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luthius dagan

luthius dagan

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Jun 30, 2025
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tim73135 said:
First off, let me say upfront.. I didnt start out my college wrestling fandom as a Ok State fan. I grew up in Va and started wrestling as an 8th grader, which was actually early to start wrestling in the area I grew up in. At that time in Va, there were 3 high school classifications. 1A was for the super small schools and was pretty much open season on who would win individual and team titles. 2A and 3A were absolutely dominated by programs that had head coaches that wrestled for Dan Gable. The dominate team in 2A was Grundy High School coached by Kevin Dresser. Grundy typicalyl placed in every weight class and won a majority of weight classes. 3A was dominated by Great Bridge High School, coached by Steve Martin. Great Bridge typically won handily, but it was a bit more competitive as Great Bridge had such an incredible feeder program that a certain point, kids would move to a different beach school to have the opportunity to compete every year. At this time, there were 3 magazines that covered wrestling and the newpaper that came from USA wrestling. There was typically two opportunities to watch college wrestling, 1 was setting a vcr to tape conference tournaments at 2 or 3 in the morning and the other was the NCAA finals that came on CBS on a sunday. I loved the Iowa team and can still name my all time favorite iowa team by heart. I got the Competitor Supreme tape the summer before my junior year and it became the framework for how I wanted to train and wrestle. My problem was, in the area I grew up in, there werent coaches anywhere on the level of Dresser or Martin. There were a few coaches who wrestled in High school, but a majority were coaches like mine who was a great guy but never actually wrestled. My senior year was my best year and I went 27 and 4 going into the post season wrestling other kids who had coaches like mine. As soon as I wrestled kids who had good coaches, I lost because I was technically deficient. I ended up in Oklahoma after my USMC enlistment ended in 1998 to wrestle at Central Oklahoma for David James. There was an article in AWN that year calling him "The Gable of D2".. Central Oklahoma was also the most affordable out of state school in the country at the time and it sits between Oklahoma and OK State geographically, so I felt like I was moving to a wrestling wonderland. I only became a OK State fan once I met my future wife and went to duals with her family. Ive never been against Iowa or the Brands brothers. They were the first college wrestlers I looked up to.. Im saddened by the current state of the Iowa program. From the outside, it seems like the Hawkeyes are becoming less and less relevant. It seems like its because wrestling and the most effective ways to recruit, coach and build a program have changed pretty drastically over the past 25 years. I say that with all due respect to all coaches involved to include John Smith.. The Cowboys trained hard and wrestled hard under JS and were mostly not a threat at all to Penn State and strugged to get into the top 5 some years. All that changed with Coach Taylor and a modernized system of doing things. I feel bad for the Brands to be honest. In my opinion, I dont know how anymore could wrestle more of an Iowa style that Bo Basset and they let him slip through the programs hands! At this point it seems like the only kids going to Iowa are the kids that dont think they can break the lineup at the schools that are developing the talent better. I hope the best for Iowa. As a Cowboys fan, I hope they dominate everything the Cowboys are not at. I hope Iowa gets it figured out as, in my opinion, I think its going to take a couple of different teams getting better to knock off Penn State. It seems like Penn State is essentially doing what Gable did when he put together a 9 year run, which is develop and implement a system of development that maximizes results. Penn State got it going and hit the gas before everyone else knew what was happening and by that time, they got so far ahead that the only anyone else was going to win was for someone to develop thier own system or for someone from inside the program to break away. I think Iowa needs to go after Dake or Burroughs or someone who is versed in the current landscape.
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Not reading all that. Ever heard of paragraphs?

good for you, or sorry that happened depending on what you wrote
 
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AndreTheHawk

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Jul 2, 2025
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PennState1985 said:
I thought it was a thoughtful post. Dense but thoughtful.
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Yeah, he put a lot of effort into it obviously, and seemed pretty respectful to me.......as an Iowa fan.

I thought it was interesting actually, and didn't appear condescending to me. Nice little "journey" writeup as well (could have broken the structure up a bit better I suppose, but BFD).
 
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