Hammerlock3

Stewart himself posted on X "transfer portal heating up". To me that just seems like a lonely Bo Nickal who needs some spotlight like a houseplant needs a window sill occasionally. If he was really into transferring he wouldnt be throwing out lame platitudes about the portal...unless he's an idiot.

Bruce should have more votes. This is too simplistic, but either your a Smith guy, or you're a volume guy and its Baumgartner. Again I respect and see argument within that thinking, but there are a lot of bias's at work against Bruce.

I appreciate the topic because talking about tiers is a adding a useless layer of abstraction that makes no sense in the context of wrestling.

how about how specific head to head match-ups would go down and why they think so.

I don't always call stalling when someone backs out of bounds, but when I do its entirely dependent on the score....

probably, but they did it in highschool so who knows

its a lot harder to be wrong when you're dealing in tiers, one reason pyles takes so long to say anything is that he's afraid of saying anything anything he'll be proven wrong about later.

...I look like an absolute crack head zombie when i do.

The way you put it does make me think twice. I'd really have to get in the weeds to respond in any meaningful way, but I guess my response would probably be that athletes should have to confirm or relinquish their scholarship $ before entering the portal. But to undermine my argument again, when these athletes under perform the coaches have all sorts of ways of just taking their money back. Hard to argue with the portal when the opposite behavior is never mentioned and absolutely common place.

or read the OP in the thread you are critcizing....

yeah i guess you've got a point, hopefully you're right. When caleb henson shows up to replace gomez i'm vindicated though!

would caliendo meet your criteria?

whether or not they lose a whole year of eligibility is enormous in this scenario. These schools had ways of paying these guys before, but who wants to pay for a guy you won't see in the lineup for 18 months. The portal is way worse than NIL

if you polled the fans I feel like he'd be a narrow favorite. His negatives would definitely poll very low.

Just kidding, couldn't resist the chance to play Cinnabon.

I'll try to say a lot quickly, NIL is fine, the portal is bad. If you agree to take scholarship money and decide you want to go elsewhere you should lose a year of eligibility. Its not abuse to expect someone to live up to an agreement. The macro of why its bad is because talent doesn't distribute itself on a bell curve it distributes itself on a pareto distribution, where whatever the currency in question is floods to the top of the spectrum like money in monopoly. In the context of the economy its counterproductive to fight this effect, but in the context of NCAA wrestling talent the effect should be mitigated wherever possible. The portal is a causing talent to flow to ever smaller spaces, its destroying the incentive of smaller schools to do a good job, and its making actual coaching and the art of wrestling itself less important than how much money you can grub. The sleazier you are in this environment the better, thats why guys like dresser and ryan have already started trying to pretend they're the good guys in this scenario.

itd be ironic if tulane started a program

Ryan has some serious michael scott vibes...mixed with mike pence and the guy james woods played in casino.

i'd summarize as: Pyles said nothing, Ryan took the opportunity to posture as morally superior (inspired by dresser no doubt), and then they took the chance to sit around and not talk about it.

how about the fact that at no time in this boring interview no one bothered pointing out that the portal in itself is a bad thing.

didn't he commit to cornell first? or his brother goes there or something?

trying to stay contructive but yeah he drives me nuts. They start talking about portal stuff and his first move, which is very much anti-college wrestling, is to start playing down the idea that coaches are actually cheating or being unethical, then he walks it back by saying the obvious "but sometimes people cheat", and it takes 5 minutes to get those nothing ideas out....

I would have gone, "I don't always lose, but when i do IT'S ALMOST ALWAYS TO THAT M******F***** KYLE DAKE AND WHAT MAKES IT WORSE IS THAT I HAVE TO PRETEND WE'RE FRIENDS UNTIL I BEAT HIM!"

thats a whole genre "I don't always insult religious figures, but when I do it's on ESPN while tripping on serotonin."

More of a freestyle thing... "I don't always drag the action out it bounds, but when I do its by tapping the hardwood with my pinky after a long useless pause with a bored look on my face."