wrestle87

Are we headed for an ‘84 round two in the upcoming olympics? As a wrestling fan obviously I hope not, but wrestling is not THAT important compared to an actual war. Maybe this is the opportunity for a massive coup, and random small countries can pull major talent and field the whole team from Dagestan. We don’t actually care what country they rep do we? Just want to see the best in the sport go out and perform. I first noticed this trick with adam batirov, it must be tough to be so good but have your brother be mavlet, maybe one of the top 5 russian wrestlers of all time.

I’m calling a crazy upset, I think Zahid finds his way to a bronze. He has things that most 92’s have never seen. Sneaky dark horse when he does to make the finals and push a tired taylor if life gets too successful and interesting for david outside wrestling.

I have also seen a nearly 100% correlation between seeing wrestlers eating food and successfully having made weight, especially bagels with cream cheese and gatorade. We should encourage wrestlers to eat bagels and gatorade more often, it will be easier for them to make weight accordingly.

Yeah, folks, on all of this, let’s keep in mind this was a career move for Koll as well. He didn’t just happen to go to one of the most sophisticated athletics departments attached to one of the top endowments in the top athletic programs at one of the top 3 Universities in the world. Yeah, Cornell was nice, but it can’t hold a candle to the suite of offerings coming out if Stanford. However…the issue Koll is becoming keenly aware of, as the Harvard, Princeton, and to a lesser extent Penn Columbia and Brown Coaches know, when a school is unwilling to budge much on admission criteria, certain sports teams suffer. Wrestling is one of the sports that requires the most of a human being mentally, physically, and time wise. Being a successful wrestler requires that you have very little else going on in your life, including school. As anecdotal evidence, albeit almost 15 years old at this poing, I stopped considering going D1 when a D1 coach slid a piece of paper across his desk to me and said “make sure you like this list, this is all that you can study if you come wrestle for me.” Noped out of there and non-ivy d1 recruiting from that day forward. Excelling in the sport in the modern age requires sidestepping traditional education in a myriad of ways. Most schools are Ok with that because athletes have never really been traditional students at 99.9% of colleges anyway. Nowadays, a few schools still offer a degree with value beyond money. Stanford is one of those schools. The only catch is, you have to be smart and academically seasoned enough to complete the degree. This creates problems for Koll, because the by college time, the traits and priorities a kid must have for getting accepted to stanford and for being nationally competitive at wrestling are largely mutually exclusive.

Aight, what tournaments used to be covered well but have since totally disappeared. 1) Russian Nationals 2) All Zeb Miller Productions 3) They did a great job at prep nationals and nj states a while back Now that I think about it, I wish Flo would stick to their documentaries, bc those things are tremendous. They should hand the broadcasting to a new team. Even though I dislike much of their product, their ability to tell a story artfully with unsung corners of the sport really is tremendous.

Making it illegal to touch an opponent’s legs more than three times a match.

And a gutwrench a heartbreaking offensive par terre move…

Man, this is depressing. What does it take for integrity and caring for others to win out over such astonishing levels of self interest. I thought that, of all sports, ours would be able to make that happen…

@LJB Serious question for consideration, does it matter at all that “he who shall not be named” happens to have passed through the most storied programs in the sport and has toes to many of the unannointed royal families of the sport?

In fairness, those weren’t overcome mistakes, they are exorcised demons.

JB over the rules of freestyle wrestling. J’den Cox over the scale. Crutches over J’den Cox. Penn RTC’s collective bad attitude over their accumulated good will.

Just throwing this out there, and I have no knowledge if the room, but from the outside looking in I’m going to say it was never Koll doing the actual technical coaching and game planning. I think he may have said as much when he was leaving to go to Stanford. The combination of Hahn and Mike Grey where in there for decades, that’s easily the two best wrestling minds New Jersey has produced in decades, plus Dake and gabe dean being around, Koll had to manage the administration and donors side of things, which is extremely difficult and it looks like he excels at it. But out of that group, I’m never going to guess that he’s in the top three wrestling minds. Stanford hired him because he is a safe, pedigreed candidate who is probably the most polished coach the ncaa has to offer from the institution’s point of view. The only other coach in that realm who clearly knows how to handle university relations is Chris Ayres, and he sure looks like a lifer at Princeton. Also, Stanford has never been that strong. They have good kids, but, like Harvard and Princeton, the bar is too high to generate real critical mass in recruiting. I mean, look at what academics did to the Yale team… =D

Call me cynical, but I’d bet a whole lot of $$ the rules are intentionally crafted this way to allow for maximal artistic interpretation. As far as I can tell, the US still isn’t all that influential in crafting the fabric of wrestling globally. We sure do participate, but in terms of influence at a decision making level, seems minimal. For other countries, the ability to give opponents a good rogering when need be is meaningful and important. The gray areas intentionally allow for wiggle room and crafting the outcome of close matches. “I win at my home tournaments, you win at yours, see you at europeans and worlds.” Case in point, enforcement of shot clocks in tandem with last score wins criteria allows refs to very much tip matches in someone’s favor, and holy heck do they love to leverage that ability.

Nahshon could and should have won final x. He made so many bad decisions though, composure has always been a major problem for him on the freestyle circuit. I think Retherford and Vito are in trouble, they both loose so much pop when when they drop that extra weight. I don’t fault them for it, it’s not something they can control, but zain is missing his zip, I don’t think he’d beat nick lee with the extra cut, and same with vito, the cut clearly hurts. Speaking of bad cuts, what was the deal with gilman? He looked like he knew something was going on the entire time, and didn’t even seem that surprised by losing to richards. I’m going out on a limb now and saying I think we’ve seen the last of JB in a team trials finals. He looked immobile and inactive against dake in the finals, same against marstellar, and Marstellar made him look tiny. It looked like he didn’t have the room in his life to get the same sort of training in that he used to, which is totally fair, but he seemed like be was smelling the roses pretty hard before his finals match, which indicates he’s thinking about a lot OTHER than being the best competitor possible. Taylor was sniffing those same flowers, but still managed to get the job done this time. Based on how that all went though, I’m calling for taylor to bronze at worlds and for brooks to win in three matches for the olympics. Brooks looked a lot bigger, taylor looked smaller, and I’m betting by next year brooks is going to be straight diesel, and for taylor to be down another 5 pounds of muscle, kinda the way jb has gone the past two years. Now for the requisite trolling, I’m saying J’den cox beats mason parris to go to the olympic team trials finals against steveson.

It astonishes me how quickly flo got so impressively corporate. I worked at big banks where people seemed less scared of falling afoul of the company line than they seem be at flo. This many years on I think it should say a lot that anybody with any sense of independent thinking or a personality has been pushed out of fulltime work at Flo. Anybody interested in going out and seeing if we can bust up some of these contracts they have on tournaments?

Don’t disagree with your decision to trim considering that you have to prune as you see fit ultimately, but at it’s base, it was about something that one portion of the audience saw and was distraught at while watching Final X. I couldn’t agree more. The wellbeing in life of current and future athletes is infinitely more meaningful than anything anyone will ever accomplish in a sport. The fact that the institutions governing our sport are in anyway bogged down in prevarication, hemming and hawing, passing of bucks, or anything other than exacting action to protect those that need protecting does not pass the smell test. I also want to be clear, I am not in anyway interested in putting a cart before a horse, but there needs to be a far more robust mechanism in place to handle such situations. Maybe it means moving away from complete reliance on university facilities…universities don’t have a stellar track record of being forthcoming or morally upstanding on anything that affects their public image.

Koll’s just being a bit salty, he’s been on this for more than a year talking about “what’s the point,” but at the best programs, the ncaa level is just a training ground for making the world team, considering that we’re in an age of 25 year old seniors who win world medals before winning ncaa’s. I’ll take a stanford degree over NIL eight days a week. He probably does really miss the state school affiliation of cornell right now though.

Lol then why tf did the flo guys discuss none of that…though I’m not surprised… They were major homers for certain people in certain matches throughout the day…I miss the days of mark bader and joe flo announcing the wrestling, they were so much better