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Southern Scuffle

That's already indirectly in the seeding criteria -- eligibility for coaches' ranking and RPI.

Be careful what you wish for in making it an explicit criterion -- may make low-quality Opens more popular without fixing ducking. The Law of Unintended Consequences is undefeated.
I agree just fishing for some ideas. I think we have enough good wrestling fans out there that we shod be able to come up with something.

I remember when Cael first took over for PSU he had a few different interviews where he talked about making a great product for the fans. I never forgot that We need more coaches with that mindset. Put on a show that the fans will enjoy
 
Actually something along those lines isn't a bad idea. I don't think points from a tournament should could towards nationals but what if each wrestler could earn points based on how much they wrestled. Those points could be added to the algorithm they use to determine seedings. And a wrestler wouldn't be penalized per sey if they didn't wrestle due to an injury they just wouldn't have the points to seed them above a certain seed number. For example, in order to be seed number one you would have to accrued so many points based on how often you wrestled
I did post that as an idea that I perceive as preposterous.

I think the coaches need to get together and put thought into developing a few must see events during the year. Not just, as Dean pointed out, the PSU v Iowa dual and NCAAs. With that said, last year into this year we had the college duals and this year they reintroduced the All-Star match.

ESPN shows a decent amount of weekend duals, Wisconsin v Cornell which gave us the Gomez v Yianni match is a singular example.
Sunday afternoon ESPN has WVU v Pitt, and ASU v ISU. I am certain Slush will be promoting these as well as other matches.

A conversation coaches need to have with each other is the importance of putting their studs on the mat against other studs, and promoting their duals and big matchups. Then making sure the big matchups happen.
 
A few things folks may wish to consider in this discussion about their apparent discontent with the first half of the season:

(1) Midlands used to be THE holiday tourney. PSU, Okie St, Cornell, Mizzou et al. made Southern Scuffle a solid (arguably better) competitor. But teams also have CKLV and Reno to choose from. And then the National Duals essentially shifted from mid/late January to the holiday season. PSU left the Scuffle for that option, and it was downhill from there for the Scuffle. Brands got pissed about Midlands being canceled last year, so Iowa had added yet another holiday tourney to the options. Look, this is really simple — there are simply too many options available
to teams to get in a good multi-day event before their conference dual season kicks in. There was no analogous spike in the number of D1 men’s wrestling teams to saturate all the excess opportunity. The field could only get watered down.

(2) If PSU put a dinged-up or injured guy on the mat for a holiday event and put himself at risk of a serious setback or even a season-ending, proverbial nail in the coffin, would you feel like that was a good, responsible decision by the staff to put him out there?

(3) Subjective, personal “boiling points” aside, where is the evidence that the sport of wrestling is being harmed by “ducking” and “non-participation”? Any empirical data to back up this claim? Dollars, butts in seats, number of competitors in the sport? Something other than “Well, I was looking forward to that prospective matchup and it didn’t happen, so I’m pissed”?

(4) I’ve been following college wrestling fairly closely for a little over 20 years, too — guys sitting unexpectedly is absolutely not anything new. See #1 above for what is new.

(5) As someone notes earlier, some cool stuff happened in November and December. And it usually does.

(6) Wrestlers are starting younger, training hard younger, competing all over the place younger, and coming into college more battle-tested than ever. Perhaps the toll on the body is showing up sooner. The days of 30-40 match seasons in college are long gone and not coming back.

Anyway, I think people should remember that most spectators of the sport are family, friends, former wrestlers, and diehard fans. It’s been that way a long time. Casual fans come and go, and I really doubt the “non-participation” epidemic is really as bad as some are making it out to be. When Nationals can’t sell out and sees a substantial reduction in television coverage, then maybe I’ll raise a concerned eyebrow. I think the trajectory is still upward, though.
 
(6) Wrestlers are starting younger, training hard younger, competing all over the place younger, and coming into college more battle-tested than ever. Perhaps the toll on the body is showing up sooner. The days of 30-40 match seasons in college are long gone and not coming back.
6A: younger/toll on body -- see Tirapelle tweet above.

6B: fewer matches per year -- unintended consequence of the NCAA, school, and state virus policies. Other coaches had Cael's training philosophy thrust upon them against their will, and they learned.

 
A few things folks may wish to consider in this discussion about their apparent discontent with the first half of the season:

(1) Midlands used to be THE holiday tourney. PSU, Okie St, Cornell, Mizzou et al. made Southern Scuffle a solid (arguably better) competitor. But teams also have CKLV and Reno to choose from. And then the National Duals essentially shifted from mid/late January to the holiday season. PSU left the Scuffle for that option, and it was downhill from there for the Scuffle. Brands got pissed about Midlands being canceled last year, so Iowa had added yet another holiday tourney to the options. Look, this is really simple — there are simply too many options available
to teams to get in a good multi-day event before their conference dual season kicks in. There was no analogous spike in the number of D1 men’s wrestling teams to saturate all the excess opportunity. The field could only get watered down.

(2) If PSU put a dinged-up or injured guy on the mat for a holiday event and put himself at risk of a serious setback or even a season-ending, proverbial nail in the coffin, would you feel like that was a good, responsible decision by the staff to put him out there?

(3) Subjective, personal “boiling points” aside, where is the evidence that the sport of wrestling is being harmed by “ducking” and “non-participation”? Any empirical data to back up this claim? Dollars, butts in seats, number of competitors in the sport? Something other than “Well, I was looking forward to that prospective matchup and it didn’t happen, so I’m pissed”?

(4) I’ve been following college wrestling fairly closely for a little over 20 years, too — guys sitting unexpectedly is absolutely not anything new. See #1 above for what is new.

(5) As someone notes earlier, some cool stuff happened in November and December. And it usually does.

(6) Wrestlers are starting younger, training hard younger, competing all over the place younger, and coming into college more battle-tested than ever. Perhaps the toll on the body is showing up sooner. The days of 30-40 match seasons in college are long gone and not coming back.

Anyway, I think people should remember that most spectators of the sport are family, friends, former wrestlers, and diehard fans. It’s been that way a long time. Casual fans come and go, and I really doubt the “non-participation” epidemic is really as bad as some are making it out to be. When Nationals can’t sell out and sees a substantial reduction in television coverage, then maybe I’ll raise a concerned eyebrow. I think the trajectory is still upward, though.
Disregarding your liberal use of quotation marks for a moment, it’s not just several posters on this board who are discontented by the increase in non-participation (no quotation marks necessary) in these tourneys. It’s successful wrestling veterans like Gabe Dean and Ben Askren, as well as passionate guys for whom wrestling is their very life, like Willie Saylor. They are also displeased by the current state of affairs and agree that improvements need to be made. Is it a catastrophe that is ruining the sport? Of course not. Does the system have some flaws that need fixing? Without question.
 
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I love the sport, but wrestling has some big time problems.
I concur. I think at times we do a horrible job of growing our (NCAA wrestling) sport and fan base, and this is one of those times. If you're going to send your team then send your team (i.e., Iowa State, Mizz, etc.) .I think we (NCAA wrestling) do a huge disservice to the fans by attending these events half-cocked.. Iowa and PSU have outstanding fan bases, but some of these other programs struggle to get a thousand fans to attend any of their meets, let alone all of them....and these holiday tournaments could definitely help. The scuffle used to be, especially in the years you all were attending, the best holiday tournament, but those days are long gone. This year's version could have been decent, but not when we're keeping many of our hammers at home. How cool would that have been to see Keegan, Griffith and Carr going at it in January!
 
It’s funny how flo/intermat do these preview/predictions for midlands/scuffle/etc when we know half the time no one shows up.. does this happen in any other sport? Hard to see how wrestling grows.. miss the days where Taylor/Dake showed up to duke it out.. now it’s why bother until March..
This!! We're not doing our sport and/or our fan base any favors by not giving the fans what they want and frankly deserve. It's great watching Spencer, RBY, Brooks, etc., win in March, but as fans I think the programs owe it to us (the fan base) to have those fellas going after it every time a school attends an event, whether it be a dual or a tourney, barring injuries, emergencies, etc. To your point, Taylor and Dake would go after it regardless of when it was on the schedule, and they're as good as it gets. So if they can do it why can't everyone else. I really didn't expect Spencer to wrestle more than one or two matches this weekend, if at all, and certainly didn't expect him to wrestle in the final against a fellow Hawk. What a treat for the fans. That's what we should expect to see...if healthy we should expect our fellas to lace em up and get busy.
 
Another suggestion from Willie. Not sure I 100% agree on this, but the urgency to do something different is apparent.

 
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Another suggestion from Willie. Not sure I 100% agree on this, but the urgency to do something different is apparent.

I think that’s the simplest solution. Definitely not perfect because it penalizes guys who are actually hurt but I bet at least 10 of those 13 forfeits were from guys that are healthy. It is a huge problem and I’m pretty sure counting a forfeit as a loss would stop this bs.
 
There could be unintended consequences, a couple I can see if you count all MFFs as losses:

1) Teams are going to be less inclined to sign up for large tournaments if a legit injury torpedoes their ranking.

2) Sometimes at these tournaments things go super late and teams have to travel back and miss a late round consi. It would suck to have an L to someone you likely would have beaten because you had to start heading back home because things were still going at 9:30pm on a Sunday.

Again, I don't have a solution but I don't think simply counting MFFs as losses is a panacea and could bring up other issues. I can see some coaches simply not want to risk attending some larger tournaments if this rule goes into place.
 
There could be unintended consequences, a couple I can see if you count all MFFs as losses:

1) Teams are going to be less inclined to sign up for large tournaments if a legit injury torpedoes their ranking.

2) Sometimes at these tournaments things go super late and teams have to travel back and miss a late round consi. It would suck to have an L to someone you likely would have beaten because you had to start heading back home because things were still going at 9:30pm on a Sunday.

Again, I don't have a solution but I don't think simply counting MFFs as losses is a panacea and could bring up other issues. I can see some coaches simply not want to risk attending some larger tournaments if this rule goes into place.
Shame on them I think the benefit of counting them as a loss out weights the detriment of sustaining a loss. I agree with your assessment but I think counting them as losses gets rid of the bs overall.
 
There are some interesting ideas, but the first time a new idea negatively impacts a PSU kid this board would have a collective meltdown.

It would be nice if we got all the cool top tier v top tier matchups possible. However, acknowledging people will always game the rules, who is in a position to declare a kid who MFFs out of the consolation bracket is or isn't gaming the system?

Skipping matchups to protect post-season seeds is definitely for wussies, skipping consolation wrestle backs because I am tired and don't want to risk season altering injuries isn't really anybody's business.
 
People could MFF out of matches they are losing in the last 5 seconds to get around this, heck it would make sense for every losing wrestler in a tourney taking their first loss (assuming they can't come back super late) to do this in case they need to MFF out later on.
 
People could MFF out of matches they are losing in the last 5 seconds to get around this, heck it would make sense for every losing wrestler in a tourney taking their first loss (assuming they can't come back super late) to do this in case they need to MFF out later on.
This would be an injury default, not a MFF.
 
There could be unintended consequences, a couple I can see if you count all MFFs as losses:

1) Teams are going to be less inclined to sign up for large tournaments if a legit injury torpedoes their ranking.

2) Sometimes at these tournaments things go super late and teams have to travel back and miss a late round consi. It would suck to have an L to someone you likely would have beaten because you had to start heading back home because things were still going at 9:30pm on a Sunday.

Again, I don't have a solution but I don't think simply counting MFFs as losses is a panacea and could bring up other issues. I can see some coaches simply not want to risk attending some larger tournaments if this rule goes into place.
 
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