Having spent a fair amount of time at US Olympic or World Team qualifiers, I was very surprised to see recently at Carver, at Kinnick, and here in the cesspool how many Iowa wrestling fans are professed, ardent women's wrestling supporters. Quite the discrepancy between butts in seats at those national events, featuring competitions among your beloved women's wrestlers, and the number of heroic allies here. Each year at those various key tournaments, you were all surely just busy fundraising or cheering women's wrestling at King, McKendree, and Presbyterian, right? Also, as obliquely referenced in my prior posts, quite the discrepancy between fan support for Coach Chun and members of our returning national champions. Jaydin Eierman, in his first fan-inclusive home dual at Carver, didn't get a standing ovation when the fans first saw him walk to the mat versus Princeton, but Coach Chun did. Local son, Cobe Siebrecht, didn't get a 15 second ovation after his surprise first period domination and tech fall, but Coach Chun did. U23 World Champion, Tony Cassioppi, didn't get a standing ovation when he came to the mat the his first match since winning worlds, but Coach Chun did. For the record, I warmly welcomed Coach Chun with applause, but from Carver and this message board, one would think that Coach Chun was Coach Brands coming back from Virginia Tech rather than what she is--the face of a program implemented at this moment and with this salary due dominantly to a Title IX lawsuit settlement and its required timing.
The women's wrestling program at Iowa will be a financial negative on the athletic department, just like men's wrestling is a revenue net-negative at all but about 5 or 7 colleges. If women's wrestling were a viable program for major wrestling colleges like Iowa, Minnesota, OSU, tOSU, and PSU, then schools other than the only one that recently settled its Title IX lawsuit would have women's programs right now too. Although the past couple of years, which correlate with the relevant Title IX lawsuit itself, have seen Coach Brands articulate the angle of growing wrestling through the women's program, why had none of Brands, Gable, Carl, Tan Tom, or John John pushed women's wrestling programs through at their schools prior to a lawsuit if women's college wrestling is such a dominant strategy for wrestling overall? If those legends were not sufficiently powerful as individual champions for women's wrestling programs at their respective schools, why did they not ban together in a concerted effort with a unified voice? Those of you asserting misogyny or worse to my previous posts, is your position the same for all of these named ambassadors for wrestling? Are all of them unsophisticated louts too? After all, unlike me, they actually have voices familiar to and recognized by their respective athletic directors, their respective sports conferences, and USA Wrestling.
My view on why none of those schools have announced women's teams? It doesn't take a Bernanke, Krugman, or Summers to understand that Athletic Departments have limited money for all sports and that women's college sports generally, including women's wrestling, are a significant suck on the overall economics. Fans simply do not watch women's athletics at economically sustainable levels, whether in person, streamed, or on television. In large part, that's because fans, for whatever reasons, do not at an aggregate level find women's sports as compelling as men's sports. Iowa's women's wrestling program will be a financial parasite to Iowa's men's wrestling team--not so much in relation to the athletic department budget necessarily, but in relation to wrestling donors to the college wrestling team and HWC. And all the while, the university will do what universities and the NBA do. They'll try to cross sell the women's product to fans of the sport during the men's event, which means that we will all have to watch even more of the women, when our purses and wallets were actually opened in order to see the men wrestle.
Watching women when most fans are dominantly paying to see the men is exactly what happens at the US national events. Despite the fact that some of the national- and international-level women are fun to watch wrestle, most of the women's matches even at the national level are extremely lopsided and uninteresting due, admittedly, to a severe disparity between the best woman at each weight and the 4th best woman at those weights. Collectively, except for perhaps the first stand- alone women's event, you bold lovers of the women's wrestling product still won't buy independent, full-priced tickets to any stand-alone women's wrestling events at a level of more than 1,000 fans per event. That goes for college duals and international qualifying events alike. The female-only college events will look like non-Hawkeye duals at the Devaney Center, Hilton without Carl's Curtain, or wherever the heck Michigan State wrestles in East Lansing when not hosting the Big 10 Championships. Simply put, unsustainable and weak.
