These guys have to earn their spots, regardless of where they fit.

A lot of people on this board make assumptions about where guys will fit without recognizing that a LOT of the good high school guys are just that and they don’t ever progress. This isn’t to disparage anyone, it’s just a fact that we all (myself included) like to jump the gun on these things because we want what’s best.

We all assume Catka will be better than Borst and Borst is better than Smeltzer (or whomever comes into the room), so Borst should drop to 197. But we don’t know how good Catka will be. We assume he will be good, but we don’t really know.

Same thing with Ulrey slotting in at 165. As far as I’m concerned, Mekhi has earned the right to wrestle at whatever weight class he chooses (within reason of course), so I don’t think the coaches will ask him to bump up.

We’ve had a LOT of guys who were ranked highly that didn’t work out: the Norstrem brothers didn’t reach what most thought was their potential, Billy Miller (injury), Chisko never recovered from his injury, Zach Epperly left early, and so on. We even had a number 1 overall recruit not work out (Cody Gardner from Christiansburg). These things happen, so without being in the room, it’s hard to really say what should or shouldn’t happen when all we see really is what the coaches and team want us to see.

Also, it seems that we tend to forget that Gerardi is a R-Fr and is ranked in the teens all season. That’s pretty frickin impressive if you ask me.

Mitch is basically the same as Gerardi. Sure this is his second season starting, but he’s a T-So and could probably benefit from more time to grow his offense.

DMF is having a below standard year (by his standards) which is still a fantastic year. He’s only had one loss that was really perplexing and the other three were not for lack of effort. But the level of fatalism regarding him is just astounding. He’s a three time AA. I won’t count him out until he’s wrestled his final match. He has earned that and deserves that from us.

There’s a lot of negativity and people looking down the road and brushing off what we have now. All of our guys are in the RPI. Not many other teams can say that. We beat Ohio State in THEIR house. We have weight classes that have over performed what anyone expected before the year started (125, 133), we have classes that have shown improvement all year (141, 149, 174, 197, 285) and we have guys that go out there and wrestle hard all 7 minutes like BC and DMF.

I feel like we are a little spoiled as a fan base because we’ve had a number of years of sustained success, and when we got off to a hot start, people forgot that we were ranked in the high teens and even that was generous by most standards. Our guys are out performing expectations, and other than the flop against UNC, I haven’t really seen us lay an egg this season.

Our coaches deserve a lot of respect for the work they’ve done this year, and so do our guys.

This post kinda went off the rails, but I just felt like some of these things needed to be said after seeing all the negativity and looking to the future and undercutting the present. It’s not meant to disparage anyone in particular, and it’s probably just me being an “old man yelling at clouds”. So I hope I didn’t offend anyone.