm, and potential loss of federal funding, if they directly compensate international student-athletes on their rosters who are not authorized for employment by the Department of Homeland Security." Programs like the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, UM, UVA, etc. with elite academics could sidestep this and sell international recruits on the piece of paper they'd receive upon graduation, but obtaining an F-1 under the current administration is a far more burdensome (and slow, because they're backlogged) process now, with the screening & vetting, travel bans, and wait times. The DHS has also proposed changes to F-1 rules that would require international students to reapply and go through the process all over again, before their academic term is complete. I like the idea of bringing in more athletes from overseas, but competing here just isn't a super attractive option for international wrestlers.

Boxing, BJJ, and some other combat sports have AI models to capture analytics, so it's probably just a matter of time before there's a decent one for wrestling. I think the analytics would probably only be interesting to wrestlers, coaches, and serious fans. Casuals won't really care unless they can bet on it (or use the data to bet on matches). It might also suck if the sport got moneyballed into something where action gets displaced with boring efficiency. Like Taekwondo.

Kendric Maple and Mike Grey were also in the 2010 field but DNP. I'm thinking 2012 might be in the mix as well. 133 AAs that year were Logan Stieber Jordan Oliver Tony Ramos Chris Dardanes Devin Carter BJ Futrell Zach Stevens Steve Keith DNPs were Joe Colon, Cody Brewer, AJ Schopp, Mason Beckman, Ca$he Quiroga, Nick Arujau. That's a pretty thicc bracket. 2022 was pretty good too.

Interesting way off capping your NIL potential

I hope they received another $20mil donation