What I learned at NCAAs this weekend
- Thread starter vhsalum
- Start date
Iowa is one of the smallest Big Ten schools. Iowa doesn't have near the alumni base. 50,000 less students than Penn State. Over half of the students at Iowa are in-state. There is more of a reliance on fans. Population is definitely part of the equation.
OT- but I would’ve loved Lugo/Sasso pt3 at NCAAs. Lugos win over him in the B1G final might have been my second favorite win of that year. Obviously Kem over Hall was number 1.
that class was a foreshadowing of things to come.
141 ranked #16 p4p InterMat
149 ranked #27 p4p InterMat
149 unranked. never made it to school
157 ranked #77 p4p InterMat
165 ranked #12 p4p InterMat
174 ranked #4 p4p InterMat
HW ranked #18 InterMat
You’re counting all of the Penn State satellite campuses, of which there are many, and which have their own division 3 sports programs. There are only 50,000ish students at University Park. Still significantly bigger, but not to the degree you’re suggesting.
That's fair. I just googled the enrollments. Edit: But aren't the satellite students Penn State grads? If they are donating money what school is it most likely going to?
Gotcha. Yep. I read your context wrong. It’s 88k with all the campuses. Your point is legitimate.
After one interview I am very confident that nearly any high end coach would not just walk, but run from that “opportunity”. I do not believe there is an athletic department that cares less about their performance in the B1G and I say that knowing how NW is with a limited roster and the likes of Indiana and Purdue.
Roger and Chris are good guys and they try hard. But, they know exactly what the ceiling is. Any chance of breaking that ceiling any time soon crashed through the floor after Nassar.
As an aside, have you ever been in the wrestling “room”? Feel free to take a real hard look at what they are working with…
Well, I think Brands' success those three years was largely the result of a perfect storm of beneficial circumstances. Therefore, the foundation (coaching/training system) was always shaky at best, but was papered over. This was exposed as soon as the perfect storm of beneficial circumstances passed.
Here is how I see it:
1. Brands combined two awesome recruiting classes (Zalesky's ‘05 class and his VT guys).
2. Minnesota and Oklahoma State, who had been the best teams the previous 7 years, hit down/rebuilding cycles around 2007/8.
3. Iowa's two best high school graduating classes (the '05 class and the '08 class) in probably the past 25 years overlapped in college around that time.
4. Cael Sanderson was probably the best coach in the country at the time, but he was losing out on all the great in-state talent to Brands and Iowa because Iowa is a Hawkeye state ever since the Gable coaching era when it comes to wrestling.
5. Cael goes east and redshirts everyone he can in 2010 and is set up to begin his run at PSU in 2011.
6. Iowa's combined awesome recruiting classes from VT and Zalesky graduated in 2010.
7. Iowa high school wrestling took a downturn compared to the classes of '05 and '08.
8. Beneficial circumstances were now gone. Let's see if this house was built on a rock or on sand.
9. Looks like sand. Poof, momentum gone.
10. It's 14 years later and we're still here?!?
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no ncaa tournament that year so does that also mean recruits felt we did not have the best team. of course not. no one competed in the tournament. if anything there should have been very little difference in our ability to recruit. fact is they still have not adapted to the necessity of recruiting top ten level recruits. pick your reason for that being the case.
The avenue I tried to present was not based on excuses, it was based on did it help or did it hurt?
I am not blind to the fact that we have shown severe flaws in our techniques.
However don’t be blind to entertaining we may have landed high level recruits after the facilities are completed, Spencer wins 4, possibly kicks Gilman’s ass and wins a gold medal. We have back to back team championships and the debacle of the 2021 finals round doesn’t happen.
Let’s just excuse all of this and say the coaches need to go because all of the above are excuses and it didn’t contribute to PSU widening the gap.
Penn State fans video tapping Iowa Wrestler’s parents and heckling them, will get you a police escort out of your seats.
Today I learned. Holy s***. I knew we were one of the smallest enrollments in the Big Ten but damn. I must have only ever seen their main campus enrollment.
Honestly it's worse than that. 88k versus 21k as of 2022. So PSU is 4x bigger than Iowa undergraduate-wise.
oh wait. I thought he was being sarcastic.
if not? PWNED himself - cuuuuzzz, those are terrible excuses for the results.
Man, I hope Beth doesn’t think the way you do.
As I said yesterday, these issues predated COVID by several years, so what makes you think things would have been different with another team title?
Let's say Iowa wins back-to-back. Spencer gets his 4th and wins in Tokyo in 2020:
1. Would Bobby Telford still be making the recruiting calls?
2. Would Iowa coaches still be training their guys the same way and ignoring the obvious flaws?
3. Would Iowa still be losing close matches in March because their coaches refuse to adapt? It happened in 2021 when we won, so why do you think that would be any different?
The fact is, TNT aren’t getting it done on several levels, and trying to use COVID and a bunch of “what ifs” to downplay the current situation is lazy. COVID was four years ago - it's time to move on.
I will ask again, outside of recruiting Spencer Lee, what has this staff done over the past decade to give you confidence that they can get these issues fixed? At what point do you stop giving them time to fix something they don't seem interested in fixing?
If you're not being sarcastic - you literally summed up Tom's inadequacies quite succintly.
Acting like a shiny facility was going to get us recruits, and not the... you know ACTUAL F'ING RESULTS OF THE "DEBACLE OF THE 20201 FINALS" - isn't an indictment against Tom is comical.
dude. no need to twist the knife.
It's amazing that Tom has somehow found a way to not recruit the club where the HC LOVES HIM. But hey, that's Tom.
Wasn't meant as a twist of the knife. Sorry. I was just surprised by that. I'll remove the post.
Maybe if the new facility were done in time, Rocco would have just committed anyway!
Wasn’t 2x national champion Austin O’Connor ignored or slow played as well?
Brands favored Arnold over Welsh as a 174 recruit. Arnold also beat Welsh. Not that difficult to understand.
Recruit them both. Find a way to get top guys in line up.
The 88K includes all programs which encompasses the on-line programs, Associate degrees, and non-degree students. It's about 72K if you eliminate those three categories. Still a big number that includes Graduate students, Medical students, and Law students.
It's that easy huh? Maybe Rocco didn't want to come here if he knew Arnold was coming.
Why do we think this? Every other recent #1 seed for the hawks lost (except one year for Spencer). He had a million close matches that year and was seconds away from losing in big tens. He had a prior loss to his likely quarterfinal opponent.
You can't just add Lugo as a "likely champ" when the track record is full of better, more dominant guys not getting it done (Marinelli x 2, Eierman, Kemerer, Gilman).
I guess we’ll never know. But PSU doesn’t seem to have that issue when bringing in top recruits.
If you look you can find the numbers that will show that PSU has the largest alumni association in the Country. and the argument over Billionaires ONLY being multi millionaires falls on deaf ears...those few guys aren't donating BILLIONS anyways but the Multi millionaires are donating Millions of dollars over and over so the facts remain that money is a HUGE difference maker.
Let them? I’d rather try to beat them.
Why wouldn't you want 165/174 or 174/184 manned by these two guys? Worse case is that if they are the same exact weight (unlikely), then the lesser will transfer out. Little cost in the grand scheme, and for that cost you made the starter a better wrestler by room competition. Such archaic thinking.
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No. It's. Not.
If this is the case, why are guys taking less money to go to PSU over Iowa? Nagao and Bernie had better offers to come to Iowa City, and they still ended up in HV. Mess said NIL had 0.01% to do with his decision to go to Penn State.
They are getting better guys for less money, so how on earth can you say money is a "HUGE" difference-maker?
Very nearly lost Gilman this way too.
Of course it matters. You can’t pay 90% of the US Olympic team to base out of your RTC without the money for one thing.
we are not surprised. That's a familiar story with a new name.
