dragit

Thanks for teeing that up for us. Besides the content, something noticeable to me that's also relevant to the topic is that Metcalf SOUNDS much different now than he used to when he was in "the bubble." He used to sound just like Tom Brands in his cadence and manner of speaking, now he sounds much different -- more like, I guess, Brent Metcalf.

Wait. Morningstar and Telford weren't once the face of the Iowa team?

Cael does that a lot. He memorably did it at the end of the Dake-Taylor final. I'm sure this sportsmanship/positivity makes him a bad person somehow.

We probably have different senses of humor. I said that Cael is "perhaps one of the two best ever." I think most would agree Gable is better than Cael. 21/21 Big Tens. 15 national championships, 9 in a row. So is it laughable to suggest Ed Gallagher might be ahead of Cael too? According to his Hall of Fame bio, he had 19 undefeated teams in 23 seasons; in 13 national tournaments won 10 and tied for first once; and is credited with being the innovator of modern folkstyle wrestling from applying his "engineering knowledge of leverage and stress to the development of more than 400 wrestling holds." I can't see any view of the facts under which a reasonable person would find that laughable. While it's a tougher argument, I also personally don't think it's laughable for someone to put Harold Nichols third after Gable and Gallagher. He won 6 NCAAs and finished in the top 4 27 straight years. And if I'm counting correctly, Cael has had two of his college wrestlers win Olympic medals in the four Olympics contested when he has been a college head coach. Nichols had three wrestlers win a medal in a single Olympics, at a time when winning medals was much harder for U.S. wrestlers due to the disparity between senior level funding between the Soviets and Americans.

I can't figure out how to edit. But I'd also say that there could be other things in the category of tangible things that could be addressed besides the two I identify, which I invite others to suggest.

I wasn't sure which Iowa angst thread this belonged in so narcissistically decided to start my own. It seems to me that the issues at Iowa need to be broken down into what are things that are big picture things that are true that there aren't clear answers to and things that should be not to hard to address. PSU has some big advantages. Best wrestling state for recruits. The best financial resources. The best head coach, perhaps one of the two best ever. Firing Brandses wouldn't change this. Tom Brands can't do anything about any of these. He has a very good record as a coach. Four championships, five really if you want to be fair. With him as coach they have every season ticket sold and far higher attendance than during the Gable era. He put together a great dual where they had more than 40,000 fans. And it sounds like he's done a nice job with fundraising and facilities. And he's an Iowa icon. I'm not confident that changing the head coach would be a positive transformation. But there are definitely things that they have problems with that could be changed without much problem. Two that come to mind were demonstrated, as they are annually, in last night's dual. They appear to lag far, far behind Penn State with respect to strength/body coaching and upper weights wrestling coaching. Penn State's guys seem to develop much better physically and to stay more healthy than Iowa's. They have many guys who come in skinny and athletic and get much stronger. Retherford, RBY, Haines, etc., etc. Haines was an absolute brute last night. And the issue of Iowa guys who get badly injured and/or look worn out as their careers progress receives a lot of discussion on this board. It's a dangerous sport, but it seems like Penn State has this problem much less. I would think that Iowa could close this gap with the best strength coach they could find. This is all by one observer's eye test combined with what I see from other commenters. The other place this seems to be true is in the wrestling coaching of the middle and upper weights. I think that Terry Brands has a very good record with the results of his wrestling coaching at 125, 133 in particular. But as you go up in weight it seems obvious to me that the Penn State coaches, led by Cunningham, have produced much better results. Morningstar and Telford would not seem to be anywhere near this level. I think Iowa could close this gap with the best upper weight coach they could find.

Understood. Apologies to the extent my comments amounted to criticism of a 17 year old. My intent wasn't criticism but rather description. It doesn't make him a bad, stupid, or any other negative adjective, person that he chose MMA over wrestling. But I think choosing another sport by definition demonstrates a less than full commitment to a sport where, more than most others, commitment is as important for success as raw physical talent.

Isn't the fact that he bailed on the sport he was so great at in favor of a sport he appears to not be as good at indicative of a lack of passion for the former sport? My point is that you can't just say, he had more talent than Zain and everyone else, therefore if he'd spent 10-15 more years in the sport, he'd have racked up all these championships and medals. An athlete's passion, or lack thereof, for the sport is a major part of the package for determining success, particularly in a less fun sport like wrestling. He does not appear to have had that necessary piece of the puzzle. Therefore I believe he would not have had a very successful career. Specifically I do not think he would have a world championship gold medal such as Zain has. Zain lacks Pico's talent, but his incredible passion and will to overcome adversity were substantial enough to make him a champion.

Please. Stop.

It has been brought up multiple times, but I do think the 2020 canceled NCAAs remains a highly underrated fact in a discussion like this. If the tournament is held, then Iowa almost surely wins, which means two in a row, with the 2020 win being a very big deal in front of a giant crowd at a football stadium in an unprecedented showcase event. This would have a big influence in how people view the Brands's performance, and it seems to me would have been a big help in recruiting. During that window, it did seem like they were closing the gap on Penn State pretty substantially. And frankly, the continuation of Covid took luster off their single team championship in 2021 -- short season, almost no fans at the arena, etc. I say this as someone who thinks there are definitely some points to raise questions about the progress of the Iowa program (Ferrari/Downey dalliances, cautious style, injuries, losing some key guidepost matches at NCAAs, for starters). If not for Covid, the perception would have to be a lot different, the pandemic slowed some serious momentum. Furthermore, I agree with several posts regarding the general point of how much better do you think things will be if you jump to that greener grass on the other side of the fence. Who's yard of green grass are you confident will produce better results than the very good results of the last 16 years, including what should fairly be viewed as including two recent national championships?

That doesn't look like the NU football coach, it looks like the former NU football coach. Pat Fitzgerald was replaced by David Braun last summer. It was a giant surprise, Fitzgerald was viewed as an indispensable uber coach and was on a $50 million contract, he only was removed because the student paper published the details of a hazing scandal which caused the administration to change from a light punishment to a firing (even though they knew all the facts before the first action). The unexpected result was that the football team, expected to be even worse than their one victory season last year, was terrific, went to a bowl and won, and could have been in the Big Ten title game if not for a long Iowa field goal. So just as surprising as the hazing story was the revelation that Fitzgerald may not have been a good coach anymore (probably more focused on fundraising for the proposed new $800 million stadium following the construction of the $200 million practice facility), they stunk the last two years and then totally turned around under the new coach.

It's been kind of a slow season so I invested some time instead in re-reading the Zavoral book and the HBO documentary now owned by Flo regarding Gable's last season. It's kind of jarring, bordering on grotesque, seeing that video filmed in the same wrestling mecca where Jesse Whitmer trained to be a one time starter, one time champion; where Lincoln McIlravy overcame headaches to win a third title and finish 96-3; etc., etc. Maybe someone could do a wellness check on the Gable statue. It's one thing to get thumped in a dual by the 13th ranked team; it's another allowing your room to be used for this crap. The way to turn around the first part of that sentence is not by turning to the second part of that sentence.

That was brutal. Just brutal. Frankly Brown, an otherwise admirable person, also gets demerits for the final he won, with the cheap move, dropping to his knees so that the ref with the trigger finger would call locked hands on Wilps.

He and Gibbons are a very pleasant pair together. I think they did Iowa - Iowa State.

Sparks is a plus for sure. The caffeination can sometimes overwhelm you but it's hard as a wrestling fan to hold it against him that he unabashedly loves wrestling. He does handle the PBP job professionally. He does a good job of getting a lot out of Gibbons, who we're lucky to have, and whose calm demeanor matches up well with the Sparks enthusiasm. And Sparks is way better than Tim Johnson at working stats and history anecdotes into the flow of the match rather than as a data dump that interferes with the action.

Good point, there were a lot of loose ends that just vanished. Joseph going for a third national title while as pointed out above having been 0-4 at Big Tens. Also possibly another installment of his wars with Marinelli. Luke Pletcher and Kollin Moore looking ready to finish their careers with an elusive championship. I actually thought that these two were the ones hurt the most. They'd been kind of forgotten terrific wrestlers for the previous years in their careers and then in their senior years put it all together. Mark Hall getting a Valencia-free run at nationals, healthy Kemerer getting a rematch against him. Joseph, Pletcher, Moore, and Hall all seniors so don't get a covid year, just like that their careers are over. Sebastian Rivera taking his shot at a title while healthy and not exhausted from cutting to 125 and having just put his stamp on an incredibly tough weight class at Big Tens with high-scoring wins over past and future NCAA champs Gross and RBY. And would the usual Penn State rules apply--losses in the Big Ten Final avenged two weeks later (RBY/Nick Lee/Joseph)?

I know it sounds ridiculous but it's a situation that happens sometimes. You've got the ball. I swipe in and knock it hard out of your hands. 100% of the time without replay you guys get the ball. But they go to replay and the frame by frame shows that it technically rolled off your fingertip after I hit it. So I knocked the ball out but it's off you. The rest of the game it's always called the other way, so it's not a mistake by the ref.

I hate current replay in most sports as I don't think it justifies the stoppage, particularly because they blow the call anyway a lot, and because they can't reverse when everyone knows they should a lot. It's particularly frustrating in wrestling because it's an action sport and a conditioning sport. As a fan the stoppages have noticeably lessened the viewing experience for me. One of the best selling points for the sport previously was that there aren't any timeouts. That's gone by the wayside. I'm not totally anti electronic help. Tennis has been helped enormously by many tournaments going all laser calls. If the ball lands out, a recorded voice instantly yells, "out," and the point is over. There are no arguments at all. Who can you argue with? Also, the players have confidence in the accuracy. This improves play quality, because you don't have players getting doubts in their mind about the fairness of the competition. Someone mentioned balls and strikes in baseball. I actually advocate that they go all electronic on balls and strikes, and get rid of replay for everything else, all other calls stand. Missed balls and strikes affect the outcome of baseball games 10 times more than missed other calls. The players have zero confidence in the home plate umpires, most of whom are not good at their jobs, which are very hard even if you're good at it (ball moving 95 mph, moving a foot or more, large human blocking your view). My understanding is that the minor league experiment, kind of like the old tennis system of challenges, worked very well and did NOT slow down the game. The pitcher, catcher, or hitter immediately touches their hat, and the ump is immediately given the call. That's it. It really depends on the physics of the sport and whether, like tennis, but generally unlike wrestling, they're susceptible to a clear, objective, electronic result. But I start with a bias against because the breaks in action are so substantial, and the results often ridiculous (last minutes of an NBA game are a joke, so long, and they screw up all the time). Another thing and I'll shut up. A lot of the overrules are to me pretty pointless. When a runner slides in safe and then is off the base for .00001 seconds when his foot comes off before his hand comes on, have we accomplished something by calling him out? There are also some situations in basketball where the last person to touch the ball is basically a technicality, it's been knocked out by someone else.

Maybe he could ask Jordan Burroughs and Kyle Snyder about whether they, as people who had similar training and success in college while developing a marketable skill, have any suggestions about a career that could last well over decade from his current age and make him a millionaire.

You're a beast.

Yeah but go the other way. Did Cael look like the national champ his redshirt year?

Those all all good points but they don't address the most relevant question. How confident are you that Cael would have won NCAAs as a true freshman?

So I was walking past the TV the other day and someone was on saying something to the effect of, You don't really understand the complexities of what Tom Cruise does. He does his own stunts, he's working constantly, driving everyone else around him to do better, etc. Same thing here - no one understands the complexities of arguing on the message board. Case in point: When do I play my hole card? If I'm too quick, then the argument could get ignored in the flurry of other postings, but if I wait too long, then nobody's really paying attention any more. Anyway, I think it's time for my Dake Trump Card: People, he accomplished so much with the most rudimentary, prehistoric training methods. Back in college he didn't know anything about nutrition, about collagens, about sunlight, about functional patterns, electric waves. It's a wonder he could even stay upright, and he smoked David Taylor three times in a row. Case closed. GOAT.

Really good points in here. On the redshirting, while what you say is accurate, it doesn't go to what I think is the key point/question: Would Cael have been a 4x champ if he hadn't redshirted? Obviously it's a hypothetical, so I can't claim anything conclusively, but I don't have high confidence that he would have won an NCAA title 9 months out of high school. And if he doesn't win 4, then he's obviously not in the conversation.

You hit the key points of my ritual argument for Dake: 1. No redshirt, no redshirt, no redshirt. Huge difference. He won an NCAA championship nine months after he was in high school. How confident is everyone Cael would have done that? 2. Never really in substantial jeopardy at NCAAs. And his four wins in the finals were notable. Marion, who made another final and lost in OT, and who lost a semi on calls so extreme that they contributed to rule changes. He absolutely brutalized Molinaro, who then became an undefeated national champ. Then St. John, who won the next year. And the coup de grace was the great David Taylor, who won the Hodge the year before and the year after. Kyle Dake, sitting on three titles, went up a weight to where he wasn't even cutting to wrestle the Hodge winner, and beat him three times in a row in three completely different matches. This is an extraordinary fact. 3. Not as dominant before NCAAs, but he was putting together a very strong academic record at an Ivy League school and cutting a lot of weight the years he lost matches. It's reality -- that's a very big impediment that's gonna lead to competing in a lot of matches when you're just exhausted. I think picking Cael is totally reasonable and defensible. But I have Dake at least in a tie with him.