Eagle26

Pretty much exactly my take as well. Got overconfident that he could Dake bomb him and then when it went wrong, he never mentally recovered.

Wrestlers do the best when they are in the right weight class for their body. Since elite wrestlers usually know their body well, when they move up, it’s generally for the better. However, there are times that wrestlers do better or would do better at the lower weight class. A recent example would be Micic going back down to 57 kg and performing much better when he was undersized at 141lbs. Cutting too much weight is never good, but neither is being undersized. That’s why 6 weights sucks so much.

Zilmer

Haha! That’s awesome. It also got me thinking… I beat a guy who beat a guy who beat Jordan Burroughs. I may have to nominate myself for GOAT lol

The Olympics are the ultimate goal of our sport and are seen with sooo much more prestige than a world championship that I totally agree you can value that higher than the world championships. However, I don’t think you can make it about competition level. If you want to talk competition level, Burroughs is a clear winner. Fewer weight classes, Soviet break-up, advancements in training/scouting, case closed. Now I’m not saying that settles the debate… it depends what you value more. Just saying you shouldn’t value Olympics more because of competition, it should be valued higher on prestige alone. Also, I would add if you are putting Olympics on such a high pedestal, you should have Baumgartner over Smith. He has 2 Olympic golds plus one silver and one bronze!

Please… let’s not turn this into a basketball debate!

I actually think JB has a good chance against Sidakov. Unfortunately, I don’t think he gets past Dake though. I think Dake presents a tougher style matchup for him. Either way our opinions of these fantasy matchups have no relevance on his GOAT status.

Yes, we are talking about USA Mens freestyle GOAT. Although I think that would be synonymous with overall USA wrestling GOAT.

Yeah I agree two straight losses is not good, but I don’t think you can say Sidakov “owned” him. Those matches were as close as you can get. We are arguing semantics at this point though. Burroughs has at least made it a debate at this point.

Sorry… that was my weak attempt at sarcastic humor and trying to give ShakaAloha a hard time lol. My point was that no one hold Satievs loss to Slay against him when considering him the GOAT. So why should two razor thin losses take away from everything JB accomplished?

Russias GOAT should not be someone who is 0-1 against Slay who wouldn’t even be considered in the top 10 Americans of all time.

Another note about how good our team is now…. Isn’t it crazy to think that Gilman is in the bottom half of our current team members (probably 6th best out of 10) when prior to the “Burroughs era”, he probably would have been one of our best wrestlers of the entire decade!

That would be awesome to see Snyder keep going. It’s just super rare to see someone go for 4 quads. Has anyone ever been our Olympic rep four times other than big Bruce? I agree Snyder could do it if he wants. He seems to love it and has done a great job staying healthy

Fair point on Yianni. It seems like he’s been around a while I forgot he was so young. I should bump him from probably to possibly.

Yeah I was just making a point that if it isn’t weird for Dake, maybe it won’t be that weird for Yianni either. Yes, the separation is a little bigger for Dake, but I don’t think they should be sleeping on Nolf.