The 2023-24 B1G Scouting Report (Part One)

all photos courtesy of Sam Janicki; SJanickiPhoto.com

Sometimes I have fun and exciting ideas for articles. Other times, I take other people’s great ideas, and make them into wrestling things. This is one of those times. Shea Serrano, one of my favorite writers and podcasters (if you like hip-hop, basketball, movies, pop culture, and funny stuff, then check him out) recently wrote the “Action Hero Scouting Report”, in which he has categories, a scoring system, and breakdowns of several movie action heroes. It’s essentially a scouting report for pro sports prospects, but he did it with characters from action movies. It was awesome and I loved it. So much so that I decided to tweak the idea for a B1G preview for this season. It’s already late August, and before you know it, September will be here. Despite what Green Day says, September will soon end and it’ll be Halloween, and then the MSU Open is here. It’s basically tomorrow. So with that in mind, let’s get to the B1G Wrestling Scouting Report.

First things first. This is supposed to be a fun exercise. It’s largely subjective. It’s me making up categories and then assigning points to these wrestlers based on my own thoughts and feelings. I’ll try to justify the scores to some extent in each breakdown of the wrestler, but this is for fun, and in no way shape or form, do I have any lack of respect for any of these wrestlers, so please take this as simply a fun exercise. Secondly, it would be a lot to include every single wrestler from the B1G in here, so instead of that, I’m including the returning All-Americans in the B1G from last season, along with the returners from the Round of 12, or the Bloodround, if you will (I will). I will not be revisiting previous season AA’s who didn’t last year. No offense to any of those wrestlers, but this article can only be so long, for your sanity and mine. I will try to include AAs from other conferences who are transferring into the B1G, because they seem relevant to this season. Finally, this is broken into two parts because it’s really long and I have deadlines on when I need to turn things in to Earl. Lastly, let’s get to the categories.

So just like Shea did, I am assigning points to each of my categories based on how heavily or lightly they should be weighed (again, subjectively how I feel they should be weighed). The total points would be 100 (an impossible score to achieve), which will be broken up into the 6 main categories. Another point is that because this is a scouting report, weight classes don’t really matter. So hypothetically someone from a much lower weight who placed 8th could score higher than someone who placed second at a much higher weight. Would the smaller wrestler beat the bigger wrestler in a match? Probably not, but that’s not what this is. Enough already Claunch, GET TO THE CATEGORIES!!! The categories are:

• Offensive Diversity - Since this is my list, I’m going to focus less on effective offense, and more on a diversity of attacks. You always hear about your “go-to” takedown, and that’s valuable, but I like when wrestlers can attack both sides of the body and score in a variety of ways. I also like when they can initiate their own offense and not simply counter-wrestle. I’m going to reward primarily counter wrestlers in a later category, so it’ll likely balance itself out, but for the sake of this category, a large toolbox of attacks will go a long way. Total points available here - 20

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