Konquest

Yup. Dude is the same IRL as he is in front of a camera.

What did Trent Hidlay major in? I don't know or really care, but it's entirely possible that he has some formal training in this kind of thing depending on his coursework...

Go to his instagram and you'll see he (Steveson) has slimmed down quite a bit

He has a back injury and is nowhere close to 100%. Instead of playing it close to the vest, he flat out said in his post match interview that there are a lot of techniques in his arsenal that he simply can't do at the moment.

Lenny Pinto

"Tophy" Minto almost TFing Julian Ramirez was pretty impressive.

Penn State, UNI, and especially Minnesota are snapping up Wisconsin's best. It used to be that they'd pretty much be a lock for Mizzou.

Even more insane is that as a senior in HS, Sparks won a CA state title over a Valencia brother, who was probably being coached in wrestling before he could walk. Sparks must be a hell of an athlete. Parker Keckeisen did a clinic a few years back for the program I was coaching (his alma mater, actually) and he mentioned that Jeremiah Kent from Mizzou didn't start wrestling until HS, and used him (Kent) as an example of how you can improve rapidly if you have the right work ethic and surround yourself with the right people. Kent might not have AA'ed or whatever, but he started wrestling in 9th grade and was a Fargo AA and got a college scholarship in a sport that most of his competition had been doing since they were 4 or 5 years old.

IMHO, the mother of all hypothetical dream matches would be McIllravy vs. Nolf.

Parker redshirted and went like 20-1 with his loss to Abe Assad (remember him?)

I am excited to see what Trent Hidlay adds to the broadcast team this year. I have a lot of respect for the Hidlay bros.

Snyder was a tweener who used a combination of athletic ability, IQ, gas tank (compared to other NCAA heavies) and technique to make his (lack of) size an advantage. Gable is arguably better in all these areas and 50-60 lbs. heavier. Gable destroys Snyder in their college primes.

"Joey Blaze" sounds like a new marijuana strain

Oh, and the correct answer is "Carter Starocci". A combination of reasons: I don't like the 5x national champ thing, I don't like his abject refusal to say anything nice about any of his competitors, along with his twitter fingers s--t talking, and finally (this has nothing to do with Starocci) Parker Keckeisen represents everything good about the sport and it'd be great to see him finish on top again.

Maybe he got rejected by a tall girl...

Everyone was cringing, and obviously he had to circle back and apologize, but deep down we all were thinking the same thing, LOL.

Back when he was winning stop signs in high school, Zane Richards was a GREAT matside interview.

Whether they win a trophy or not, it's just insane that these guys are training at an off-campus warehouse that the team personally converted to a wrestling room, eating at "Mama Rahn's House". Meanwhile a few other schools have state of the art everything, fly around on private jets, and have 3/4 of their lineup bought and paid from other schools by a billionaire...and UNI is WINNING. It defies all conventional wisdom about "kids these days" and is a bright spot in a college athletic environment where money and clout are more important than loyalty and integrity.

Another team that ought to be your favorite or second favorite is Nebraska. Those guys seem like they are all really close like brothers cheering for each other and getting bench warnings, despite historically being a pretty geographically and ethnically diverse group of guys coming into the program. Heck, one of their stars sells a merch line called "Wrestling is Fun". They also don't really have a "style" per se, other than sending it. They've got mat specialists, brawlers, and whatever the heck Lenny Pinto is, but they're all pretty entertaining.

I don't get how the answers to this question aren't 100% the UNI Panther Train. Unless that's everyone's favorite team. UNI's wrestlers literally put on work boots and built their own room, and they just were in a tight team race decided in the final match with a team and coach that were mostly purchased by some billionaire as a tax write-off. I don't get how people wouldn't cheer for UNI. They are the college wrestling embodiment of the "Rocky" story.

I can say with absolute certainty that there is a room in Wisconsin that has highly ranked wrestlers from Mizzou, Minnesota, UNI, and Penn State all wrestling with each other in the offseason.

Both Big 12 finalists at 133 transferred FROM Nebraska.

BTN saw the the popular viral content with Lucas Byrd and his girlfriend, so they decided to hop on the trend.

FWIW the Minnesota wrestlers say that Salazar, and not Gable, is the strongest p4p on the team.

Obviously things are a little different now with NIL and everything, but when Nazar Kulchytskyy from Ukraine moved to Wisconsin, he was allowed to compete at Fargo as a high schooler (he got 3rd) and at NCAA D3 (3x champ), but couldn't compete at WTT type events until he got citizenship. I've got to imagine a guy like Rin at Oklahoma State is kind of in the same situation, where he can rep an NCAA school but can only rep Japan in international competition unless his citizenship status changes.