TripNSweep

I don't think the Marines have the same kind of program like WCAP in the Army. I could be wrong but I remember that the Marine wrestlers didn't get much special treatment and still had to do regular Marine duty. It might have changed though.

My first thought. Larry is a wonderful person btw.

We can call him Spelunkin Fred.

Did they patch the crater Dake left behind?

Suriano looks like he's letting the offense off the leash. Much more relaxed.

Did CP get a point deduction for something?

We saw how well Wilson wrestling McIlravy went in the Iowa/Iowa State dual that year.

If he beats Dake and wins gold I can't imagine him sticking with a cycle for another 4 years. I could see him taking a year or two off and keeping himself in shape without the grind of wrestling and trying again in 2024. But I think if he wins another Olympic gold he's out. He goes out on top and transitions into coaching at an RTC close to home.

Micic trains at Sunkist too apparently. And has already qualified for the Olympics. Sounds like a really good situation.

Zeke doesn't coach Sunkist. Mark Perry does.

I actually have a really funny story about this. I was a high school assistant coach and our head coach wasn't really a wrestling guy. He was basically a weights and PE teacher who wrestled in junior high or something. When Shawn Charles became head coach at ASU and brought Ben on as an assistant, they put the word out they wanted to repair the neglect from the previous ASU coach towards local high schools. So I got in touch with Ben and he said he would be happy to come do a one day clinic for us. I brought it to our head coach who naturally had no idea who Ben was. He said he'd look into it and let me know. About 2 weeks pass and Ben texts me a few times asking what's going on. I finally went back to the head coach and basically asked what the hold up was since Ben wanted to get us on his schedule. He said he didn't think Ben was very fundamentally sound and that he didn't think he would be able to teach our kids anything useful. I never told him, hey sorry our coach thinks you suck at wrestling, it was much more cordial than that. But it was really funny. This was the same coach who didn't want lewboo in the room either despite knowing full well who he was.

If that pud can land punches like that, if anyone even remotely talented gets off those kind of shots it's going to be over fast. Askren is the betting underdog and I'll put money on that. Askren all day on this. If you think otherwise then you've got serious blinders on.

Donald Lockett?

Yeah but Askren has competed where people can and have hit him. Other than a flying knee he got rocked a few times and kept fighting. He's a lot tougher than people think. Just because he got hit with a 1 in a 100,000 flying knee doesn't mean anything. The guy can take punches from professionals wearing much smaller gloves. Boxing some YouTube star who is not a real fighter is going to be pretty easy.

Askren will win. You have to be a great competitor to do that well in wrestling.