wrestle87

This is so very true. The wrestling community really doesn't have a good understanding of how BIG football players are. With the exception of a few defensive ends aside, Linebackers are almost uniformly the scariest guys on the field, both physically and mentally. Keuter is a 30% away from filling into that size. That sort of size takes time, and it takes rest. Also, the amount of homework that football players do every week to be ready for game time is absolutely insane. If you ever listen to the top football guys start talking football with one another, it is another language. I'm not saying any of this to poopoo Keuter's chances. I hope he is able to attain his goals. But...considering that we live in an era where Freshman can come in and dominate at any weight class when they are of his caliber...and let's be clear he was high AA caliber coming out of High School just based on placement alone...his time with football has taken him from that down to a much more mediocre r16 kind of guy. He is good enough at football to get a roster spot on a Big10 team. That's impressive. But guaranteed that his wrestling is having a similar effect simply because he is splitting his year in two, and is not fully engaged in learning and honing his football craft. Football coaches always talk about wanting guys who wrestled. They mean in High School. How many college wrestlers have made it in the NFL in the past 20 years? I know there are more than Stephen Neal, but I can only think of Stephen Neal. I know Lesnar and Coon both bounced out. Keuter's not out there pulling a Gable Steveson in his first year. And last I checked, they didn't pull his redshirt in football so he could go hold down the defense with his unprecedented raw football ability. I just don't want a very hardworking and accomplished young man to fall victim to the whispers of the marketing machine in the Big10 and elsewhere to convince him to make short term decisions that detract from his ability to achieve his highest goals.

I did not know that. I'm rather surprised they didn't hype that up more. But...then again, NW may have just turned its nose up at the idea of athletics mattering at all.

Him being an "NFL Prospect" has been something that the WRESTLING community has talking about, frankly because we don't collectively understand the football side of things at all. Is Keuter really good enough to be on an NFL track? 1.6% of NCAA football players go on to play pro. After a (very) cursory perusal of a few football sites, sounds a lot like our boy is a better wrestler than a football player. Honestly, if he were that good at football, he wouldn't even consider wrestling. The economics for football success so outweigh what wrestling can offer, the fact that he's two sporting it kinda says everything. And, realistically, we are in a time when the two sport thing doesn't work. Two guys did it, and the BigTen network LOOOOVES the talking points, but Nutmasher and Keuter are extremely middle of the road right now. AND, they are giving up at least 50% of their bandwidth to pursue both sports. Now, maybe Hutmacher did it to slim down a bit as part of something strategic for football. But Keuter...this year at least, the dude is really a 197 who just isn't cutting weight. If he's going to do football and give it a shot, I hope he does. Because he's going to be missing out on a lot of skill development time, not just time in the room, but physical adaptation and CNS adaptation as well. It's also 50% of the year that he's not building relationships with the guys on his team and the coaches too.

I am not hopping in here just to be the guy that disagrees. I will leave my thoughts on why a pushout would be bad, but I would like to share about a recent experience I had going back and revisiting old NCAA matches, and how much these new rules, including the edge stalling, have improved folkstyle. Specifically, I was going back and watching the old early 2010's 174 matches, with that murders row that just chopped each other to pieces every year. I'm talking about robert kokesh, logan storley, matt brown, mike evans, and chris perry in particular. I rewatched the final between Matt Brown and Chris Perry. My mind, having adjusted to expect modern scoring, was aghast at how that match was wrestled and officiated. With current edge stalling (and dropdown count stalling, which is terrific as well), Matt Brown would have had zero trouble winning that match. Multiple point margin of victory because of how the lack of a stalling rule allowed Perry to just escape bad situations he put himself in to waste time. The edge stalling could be improved, because...like just about everything that doesn't have a count attached to it, it is officiated inconsistently. I would prefer putting metrics to the OB stalling, instead of just doing away with it. I do understand what you are saying, but I think a pushout rule would ruin folkstyle wrestling. It would introduce so much more new strategy, and would turn scoring into more of a mess than it already is. If you have a pushout rule, you can't really have mat wrestling, because any semi-savvy top wrestler will manage the boundary to earn a pushout at the exact same time the bottom guy earns an escape. I would like to agree with this, but a pushout rule would ruin folkstyle wrestling. Creative scrambles would disappear.

Yes, 100%. The US is in a situation where, as the international “transfer market” heats up, non-qualified reps aren’t getting ill-prepared inexperienced national reps from countries that frankly don’t care about wrestling. They are getting US born and bred wrestlers who are NCAA champions, or at that level, with decades of top level experience. Retherford losing to Destribats, that was just odd. I have never seen someone catch a headlock from defending an ankle lace like that before, probably never will again. But Lee and Richards lost to guys who could potentially beat them 3-5 times out of 10. This is a new era for competing for Pan Am spots, and if we want to continue prioritizing olympic success, this is the next hill to climb. ”We’ll be fine” is the approach that USA wrestling took in the 2000’s, and we were definitely not fine. We sucked. I have no desire to go back to that era. We are now 80% of the way to missing 2 out of 6 weight classes at the olympics. That’s a step in the very wrong direction. We are also three retirements away from being back below 10th in the world praying for bronze medals again. That should be setting off alarm bells, bc when Dake, Taylor, and Snyder retire, they will be taking the lions share of USAW’s collective knowledge, investment, and experience with them. Oh btw, all those guys are all also coming out if the same house. So it’s not like the entire country is on fire with a glowing hotbed of gold medalists 4 rows deep champing at the bit behind them. There is now a major pressure release valve in the international transfer market, and guys will continue availing themselves of those options. Pan-Ams is not a tournament that USA wrestlers can take for granted anymore.

He’d medal, probably like Miles Amine, but he has the pace and a unique enough style to surprise some people at 86kg. Yeah his brother gave it a shot at 86kg, but he was clearly on the wendy’s chocolate shake diet trying to get there. I don’t know what it is, but the older valencia never has more than one match a day in him. If zahid wanted the mexico spot, it would be his, and he would bring home many medals.

This, and that might even be conservative. The details have been rehashed ad nauseam already, but the juice, however much it is, has never proven to be worth the squeeze, and that goes all the way back to High School.

He is definitely no fun for anyone to wrestle, and what's crazy, I see him as the kind of guy who could place higher at NCAA's than he does at big tens. Put him in a bigger bracket with a bunch of small conference guys who aren't used to stingy wrestling in a big tournament and he can really do some damage. We do have to give credit where credit is due, no matter how crazy AJ potstickers is, he is a national champ who has tools and is in stellar physical shape. Glazier took him to OT and scrapped like a dog the whole time.

What do you all think? His knee looked like it wasn't in great shape. Folkstyle is tougher on knees overall than Freestyle. Is he about to D Schlatter his way out of NCAA's or Big Tens? If I was Bormet, I might seriously consider putting someone else in at 149. Having an Olympian in your room is way bigger than an NCAA title. I wouldn't risk it if I were Bormet, even though it will reduce the team's chances of placing high.

That sh*t is so f-ed up, adults getting too big for their own britches “trying to keep the kids in line”, complete travesty.

I would assume Franklin Gomez and.....Ramos?

This is an awesome trend overall, and hopefully will lead to more total allocations going to the Pan Am tournament.

Yo, this might actually be a thing. Nobody has ever claimed that professional wrestling prep is an easy out.

Are you saying "Meh" to the concept that getting the delegates at those weights earlier would allow them to actually take personal ownership in the trials process, and thus would perform better? I don't see how it can be argued that our guys are comparatively underinvested, even if over-skilled, compared to their competition, since the US basically requires selfless performance for "the good of the weight", but putting in the hard work does nothing to guarantee the spot for the guy who actually wins it. That's entirely backward. As a comparison, imagine if all college teams had their wrestle offs AFTER the conference tournaments. That would be the identical analogy for the US schedule around pan-ams and olympic trials. Edit: My "enthusiasm" on this topic is not aimed at you, it is at the fact that, for the Nth time in a row, the US is in a position to prematurely burn the lifetime dreams of two entire weight classes of guys. This is where my passion on this topic comes from. The olympics are literally a lifelong goal for thousands of guys. It is, however, contingent upon there actually being an available spot. No matter what we say about individual athletes, the US is a top 3, arguable top 2 Freestyle country. For us to be in a place where we could miss out on 1/3rd of total weight classes does a major disservice to the athletes themselves.

I should have been more precise. I look forward to an era where the NCAA doesn't have undue, capricious, and inconsistent power to punish wrestlers based on hearsay and incomplete investigations largely based around evidence and intercollegiate politics.

Bekzod potentially, if he is still wrestling.

The very real potential that we send 4 wrestlers to Paris in freestyle is disgusting.

This didn’t age well…

On a normal day, yeah, but for other countries those are career/life defining days. Maybe I’m missing something, but aren’t RBY, Cruz, Gomez etc all Olympians now? Didn’t they just punch their tickets to Paris today? That’s an incredible prize on the line. Not having it be on the line for US athletes is a disadvantage. We are usually good enough to have this not be a problem, but it is easy to fix. I have a high degree of confidence that spencer lee or dayton fix would have qualified 57kg today. I won’t say the same for 65kg bc Gomez went beast mode in that match, and a tuned up Austin gomez is hard for anyone to match. He has shown his beast mode is good enough to take out yianni in a folkstyle setting.

For any weights not qualified heading into pan ams, having the trials tournament before pan ams, that’s the only change. I think it takes care of it.

So really, Bono is just suffering from burning one very important bridge. That tracks and is fair, but it sounds like really Wisconsin has risen on the national level during his tenure, and all the best kids, who by all accounts didn’t exist before, are getting actively steered away from Wisconsin. Wouldn’t be the first time somebody had everything they worked on go down the toilet bc of one series of bad decisions.

Still looking forward to a world free of the NCAA.

After watching this wrestling today, I no longer blame Retherford. It is an insane disadvantage to still have to jump through so many hoops AFTER your olympic qualifying tournament, and it intrinsically limits individual athlete motivation tremendously. It is a US trials process problem, not a Richards, Lee or Retherford problem. I am not big on making excuses for guys, but USAW 100% hamstrings athletes going into Pan-Ams. This is going to be an increasing problem as more athletes from the US figure out ways to compete for neighboring countries.

We really should have a better schedule. We clearly take pan-am qualifying for granted as a country, and this is an enormous mistake. I am once again perplexed at how poorly this is handled considering that the pan-ams are the primary path to achieving a lifelong victory. And if you are the US rep at pan-ams, winning it doesn't get you into the olympics, it just gets the country in. That motivation is fundamentally sideways, considering that americans are competing against other athletes for whom victory means a place in the olympics for themselves personally, no ifs ands or buts. We should already have had our olympic trials by now for the unqualified weights.

I really like Lee, but this is hard to argue with