wrestle87

They do at 125 and heavyweight as well under Cael. Care to keep going with that equivalency, or shall we look a little deeper than just one number?

I think we can all agree at this point, if you are 141 or up, Penn State is your room. For whatever reason, the formula just doesn’t translate to the little guys. What works for big guys gets the little guys hurt, worn out, and seemingly burnt out. I hope Cael’s dialing up Nico to find out how he was able to do it, bc they’ve been wrestling with 9 weight classes since then.

Can someone far more in the know please give an overview of who the teams are to watch? Obviously the Hawkeyes, but this feels to me like it is getting no airtime. Ostensibly these will be our future olympians, so I’d like to be less than completely ignorant about the structure of the season, conferences, an NCAA tournament, etc. I consider myself entirely ignorant at present besides the fact that it is in fact freestyle wrestling, and I know Iowa and Princeton have teams.

This is a great point.

My bad, I shan’t speak it’s name.

@Husker_Du What kind of support is needed to be able to set up streaming coverage of tournaments? I think every person alive would happily pay for a higher energy, more positive and/or less corporate broadcast. Any chance you know someone or you could get the old boys back together who were actually worth having? ie joe flo, mike mal, fretwell, roper, all those dudes who actually know wrestling and make the streams exciting?

These athletes will be the Reggie Bush crew of ten years from now. This is dumb nonsense. Like every team doesn't have some towel boy circuit placing the bets all day everyday for all the players. What’re they gonna do start monitoring all friends and family activity as well? These org heads, the AD’s, and the conference heads are all TV rights brokers above all else anyway. S**t is disgusting. Apologies for the rant, but I hate seeing guys in suits take away such major opportunities for athletes when the NcAA and conferences have always been complicit in sweeping MUCH larger stuff under the rug.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful, I hear this opinion from others a lot, and I don’t know how it can be justified. If we’re talking peak vs peak, I’ll consider 2011-2012 JB as maybe the best wrestler to ever wear a US singlet. But for an overall career? I must respectfully but strenuously disagree. JB has had a tough go since 2016 if we’re talking top 3 status. He didn’t make the team this year, at a non-olympic weight. A DNP in an olympic year, losing your spot, and then losing it again at a new weight two years later is not top 5 status to me. I have a hard time justifying him above Snyder, Taylor, Dave Schultz. I think one of the main things in being way up there is always having answers for opponents. A lot of people inside and outside the US have shown that they’ve figured JB out. Being 1-dimensional to the point that you get figured out keeps keeps him outside the top 5 for me.

Once again, the NCAA in being hypocritical and profit-seeking, is placing random rules in place that steamroll the first kids to get in the way. Within 5 years the wrestling room will be “The Iowa Hawkeyes Draft Kings Tom and Terry Building for Athletic Excellence”

That is 100% my mistake, and great to hear he didn’t have to have it worked on. I just assumed based on how bad that injury looked that he was headed for the doctor’s office.

Starocci had knee surgery didn’t he? Nobody’s a lock coming off surgery. Hendrickson also jacked his leg up at worlds. Woods hasn’t even won one yet so…not sold. Gimme Brooks, then Vito, then O’Toole. I don’t care about Gable, and honestly would prefer he not come back. He has spent his career trying to leverage his success for very selfish purposes. I don’t love what he has done to teams he is on and to the culture of the sport overall.

lol this is exactly what I thought this was about, “dang what did brands do?!”

I think a point per minute of riding time would add the most juice to folkstyle. It emphasizes the point of advantage vs disadvantage wrestling, and would really make coaches rethink their match strategy. It also punishes wrestlers way more for weaknesses.

I understand your point, but it is a little disingenuous bc musukayev, for example, is from russia, as are a number of entrants in most weight classes each year. I checked, and as far as I can tell musukayev was the only russian in yiannis weight that year. This is an interesting topic broadly, but its kind of turning into a thread just bagging on yianni. We have seen a lot of crossover success from strong ncaa performances leading directly to international success, and yianni is one of those guys. Would this thread exist if yianni had beaten nick lee this year but failed to place? He’d still be a 4x champ and silver medalist. Is this just recency speaking? What role did yianni play in vito running roughshod over everyone in the world this year? Certainly greater than zero. I think you are also forgetting the absolute slump that USA wrestling was in for ~15 years starting in 97 and ending with burroughs and varner in 2012. We straight up blew. Sucked. Hot garbage in wrestling shoes. We had some solid performances from individuals, but the average US performance was to get outclassed and shown the door after round 1. So has yianni underperformed against early hopes and excitement, both our and his own, yes. But, he is of heartier, more capable, better prepared stock than the US has produced in a long time. Him underperforming is because we are better, not bc he dropped the ball. Let’s also give some credit to Nick Lee, bc he is nasty in his own right. Dude rose to the occasion.

This was phrased as a question, but is really a statement for @Antitroll2828. Sure, Yianni has had some trouble recently, by the highest of standards that we have the luxury of setting for the entirety of our lineup bc, excepting 65kg, we have brought home medals, even gold medals in the past three olympic cycles. We are not good at 65kg. It is a perennial strugglefest for the US, so when yianni went out and was slinging with the best of them, it made a big difference. Before yianni putting it on people in 2022, 2016 Molinaro was our last example of a wrestler with a style, mindset, and attitude that was capable of significant international success. I think it is also worth mentioning, 15 pounds on either side of 65kg seems to be the natural weight for males from the caucasus, and for much of the rest if the world for that matter. That is a much tougher row to hoe than the other weight classes have. There, I said it, 65kg is the most under-hyped global weight class.

Looking forward to a scoring table mistake that sets the whole thing on fire, and potentially referees spraining their ring fingers and lodging formal complaints.

I really hope we only have 5 more months of three point takedowns

I’m really looking forward to different perspectives that change my opinion on this. I love wrestling and I don’t want this change to bug me all year. Right now it really does. I just watched the Ohio State wrestle-offs. I really dislike how overweighted a 3 point takedown is compared to other scoring events. I’m open to change (I watch freestyle just as much) but I really don’t think this gets the job done. We now have a ruleset that aggressively overweights the takedown, and feels like it will drive everything to a poor facsimile of freestyle. I admit I didn’t do my homework before watching, but I was rather taken aback by how different a 3 point takedown impacted match pace. This ruleset removes a number of different possibilities for interesting exchanges actually making a match equal, and it doesn’t reward the awesome non-controlled exposure throws that freestyle and greco do, which are what make freestyle so awesome to me. Someone who likes this ruleset, I’m begging you, please change my mind and help me like this rule change.

Is tate samuelson getting a grad certificate in underwater basket weaving?

Lehigh’s not in the middle of nowhere, far worse, it’s right next to an old steel town that isn’t the safest place in the world. Also, no way NIL helped the situation. Lehigh actually asks for moderate standards for its athletes, I seem to remember david craig being academically ineligible for a bit during one of his years. I can think of few schools that would do something like that to their athletes. In that same vein, they aren’t going to open up random certificate programs to keep their guys around or access grad transfers in the portal. Lehigh also doesn’t have much of a following anymore. Lehigh is really getting hurt by being surrounded by a lot of other semi-formidable teams, especially penn state and rutgers. Lehigh is missing all the good stuff with some considerable added baggage for a college experience.

Hey, out of curiosity, are there any other countries with national styles of wrestling that have nationals on par with something the size of ncaa’s? I’m thinking of India, Mongolia, Africa, anything like that.

A question I an curious about, bc I really have no idea, did just calling all the russian athleted “Independent” do anything at all on the russian side besides keeping them from playing the russian national anthem and flying the flag. If you change what athletes compete under, but still have all russian athletes competing as the same common name, is that really changing anything? Russia can still point to its athletes domestically and celebrate their successes all the same. And ostensibly russia’s athletes got the same compensation for medaling

It hurts the athletes, but it also hurts the governments tremendously. In countries that don’t have the sort of athletic infrastructure that the US does, the olympics are professional sports, but more importantly a major rallying point to drum up nationalism and simultaneously drown out domestic issues. This is why the Olympics are so important to a country like China. Olympic success is part of a much more internecine machine that empowers the incumbent rulers and regimes. Countries that are top-down oppressive rely on events like the olympics to serve as justification for rallying cries and domestic propaganda. The olympics are not the same thing to all countries.

Keeps the heat in when cutting weight. Same reason wrists and ankles are taped.

I believe this about just about any other wrestler on the team, Sasso is the Ohio State flag bearer, Tom Ryan would bury that or strategically pretend he didn’t hear about it. The ramifications for the program would be too vast.