wrestle87

Spencer is the real deal, his knees, however, no longer are. He and austin gomez live in the same category in my head. They have all the skill they need to win an olympic finals match. But they both are one weird shot or a leg lace away from injury defaulting out of the tournament.

This absolutely made my day. This is a very high quality thread....the truest spirit of this place.

You have me imagining john smith in all of clint eastwood's best cowboy roles...and I gotta say, it's not a bad look

4 is the odds on number. Any less would actually be a disappointment for the club. Which 4 it winds up being is up in the air, but I think 4 is not an unreasonable number. Once again crazy that competition coming from within that room at many weights is more difficult than it is coming from the rest of the country.

I yelled this same thing in my own head when I saw this bracket structure…just lazily constructed.

I know about the first one, what happened to these dudes? Did they all just decide to run that zoo?

Higher Ed is a mess...and as politically driven as any "industry" that exists...competing with politics itself. AD's have near zero accountability within an organization, and institutional opacity is tremendous. In poorly run organizations, athletic departments are basically unchecked fiefdoms at small D1 schools like ODU. I love what they best programs are able to provide to the sport, but they smaller programs very much live and die at the whim of random administrators, hence the sports collective distrust of Stanford as an institution.

Oh yeah...sorry I was not meaning to imply any similarity whatsoever in terms of personal character

We’re in a very weird place when I don’t know if a comment is more appropriate for PD3 or J’den.

Straight spitting bars

That was quite an evening...that was the week we were reminded that USAW has suits.

Don't go too far down this rabbit hole...from what I gather, the North Face tried to do some moral boasting with a donation to a particular organization...and is now trying to manage its perception within the LGBTetc community by making another donation to an organization with a different mission. They stuck their right foot in with a donation to one place...then tried to course correct and got their second foot stuck...now they are fully in it.

Ah, thank you, that both explains it and…explains…it. Well, goddamnit that the best women’s club is closing, and goddamnit that such an environment was allowed to exist or continue within that club. Hopefully they go and and stuff Park Merry in some paper pushing admin position far far away from rising athletes with hopes dreams and trusting hearts.

I’m not going to lie, when I saw this thread title my first thought was “dang, that still exists?” Kinda like hearing that somebody’s brother finally decided to sell their old rusty early 90’s saab they had parked out back for two decades.

While absolutely clown status, PD3 is a former world team member, the dude is not a bad wrestler. Now, nobody in the world knows what he's been up to for who knows how long, but the dude is indeed a legit wrestler. Starocci, equally a legit wrestler. The idea of calling a 4x champ pathetic after winning the title in a stacked weight class on one knee is also...gently silly.

I would not be surprised to see 'ringer, Hall, and Marstellar call it a career at trials. Hall hasn't really been that into it since his senior year of college, 'ringer is a 'tweener in the most brutal sense, same with marstellar. They are both very good, but neither of them has the frame or the style to be consistently making teams and succeeding. Downey will probably be done after this, but he lives in his own world, and I don't think he would view a "shoes on the mat" exit as a reasonable thing to do.

There are definitely layers to this thought process. I am clearly still new to the "chess not checkers" level of coaching movement analysis.

This is a great point. No matter how hard they may try, NYC proper is not a hub for wrestling, which is kind of astonishing considering how much north jersey and bergen county are. Letting go of a head coach position would be a pretty sizable step down in career path though, especially since he was at the helm for bringing a kid to AA status while swimming upstream running a program in Manhattan.

This is an incredible point, I had not even thought of that. But you are right, UCLA and USC should have nearly entirely mongolian and japanese teams. They would clean up.

I don't always tape my wrists and ankles, but when I do, I also pull the drawstring on my hoodie real tight. I don't always sweat in buckets from my wrists, waist, and ankles, but when I do, I make sure no opposing coaches are anywhere nearby.

They used to be super legit back in the day, what the heck happened?

UCLA and USC should absolutely be under the gun to add wrestling. Both have titanic athletic departments, and have tons of home-grown talent to pull from.

I would also be shocked if Grey left, just depending on how calculating he chooses to be, now is definitely the moment to do so. He has punched two great finishes out of his lineup. From the Penn perspective, maybe Slay was expecting to be the heir apparent and Valenti getting named is having trickledown effects on the RTC. Slay doesn't have the Ivy-style polish that Valenti does.

My knee-jerk was Mike Grey getting poached by someone in the big ten. He's done a great job a few years in a row, Vito just graduated, and Vito was the last light weight guy he had a lot of years with in the room before becoming head coach. It would be lame for Cornell, but with the "Ivy League" becoming a thing, that will really take the shine off of Cornell's dominance in the future, going from a tier 1B conference to a tier 3 conference impacts schedules somehow. Grey is also coming off the best result he will have for a very long time as a coach, great time to find a new place somewhere else. It would have to be a really top team though at a school that really supports its program. Harvard gives zero craps about its program. They just have more money than god, and Weiss (seemingly) does a very good job of keeping the team on the university's good side. And not to intentionally poo-poo the idea of Tanelli going to Buffalo, but it seems like he's got the Columbia team built to a higher standard than Buffalo has been performing at, AND he has access to NYC, his high school stomping grounds for recruiting, and the pull of New York City. With another year or two, Columbia will be the perennial #2 behind Cornell (assuming Grey stays). Punching someone through to the semifinals this year was a big big deal.

JB likely has spear-doubled himself into a neck injury, and Dake is the returning freaking silver medalist. That’s higher than both Snyder and Helen Maroulis placed last year. Dake is a monster, and he blanked burroughs so hard in 2021 that JB completely left the weight class. The weight cut is likely an unacknowledged/underappreciated issue for JB now too. I think we see a nolf dake final, and it goes predictably.