Is the Brands' era entering Zalesky level?
- Thread starter HawkCharlotte
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Zalesky had the bad fortune of following Gable. Brands had the good fortune of following Zalesky.
Well Zalesky did benefit 3 championships from recruits that showed up when Gable was there…
One stat that surprised me is that in 16 years he has coached one medalist at the senior level (worlds or olympics), and that wrestler no longer wants anything to do with the program. Lets hope Lee changes that this year.
some might say we get out coached, without the necessary strategy in big matches.
I think it’s obvious we’re in/near Zalesky territory and have been for 13 years. Question is, why does Tom have so much extra leash toward keeping his job than Zalesky did? Has our administration become satisfied with averaging a 3rd place NCAA team finish? Is Brands just better at convincing folks that he’s the only man for the job?
And Tom did benefit 3 championships from combining his VT recruits with recruits that showed up when Zalesky was there…
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Zalesky was incremental in recruiting those kids too. He was head asst.
Also if my memory serves me right they had less patience for zalesky because brands/gable worked behind the scene for brands replacing JZ.
Bottom line imo weve been blessed to have 3 top coaches in the sport. Tom just needs to make changes in how he acts as a person, better at recruiting and drop the stubbornness snd evolve with the sport.
Your logic train is identical to mine about DT’s future, except I wish for him to remain with PSU. He’s making a ton of bucks with M2, but, when his Olympic dreams are completed, I would not be at all surprised to see him land a fine d-1 job. He won’t wait for Cael to retire. His M2 kids would follow him and just 2-3 years his team would be cooking with gas.
I agree. He will follow brands career. He will take a head job in a conference and tesm that isnt a PSU rival and wait til CS retires then go home to PSU.
I agree. I believe DT is the next superstar coach in D-1 and has all the proper prerequisites. He is on the right progression.
You say getting better at recruiting, I’m wondering if a change in recruiting philosophy might be needed on a couple of levels. (Who and how.)
We’ve become a cult of personality and in the process, lowered the bar for success. One dominant wrestler per season/tourney appears to be enough to make the average fan content with the program.
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Glad to see you guys are coming around.
If we actually care about BEATING Carl? Its DT and no one else. He is THE name of this generation (outside of JB)
It’s how Iowa became Iowa (gable name/recruiting, gable training) it’s how PSU became PSU (Carl name/recruiting, carl training)
It’s the only play. We’ve done it before. We need to do it again
If we actually care about BEATING Carl? Its DT and no one else. He is THE name of this generation (outside of JB)
It’s how Iowa became Iowa (gable name/recruiting, gable training) it’s how PSU became PSU (Carl name/recruiting, carl training)
It’s the only play. We’ve done it before. We need to do it again
He does seem like he’s the only possibility at the moment. He’s got the receipts and he sounds personable in his interviews. The only the he lacks is the D1 coaching experience. I really don’t get the detractors if you listen to him speak. I think he could sell.
Not that I’m disagreeing that DT will make an excellent head coach at the D1 level (and likely sooner than later), but I really don’t see Iowa hiring someone from PSU. I know they hired Gable, but Gable was always in-state even if he was a cyclone. I just feel like Iowa decision makers might feel that hiring a Sanderson product as head coach would be akin to sacrilege or something. But I could be wrong.
Brands was an obvious option to Zalesky at the time. There is no similar obvious option to Brands now. I would venture to say that had Brands followed Gable, it's more than likely that he would've been fired after ~9 years. Had Zalesky then taken over after Brands, he'd likely be in his 16th year as head coach pulling in $600K/yr. Their stats are virtually identical. The only difference is timing and perception of their performance based on who they followed.
I disagree. Brands left and breathed life into a dead VT program. His recruits followed and list a year to do it. That counts for something. Zalesky went to OSU and they didn’t prosper.
Can we finally put the Zalesky on par with Brands debate to rest?
Zalesky was trending toward the middle of the B1G when he was ousted. Brands has now won 2 B1G's in a row and another DI Championship. On top of that, they are poised for 3 in a row and 2 in a row, respectively. To bring in Sesame Street, 1 of these is not like the other...............
iowa.forums.rivals.com
Post #4 by @lookleft goright in particular:
“It will be put to rest until the Hawks lose another dual meet or finish 2nd at the Bigs or 2nd at the NCAAs.
”
Not disputing your stats, but ....
Z inherited Gable's national champion team. Virtually all of Z's success - all three of his team titles, and 6 of his individual national champs - came within his first 3 years. He benefited tremendously by stepping in while Iowa was already on top and returning tons of firepower, including 4 national champs.
In his last 3 yrs, before getting fired, Z had 1 national champ.
Another way of looking at it is Zalesky had the good fortune of following Gable. He took over when Iowa was the defending team champ and returned 4 national individual champs.
Virtually all of Z's success came in his first 3 years and very little success in his last 6 years.
Sports is filled with "what have you done for me lately" and Z's teams had really dropped off.
Brands won 3 team titles early on, but also a team title fairly recently (2021), and was favored in the 2020 season. Bad luck (covid) ended up cancelling that NCAA tournament.
Z had 6 champs in his first 3 years, when he benefitted from Gable’s guys.
Z had 3 champs in his last 6 years.
Brands had 1 champ in his first year, a Z guy.
Brands had 5 champs in years 2-4, when he benefitted from 2 recruiting classes (Z’s guys and his VT guys)
Brands has had 7 champs in his past 12 years
If you disregard their 3 years benefitting from either Gable’s guys or 2 recruiting classes and take out Brands’ first year (when his champ was a Z guy), you get Z with 3 champs in 6 years and Brands with 7 champs in 12 years. You also get Z with 0 team titles in 3 years and Brands with 1 team title in 12 years.
By these metrics, Brands has a slight edge. But it’s certainly very similar by the numbers. I definitely don’t see a big enough difference to explain any Z was given 9 years and Brands is in his 17th year (if you don’t count COVID year).
You say Z had 1 national champ in his last 3 years before getting fired, which is true. Wanna take a guess at how many national champs Brands has had in his last 3 years?
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And another way of looking at Brands’ tenure is Brands had the good fortune of 2 sets of recruits early on. He combined his VT recruits with Z’s recruits.
Virtually all of Brands’ success came in his 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years and very little success (by Iowa standards) in his last 12 years.
It’ll be interesting to see how we view Brands after this season. I agree that sports is filled with “what have you done for me lately” and it’s looking like we’re on track for 3 straight years of not sniffing a team title. Prior to 2020, it was 9 straight years of not sniffing a team title. I wonder where “what have you done for me lately” was during those years. Or, is consistently winning team titles just no longer our standard?
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Sounds like me as a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan! Ryne Sandberg, Kerry Wood, Sammy Sosa. I’m good! Then we win one and it pisses you off when management screws it into the ground and we’re back to those years!
Regarding Z - anybody know how the wheels fell off so dang hard?
Recruiting, training, connecting with athletes?
How much of Zalesky's success was accomplished in the first 4 years with Gables guys?
That is beyond "cherry picking" when you don't account for Zalesky inheriting what was probably Gable's best team of all time!. Once Gable's guys were gone, Iowa went down rather quickly. He was never able to regain success, while Brands did in fact win another title and ABSOLUTELY had the best team 2 years in a row(Covid year sucked).
You simply cannot ignore the trend that Iowa under Zalesky was following. In Zalesky's last 3 seasons Iowa lost 16 duals. Under Brands you have to go all the way back to the 2011-2012 season to add up that many. In fact, the last 6 seasons, including this one, Iowa has lost 4 duals so far, 2 of those were PSU, 1 was OkState in 2019 and the other is Michigan from this season.
Any way you look at it Iowa is the CLEAR 2nd best team in the country while under Brands. You just simply have a juggernaught of epic proportions in PSU making the gap look more incriminating than it realistically should be. Meanwhile, under Zalesky, they were falling at a rapid pace and were looking at becoming a2nd or even 3rd tier team in the B1G.
Make no mistake, there is no way in hell Zalesky would have been able to bring Iowa back to winning like Brands did in 2020 and 2021. There is a very clear reason why they went after Brands at that point in time...
I do See DT as a future head Coach somewhere But I think we would have an easier path to get Nolf as an assistant for now and see how he does before moving on from TNT. I could see Nolf drawing in good recruits and also helping our middle to upper weights get that much better...and toss in the fact that he and Spencer are Young Guns alumni and good friends I am sure it would be an awesome recruiting visit if those two showed up at a potential recruits door.
The "2 recruiting classes" argument is so stale and weak. Guess what? EVERY single coach that has anyone follow him from 1 school to another "benefits" from "2 recruiting classes". However, there are still ONLY 9.9 scholarships. The scholarship amount didn't magically double. In fact, Brands lost Blanton because he honored Tsirtsis wanting to redshirt and didn't have the money to bring Blanton in.
On top of all that, the guys that followed him lost an ENTIRE YEAR of eligibility to follow him. Brands was a monster recruiter when he first started. Sadly, I think he lost a lot of that when he went to Iowa. The Iowa job gave him some monster responsibilities and I firmly believe he didn't think he needed to recruit like he had when he started at VTech.
Any way you slice it Brands had the best team those years because he was Tom Brands and not because of some magical "2 recruiting class" bail out...
On top of all that, the guys that followed him lost an ENTIRE YEAR of eligibility to follow him. Brands was a monster recruiter when he first started. Sadly, I think he lost a lot of that when he went to Iowa. The Iowa job gave him some monster responsibilities and I firmly believe he didn't think he needed to recruit like he had when he started at VTech.
Any way you slice it Brands had the best team those years because he was Tom Brands and not because of some magical "2 recruiting class" bail out...
It really is both.
It's a good argument when put in context. I mean, what has happened since?
and you're 100% correct about him letting off the gas in terms of actively recruiting.
I just remember there being a bit of tension between him and Gable with Z not wanting advice on how to run program.
What about you? Didn’t you decide to pass on Z?
I absolutely believe it really had very little to do with his "double class" and so much more to do with his focusing on all the monumental tasks of running a program like Iowa.
For too long Brands appeared to rely to heavily on Iowa recruiting itself and didn't continue to actively strike while his cache was its highest. I also believe part of that was following too closely in the Gable philosophy of only really going after recruits that "fit" and then "coaching them up."
With the advent of social media, training centers blew up and it became infinitely easier for youth wrestlers to access, train and learn from top notch DI talent. As such, many top recruits became college ready and didn't need to come off rugged and gritty like many of the guys Iowa and Brands lived off of.
As good as Brands has been in many areas, I do fault him for letting Cael out recruit him to such a massive degree that now the gap is too big to even begin to close. That is the one and only ball that I will say he absolutley dropped...
The "obvious option" to take over for Brands is Spencer, although that would be in a couple years, not now.
The elephant in the room in this discussion is that Zalesky wasn't competing against a Cael/PSU level dynasty. Brands put together a team that beat Cael in the only year Cael wasn't either #1 or punting. There's no doubt that Brands is an elite coach. The issue is that he's also falling further behind Cael and whether it's acceptable to be 2nd best, and the reason he's falling further behind seems to be at least in part due to antiquated training and preparation compared to Cael, so do you need to find someone who can implement a more modern approach to these areas to catch up? Or can the Brands adapt?
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