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Spencer Lee and Gable Steveson share Hodge Trophy honors

As long as we find out Lee has never been arrested for sexual assault, this is a bad look.
If Lee hadn't whined on tv about his laundry list of injuries he might have won the Hodge outright. But the Hodge committee doesn't like excuses.
 
Let's be fair, the Iowa fan bases dwarves every other fanbase COMBINED. On top of that, you can vote multiple times. Now, I definitely lean towards Lee winning this award. However, the fan vote should be taken with a grain of salt. A LOT of Iowa bias skewed the fan vote and you all HAVE to know that!

Still, I am pretty sure the fan vote only gets a certain percentage, REGARDLESS of whether Lee won by 15k votes or by 1 vote. I think this is probably as close as it sounds. If Intermat picked Steveson, I would bet the member vot favored Steveson as well.

With that said, I am happier to see Lee at least share it than lose it outright!
 
lol. you guys are patently insane.

It’s almost comical that you refuse to see the point most people are making regarding the decision to scrap process and voting points in favor of a co-Hodge. Very few people are “losing their minds,” it just doesn’t make any sense if you want to evaluate the award from a objective perspective. At the end of the day, it isn’t a huge deal but it is a valid point to acknowledge the flawed process.

Greatest 🧠 is more like tiny 🧠.
 
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Let's be fair, the Iowa fan bases dwarves every other fanbase COMBINED. On top of that, you can vote multiple times. Now, I definitely lean towards Lee winning this award. However, the fan vote should be taken with a grain of salt. A LOT of Iowa bias skewed the fan vote and you all HAVE to know that!

Still, I am pretty sure the fan vote only gets a certain percentage, REGARDLESS of whether Lee won by 15k votes or by 1 vote. I think this is probably as close as it sounds. If Intermat picked Steveson, I would bet the member vot favored Steveson as well.

With that said, I am happier to see Lee at least share it than lose it outright!
I dislike fan votes for exactly that reason. That said, if you have a fan vote and you set up the rules ahead of time, you should abide by them.

I think there are two ways this happened. First, as I speculated above, W.I.N. wanted Steveson to win the award because he will be in WWE and the Hodge will be mentioned all over the place on national television.

Second, the vote was close enough that it was decided by the fan vote (which I believe someone said is worth 5 first place votes, but I may be wrong on that), and W.I.N. got spooked by that because (a) the fan vote was just supposed to be an email collection scheme and never make the difference and (b) W.I.N. would get roasted by non-Iowa fans who would feel as though this confers a significant advantage to a wrestler from a school with a big fanbase in close years (which is a fair criticism).

It could also be both, as in they wanted Steveson to win and he did win but for the fan vote.

There were clearly shenanigans at play here. If they were transparent about it, they would release the vote totals and breakdown, but they know that will cause hell in the community, probably because Spencer actually did win the vote overall.

Again, the outcome is not what matters here as you can make cases for both wrestlers. What matters is that W.I.N. acted in bad faith, and isn't being forthcoming at all. They clearly have an agenda and they are doing what's best for W.I.N.

The Ackerman and Willson selections were already a black mark on the Hodge Trophy. This just adds to what is increasingly becoming a joke of an award.
 
Let's be fair, the Iowa fan bases dwarves every other fanbase COMBINED. On top of that, you can vote multiple times. Now, I definitely lean towards Lee winning this award. However, the fan vote should be taken with a grain of salt. A LOT of Iowa bias skewed the fan vote and you all HAVE to know that!

Still, I am pretty sure the fan vote only gets a certain percentage, REGARDLESS of whether Lee won by 15k votes or by 1 vote. I think this is probably as close as it sounds. If Intermat picked Steveson, I would bet the member vot favored Steveson as well.

With that said, I am happier to see Lee at least share it than lose it outright!
If the member vote favored Steveson, the criteria needs to be redone. The criteria is 100% clear who the winner was this year.
 
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lol. you guys are patently insane.
The biggest problem with the Hodge and this year's shared award is the role of the criteria. WIN pushed out criteria to the public. Wrestling media and voters spent the entire year talking about the criteria. I appreciate former winners, coaches, and other informed voters casting their respective votes based on informed analysis of their own making. However, if that is the basis, then WIN and the various media outlets need to stop talking about the criteria. This year the criteria simply seemed not to matter if Gable and Spencer tied, because whether one voted by weighting categories, by counting up categories won, or any other metric relying dominantly on the criteria, Spencer was the obvious winner.

Willie, to my knowledge, you weren't like your former employer in pushing out Hodge rankings based on the criteria every week or two of the 2021 season, but you cannot diagnose the Cesspool denizens as insane based on our response to the 2021 Hodge, when many complaints here relate dominantly to the criteria that WIN itself pushed out.
 
Obviously there are ways do what they want when you have Ackerman sharing with Sanderson. What Ackerman was able to accomplish with his disability was amazing but just based on wrestling ability not in the realm of Sanderson. Congrats to Spencer for being a 2X Hodge winner.
 
I’m good with this, in particular because we didn’t really even have a season. It was impossible for either wrestler to establish a season’s worth of work to separate themselves from the field or each other. Spencer has his second Hodge and third NCAA title. Well deserved. All is good.

I just hope he can get his fourth NCAA title and come back in three years to get his Olympic Gold.

Then take over coaching duties at Iowa, and start pulling all the top talent out of PA.
 
I’m good with this, in particular because we didn’t really even have a season. It was impossible for either wrestler to establish a season’s worth of work to separate themselves from the field or each other. Spencer has his second Hodge and third NCAA title. Well deserved. All is good.

I just hope he can get his fourth NCAA title and come back in three years to get his Olympic Gold.

Then take over coaching duties at Iowa, and start pulling all the top talent out of PA.
I agree with this post in it’s entirety except I hope SL wins his first Olympic title in a little more than a year. With the recent “outbreak” in Europe I think it’s possible the games get pushed back one more year.
 
I agree with this post in it’s entirety except I hope SL wins his first Olympic title in a little more than a year. With the recent “outbreak” in Europe I think it’s possible the games get pushed back one more year.

I have considered the “delayed one more year scenario.” But I assume whoever wins in our Trials this summer would still be our rep next year.
 
IOWA CITY, Iowa – For the second year in a row, University of Iowa national champion Spencer Lee has been awarded the WIN Magazine/Culture House Dan Hodge Trophy. The award is presented annually to the nation’s most dominant college wrestler.

For the just the second time in its 27-year history, the Hodge committee determined two wrestlers worthy of recognition. Minnesota heavyweight Gable Steveson is also being recognized as a 2021 Hodge Trophy winner. The only other time two trophies were awarded in the same season was 2001, when Cael Sanderson and Nick Ackerman were both recognized.

Last season’s winner Spencer Lee of Iowa and Gable Steveson of Minnesota wound up in a virtual tie, with Lee winning the Fan Vote (25,712 to Steveson’s 5,202 votes), but multiple members of the formal Hodge Trophy Voting Committee voting for co-winners with both Steveson and Lee having such similar Hodge Trophy voting criteria stats.

The Hodge Voting Committee is made up of all past winners of the award, several retired college coaches from each region of the country, and select national wrestling media.

"We have had fairly tight races before but nothing like this year,” said Mike Chapman, creator of the award back in 1995. “It’s an amazing year in so many respects. When you look at what COVID did, cutting the season at least in half and causing such chaos, it was a very difficult season for everyone.”

Lee won the 125-pound NCAA Championship on March 20. He outscored his five opponents at the national tournament, 59-8, capturing his third career NCAA title and leading Iowa to the team title for the first time since 2010.

Lee was 12-0 in 2021, scoring bonus points in 11 matches and recording five first-period falls. He outscored his 12 opponents, 141-15, and his 91.6 bonus-point percentage led the country.

Not one of Lee’s first eight matches went the seven-minute distance. He had five first-period falls and recorded three technical falls, including a 21-3 win by technical superiority in the finals of the Big Ten Championships. He did not allow a point in the NCAA finals, winning 7-0, the largest margin of victory of any of the 10 NCAA finals matches.

Lee finished the season riding a 35-match winning streak, outscoring his opponents 432-42 during the stretch.

The winner of the Hodge Trophy is determined by the Hodge Trophy Voting Committee, made up of past Hodge winners, a retired college coach from each region, and national media members. A fan vote winner receives five additional first-place votes. Primary criteria for the award are a wrestler’s record, number of pins, dominance and quality of competition. Past credentials, sportsmanship/citizenship and heart are used as secondary criteria in years where two finalists’ stats are nearly equal.

Lee is one of five multi-winners in the history of the award. He won the Hodge Trophy in 2020, earning 51 of a possible 56 first-place votes. He dominated the 125-pound weight class in 2020, posting an 18-0 record and outscoring his opponents 234-18. He scored bonus points in 17 of 18 wins last year, recording four first-period falls and nine technical falls.

Lee is one of three Hawkeyes to win the award since its inception in 1995. Mark Ironside was honored in 1998 and Brent Metcalf earned the award in 2008.
Love it for Spencer...what an incredibly special young man...and hopefully the coach at Iowa whenever TnT decide to call it a day! And though I completely despise Gable Steveson, I think he deserves to be the co-recipient. From a pure wrestling standpoint, when he didn't completely destroy his opponents he reminded me of Jaydin...spending 7 minutes looking like a cat playing with his dinner (mouse, garter snake, etc.). And like Spencer, GS had zero competition at 285. Happy for both of them.
 
lol. you guys are patently insane.
Upon further consideration, Smalls' position makes total sense. This is a known route to serious wrestling fans because WIN has done this previously. I'm not referencing Carl and Ackerman.

Naming co-winners allows the two to forever share a bond. A brotherhood that cannot be broken. I think we should all be happy with WIN's co-winner ways. Willie and Christian: 2016 and forever. https://www.win-magazine.com/flos-c...ie-saylor-named-wins-journalists-of-the-year/
 


Wow, is this really the level of analysis in the wrestling media today? Lmao

Again, set a rubric and follow it. If there is a point system and they want to name co-winners when it is close, then say the award will be shared by athletes who are within X points of each other.

It's really not difficult to, like, count up the votes and pick a winner, whomever that is.

If they are going to not follow the rules that THEY set up, then that just makes the award a total joke.
 
If Lee hadn't whined on tv about his laundry list of injuries he might have won the Hodge outright. But the Hodge committee doesn't like excuses.
Dat der is some funny shit. The "co winners" was a cop out by the committee. I know you're being facetious with your "Hodge committee doesn't like excuses" comment, cause that borders on being so removed from reality that it's comical.
 
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The biggest problem with the Hodge and this year's shared award is the role of the criteria. WIN pushed out criteria to the public. Wrestling media and voters spent the entire year talking about the criteria. I appreciate former winners, coaches, and other informed voters casting their respective votes based on informed analysis of their own making. However, if that is the basis, then WIN and the various media outlets need to stop talking about the criteria. This year the criteria simply seemed not to matter if Gable and Spencer tied, because whether one voted by weighting categories, by counting up categories won, or any other metric relying dominantly on the criteria, Spencer was the obvious winner.

Willie, to my knowledge, you weren't like your former employer in pushing out Hodge rankings based on the criteria every week or two of the 2021 season, but you cannot diagnose the Cesspool denizens as insane based on our response to the 2021 Hodge, when many complaints here relate dominantly to the criteria that WIN itself pushed out.

I'm not "insanely" :rolleyes: pissed off because GSteve is so good but Grace here nails it. Lots of second place guys were perhaps deserving of the award; Willie himself cited Nolf/Nickal should have both won it.
 
Interesting...........coulda sworn that Japan wasn't in Europe.

Learn something new every day.........
Yeah you got me good there. I would assume that if they were to hold the Olympic Games that they would invite other countries to attend the games and that it wouldn’t just be the Japanese national games. They could possibly even invite some countries from Europe. Who knows.
 
I'm not "insanely" :rolleyes: pissed off because GSteve is so good but Grace here nails it. Lots of second place guys were perhaps deserving of the award; Willie himself cited Nolf/Nickal should have both won it.
Exactly. This just opens it up to fraud and abuse and thus makes it a joke award.

What, we're supposed to take at face value from W.I.N. that "hey guys it was like totally close this year so the award will be shared in contravention of our clearly elucidated criteria"? Without disclosure of the vote totals and breakdowns, how can we take them seriously?

Haven't they now set up a system where wrestler A beats wrester B by 5 points and they could just say wrestler A won it, but in another year wrestler A beats wrestler B by 20 points and they say "it was a virtual tie! co-Hodge winners".

That leads to all kinds of problems for an award that already doesn't seem serious. Heck, we could easily imagine a situation where a school adds wrestling, get a high profile recruit who has an amazing year, finishes runner-up in the Hodge voting, and then W.I.N. decides to have co-winners for promotional purposes. And we'd never know any better. How is that fair?

Transparency is the key. The fact that they are purposely NOT being transparent is what's so distressing about this. Release the vote totals and the breakdowns. In fact, release them going back. I'd love to see the spread between Nolf and Nickal. I'd love to see the vote totals Emmett Willson got. I'd love to see whether Ackerman got any votes.
 
In a covid shortened season, I have no issues with this simply because the two winners were so dominant and the impacts of covid were different for every wrestler. Because Spencer was limited due to covid and because GS was so impressive, I can get behind this 100%. If this was a normal year, GS might have been able to win this all by himself, in a shortened year with SL wrestling limited matches and dominating how he did, there was no chance for that.

Any other year and I think dual winners is a joke unless there is a point system of voting and the votes are tied. Creating a tie for whatever reason (outside of this year) is ridiculous and not something the top award should allow to happen if it wants to stay the top award....but this is covid and everything is a little effed up.
 
In a covid shortened season, I have no issues with this simply because the two winners were so dominant and the impacts of covid were different for every wrestler. Because Spencer was limited due to covid and because GS was so impressive, I can get behind this 100%. If this was a normal year, GS might have been able to win this all by himself, in a shortened year with SL wrestling limited matches and dominating how he did, there was no chance for that.

Any other year and I think dual winners is a joke unless there is a point system of voting and the votes are tied. Creating a tie for whatever reason (outside of this year) is ridiculous and not something the top award should allow to happen if it wants to stay the top award....but this is covid and everything is a little effed up.
Then say that up front BEFORE votes are cast. If it was an issue after the vote then it was surely an issue before the vote.

At the very least release the vote totals and breakdowns so people can understand the decisions that were made.

Personally I do not think COVID factored into this, and believe it was for one or both of the reasons I described earlier in the thread.
 
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