CHROMEBIRD

No worries, he's on the Manville plan

I'd be inclined to take KOT over Haines in folkstyle too but yeah, Haines was solid on his feet in that FS match and getting to O'Tooles legs. If that was a folkstyle match the final score could've been something like 13-6. Some additional, minor factors that could work in Haines' favor are: 1) he's a more complete 174lb/79kg physically now than he was during WTT, and 2) he has Mesenbrink in the room to help him gameplan for KOT.

+1

I was talking about those flavored Liquid IV type hydration multiplier drink mixes. What brand is your electrolyte drink? It sounds pretty good.

2/23/25 at CHA should be fun.

I like Sasso's chances better at 157, too. 165 seems much more brutal. I'm sure he's got his hands full re-regaining his old muscle memory and technique without worrying about cutting weight, thoguh.

AJF learned a valuable lesson that day, which was to wait for a hot sec to have your arm raised before clocking a guy. Make it a team point deduction instead of a DQ so the stats don't get messed up!

Dang, I noticed the team score and was wondering the same thing. Would've been a horrible way to swing the dual.

Nice, I'm gonna go look for an empty cup

I was a little surprised to see that many wrestlers with that many matches under their belt. What's the average # of matches full-season starters are logging these days, and is it a pretty wide bell curve? What's the trendline looking like this millennium? Just thought I'd ask since the data peeps here may have it handy.

Also GatorGum was such a great spittin' gum. Better than Jolly Ranchers. I haven't seen it around in ages though and assume it's no longer made.

It's wild how "electrolytes" were rebranded into "hydration multiplier" to sell product to today's sports & fitness crowd. The CEO of one of those brands said the margins are insane because it's pretty much just Kool-Aid and salt. Sometimes potassium also. I think the OG Gatorade would taste unpleasant to a lot of today's Gatorade drinkers.

Fair question. It depends on how the tournaments implement it for wrestling. With the Players Era basketball tourney, teams get $1mil in NIL money just for participating, plus bonuses based on placement. Since wrestling is an individual sport, a better system might be to give teams NIL money for participating and award individual placewinners with bonus deals. The team incentive could level-out NIL imbalances across programs a little and help fund programs like Campbell and Stanford; the individual prizes would encourage guys to go 100% as if they were at Nationals, and not duck. If the NIL prize money was big enough, it could blunt transfers since wrestlers could win the deals no matter which school they were at. It might also be fun because teams could theoretically send out multiple wrestlers per weight for an even deeper field. There would of course need to be a fair way to select and invite the field of teams since hypothetically all teams could want to participate in the tournament. It might also be tricky to award NIL deals to the top x placewinners, since it's still against the rules, I think, to structure deals around athletic performance. I'm not exactly sure how basketball is getting around that.

We saw that Barr can hold his own against more physical opponents, but AJF is pretty strong if nothing else. I'd love to see Barr dominate the Focus, but I'm in the camp that he's better at 184 than 197. Need more data points to be convinced.

I forgot to post a link to the ESPN article. Second half of this piece: https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/42805108/mens-college-basketball-players-era-festival-change-nonconference-november-traditional-mtes

Funny, someone was just telling me over the weekend how Gatorade today tastes way different than it did in the 80s or 90s. The flavors are good, but they're all sickly sweet. I remember it being much more savory. I make my own electrolyte drink to consume after long rides or hikes with the same ingredients that @Warm Up Champ posted. Liquid IV hydration multiplier also has a diy recipe which is the same if not very very similar.

Do any of the D1 wrestling tournaments offer NIL deals? I was reading about the Players Era basketball tournament, which offered participating teams $1mil for participating as well as bonuses for advancing through the bracket and for winning. From ESPN: This seems like a much better implementation of NIL. Wrestling won't have anywhere near the prize money that basketball offers, but it would still be nice if sponsors setup a pool and awarded deals to participating wrestlers. It would encourage high-level participation, reduce ducks & MFFs, and help fund cash-starved programs. Tournaments like Midlands, Scuffle, etc. (and the media companies that broadcast them) would see new life. And it would create an automatic pool of high quality ambassadors for NIL sponsors. One catch with the basketball tournament is that the NIL money and goes to the schools' collectives. I'm not sure whether it would be better for NIL money to go directly to the athletes instead (or if it could work in an individual sport like wrestling), but overall I like this version of NIL more than deep-pocketed schools fishing around in the transfer portal and luring kids with bags. Or maybe it's all the same in the end, idk.

He does, but I think he might have just lifted and grown in the offseason. He didn't strike me as a huge 125er last year

Heh, nice to see Pitt-Johnstown in the mix though. One of these schools is not like the others!

I think someone mentioned this option in an earlier thread. IIRC the cut to 174 isn't pleasant for Gabe, plus why not make the Focus suck down instead? Assuming 174 isn't an option for Gabe, my preference would be to see PK win the spot. Brands get a lot of credit for AAing a couple of seasons ago, but I thought he had a pretty good draw, plus he isn't exactly known for racking up bonus pts as you mentioned. I just feel like Kennedy has more upside, including intangibles like team chemistry and firing up the boys. Hard to imagine him transferring given how much he loves Iowa. I wouldn't be surprised to see him stick it out and fight for his spot in the lineup.

Did Gross et 100% carnivore to help with the weight cut? Back in the day I remember my coach brought in a sports nutritionist who shared with us a bunch of different diets to help with weight cutting. One was literally eating all meat, as much as you want, nothing else. I think it was based on bringing your body into ketosis. Dunno if nutritionists today can or would recommend that specific diet, but I remember it totally working and shedding a ton of weight though feeling even more like *I poop my pants, don't laugh at me* than usual with zero energy.

ASU should on the phone with Kasak rn

Wrestling's own DeJuan Clayton. Yeesh.

Free the P...ierson