Theo Brixton

Tongue is partially in cheek but things are clearly different now compared to the 20, 30 or 40 years ago. No comment on the era where OSU reigned. Wrestling was less competitive then.

Now that the team race is a forgone conclusion for the foreseeable future, Cael has time to reflect on what needs to be done next to cement his legacy of destroying college wrestling. Given the surfeit of studs on his roster, collegiate wrestling's Thanos is going to need to push for multiple entries at each weight class to prevent some of his gems from falling into enemy hands. At that point, will he relent and allow a dual-meet championship format? I wouldn't hold my breath...

Sinclair needs to get to the right weight if he is going to reach his potential at the next level. Whether that's 174 or 184 is unclear but it surely isn't 197 with his current frame.

Yikes. At a Beat the Streets event, no less...

I find it almost impossible to believe he didn't take serious anabolic steroids at some point prior to entering UofM but, it doesn't necessarily mean he was taking them in-season while competing for the Gophers. It is also reasonable to speculate that Gable might want to wait until his Olympic career is over before he starts taking the WWE vitamins...

Currently, he identifies as a 61 kg MFS competitor but come 2024, the situation will be...fluid...

The guitar solo here is good. Like really good.

What did you do (this time) to piss off Eric Guerrero?

How tall is he now? Seems like he has been 220 forever. Wondering how big he is going to get.

He'll henceforth be known as Luke Lilliputian to Hawkeye fans.

Fair question but the calculus changes when the athletes in question can contribute for multiple years rather than the one year stopgap that Downey was going to be. Imagine a scenario where all three are in the lineup and one of them Fs up to the point where dismissal is warranted. What is Brands going to do when 40+ points could walk out the door? Not as simple as the Downey situation. As far as OSU is concerned, the 20 points Albert Jr. would have given them this year would be the difference between a down year and the catastrophic embarrassment that we witnessed in Tulsa. I doubt John W. would be openly talking about his dismissal if they were top 10. I agree that fully committed Mastros were not moving the needle but by recruiting the Ferraris, they failed to go after others that may contribute substantially in the future. It will take several years to recover from the Ferrari debacle at OSU. What does next year look like for them, especially if Fix moves on/Olympic red-shirts? Not pretty.

If there was ever an eagle amongst the Nittany Lions, it's Starocci. It's too bad for him that he doesn't really have a weight class. He won't be competitive at 86 and he is too big for same-day weigh-ins for 74 kg. If he really wants to make a serious go of it, he probably needs to spend the next year getting his weight right and competing in freestyle. An Olympic RS would be in order but not sure that is in Cael's plans...

AJ reminds me of the guy braying like a donkey in Godfather III. Maybe that can be his walkout music in Carver...

ESPN needs to do a remake of The Season with Iowa to document the beginning of the end for another incumbent HC, just like the did for Zalesky.

Sweeping the mistakes of covid policy under the rug has nothing to do with most of covid research. This is what I mean: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/. Articles like are abundant and an insult to any thinking person. And to your question about vaccines: I am a biochemist who makes his living (trying) to design medicines based on elements of the immune system in order to manipulate the immune system itself. I don't work on vaccine design directly but know enough about factors at play and personally know people who did design covid vaccines that reached clinical development to have an informed opinion. Adaptive immunity (the type that vaccines try to elicit) can be "local" in nature. It is very difficult to create a vaccine that is administered by injection in the arm that provides sterilizing immunity for respiratory viruses. There are multiple reasons for this and that doesn't even include the challenges associated with rapidly mutating viruses. This was widely accepted by most experts in the field (and a recent review by Fauci acknowledges this). It was apparent quite early on that the ability of the mRNA vaccines to prevent infection was relatively short-lived. Furthermore, some cohorts (young males) were obviously having unique adverse events to the mRNA vaccine (myocarditis). This was also known very early on. It is not uncommon for vaccines to induce significant adverse events in some populations. What was new was the gaslighting associated with obvious, albeit infrequent problems. So what do I think? I think it is clear some of the vaccines had the capacity to significantly reduce all-cause mortality. The meta-analysis of the clinical trial data make it clear the viral-based vectors (JNJ, AstraZeneca) worked particularly well in this regard. It is also clear there are adverse events. This means a careful cost-benefit analysis should be done by public health officials to prioritize whether and how one should be vaccinated. Those at risk for severe disease and death should get vaccinated, no question. Young, healthy people probably didn't need to get vaccinated and there is clear evidence to suggest the mRNA vaccine was a net harm, however small, for young men. I am vaccinated but feel strongly that this vaccines should not have been compulsory, especially for young men or others not at meaningful risk. The exclusion of people from society for refusing the vaccine was a disgrace and did much to erode trust in public health. It was obvious there was a political bent to this policy. Also, to not acknowledge that prior infection was sufficient to provide meaningful immunity goes against basic immunology of respiratory viruses. Obviously, there are some vaccines that are essential and now many people skeptical of the covid vaccines will conflate their (somewhat justified) reluctance with vaccines in general. This is a problem that never needed to exist and will be part of the legacy of covid-era public health technocrats.

Brands (and virtually everyone else) is relegated to Cael's crumbs. Cael doesn't need to go after elite talent with baggage (anymore). It will be interesting to see what happens when/if all three are on the roster and one of them decides to be an eagle instead of part of the wolf-pack. Will Tommy stick to his guns and give them the Downey treatment? If he does, all three are gone and will blow a hole in the lineup the size of a Ferrari ego. And that might be a best-case scenario. Hard not to speculate that larger Mastro's Ferrari joyriding contributed to his absence this year. Who else would get caught up in the Ferrari vortex? Guessing Gable/AD won't tolerate too many seasons like the one John Smith just had. And the Ferraris contributed to that fall in a meaningful way. Hope Tommy realizes what he is getting himself into here...

No axe to grind with you at all. You seem like a decent dude. I just feel very strongly that sweeping the mistakes of covid under the rug is unacceptable and that the correct approach to dealing with it was known a priori. And that approach was not the heavy-handed one that was almost universally taken. The level of groupthink that occurred during the pandemic should make everyone take pause and reflect on its implications.

Of course you completely miss the point. I wouldn't expect any less...

I disagree with your assertion that Sweden's success was not predictable. This is the whole point. All "experts" knew that it was futile/impossible to prevent the spread of highly infectious respiratory viruses, hence the WHO pandemic policy prior to 2020. This was obvious to anyone with domain expertise. The restrictions prevent none of the harm of the virus while ensuring all of the adverse collateral damage associated with the response. This should be intuitive to any thinking person once they understand how highly contagious respiratory viruses capable of cross-species transmission spread. Sorry, but this is a preposterous statement. You can do better than this. If protecting (or at least not sacrificing) the vulnerable isn't part of your moral code, then perhaps some introspection is in order.

Strongly disagree. Sweden, for example, has lower excess mortality than much of the rest of Europe (and certainly no worse). They avoided destroying their economy, a sad, obvious and predictable consequence of a broad-scale shut down of society. They kept children in school. The loss in learning due to extended school closures in the United States will have consequences that will reverberate for years. There was a wide-scale shut down of society where the individual rights of the citizenry were restricted. When authorities knew those restrictions were never going to result in the purported goals (just look at the WHO pandemic response plans prior to 2020) justifying their implementation, it most certainly is an issue of morality. I don't know about you, but keeping poor, inner-city minorities out of school for ~2 years, basically ensuring years of educational loss thereby ruining any potential for meritocratic upward mobility while simultaneously ensuring lower life-expectancy sounds like moral issue to me.

While some people are under the impression that Microbiology is restricted to the domain of cellular organisms, it also includes the study of viruses.

Don't mean to pick on you in particular GWN but there were people who got it right, more or less. Sweden's response was the right approach. So was the approach of Ron DeSantis. Proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration were also correct, more or less, regardless of the pathetic hit pieces Fauci and Collins commissioned (that BigRedFan cited). And it took serious courage to stand up for these correct (from both a scientific and moral perspective) but immensely unpopular beliefs (as determined by MSM and a small group of technocrats). The response to covid will have long-lasting negative consequences to American society. Many of them were predicted and predictable. Maybe we should listen to people who got it right? At the very least, we should be wary of any technocrat eager to make sweeping changes to society that impinge on the basic rights of its citizens. What I find amazing is that so many people went along with it all and some are still defending the government's actions during covid. And those same people are content to "just move on". One smart, cancelled guy summed up where we are headed pretty well: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Here you go: https://archive.is/sEjh1 You can use that site to find news articles from most major papers.

Doug Stanhope had a bit about that. He'd back you up.

You sure about that?