Lehigh Sports Forum

Richb-3 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 19, 2021 3:27 pm I expect he would work out better than the last 6 year senior from Stanford.

Shane's a RS Soph

There is no doubt that Lehigh wrestling has one of the very best fan bases in the country. They are knowledgeable and passionate but for many passion sometimes clouds good judgment.

There are goals and there are expectations. Goals are pretty constant but expectations ebb and flow. So for the doomsayers, last year Lehigh a very good Dual meet season defeating 2 top 5 teams and several other top 20 teams. We won the EIWA tournament and then Covid came. In a normal year, expectations should have been quite high for this year. On paper, we were returning 80% of that lineup losing only Kutler and Pomrinca. Then Weiller took his grad year elsewhere. Farro decided to graduate and enter the job market. Humphreys had a season ending injury. Paetzell was fighting an illness and now we only return 40% of the team. One of those failed to make the ill-fated NCAA tournament and another got in on a wild card. We really only had 2 wrestlers with NCAA experience. So what should expectations be for this year? Is the program in dire straits?

This season is ending where we all should have expected it to as an opportunity to get the next generation of Lehigh wrestlers battle-tested for next season. It's just that kind of year.

While i agree with a lot of that sentiment, I would argue that Farro may well have left because he wouldnt have beat Hines....I certainly wouldn’t have expected him to do better at NCAA’s than Hines did. Weiler left and the team apparently was caught by surprise? I mean it was a surprise to fans of the team but the staff had no clue?

Other than those two points which i hear often and disagree with I agree with everything else you said..... young team, rebuilding and so on......next year’s lineup will be very interesting

TMH wrote: ↑Fri Mar 19, 2021 8:15 pm There is no doubt that Lehigh wrestling has one of the very best fan bases in the country. They are knowledgeable and passionate but for many passion sometimes clouds good judgment.

There are goals and there are expectations. Goals are pretty constant but expectations ebb and flow. So for the doomsayers, last year Lehigh a very good Dual meet season defeating 2 top 5 teams and several other top 20 teams. We won the EIWA tournament and then Covid came. In a normal year, expectations should have been quite high for this year. On paper, we were returning 80% of that lineup losing only Kutler and Pomrinca. Then Weiller took his grad year elsewhere. Farro decided to graduate and enter the job market. Humphreys had a season ending injury. Paetzell was fighting an illness and now we only return 40% of the team. One of those failed to make the ill-fated NCAA tournament and another got in on a wild card. We really only had 2 wrestlers with NCAA experience. So what should expectations be for this year? Is the program in dire straits?

This season is ending where we all should have expected it to as an opportunity to get the next generation of Lehigh wrestlers battle-tested for next season. It's just that kind of year.

I think you can add to all that -- young teams were especially hard-hit because the guys who were lowest on the learning curve didn't get to learn much this year. We were one of the young teams.

I took a look earlier -- only seven of the EIWA wrestlers in St. Louis this weekend had wrestled at NCAAs before. The others got a sudden education.

So no need to rationalize things Lehigh just needs to recruit better. They're mostly getting second tier eager beaver solid citizens. Once at Lehigh they get coached up to an acceptable EIWA standard but are completely overmatched at nationals. Just not landing the alphas.

mookie wrote: ↑Fri Mar 19, 2021 8:42 pm So no need to rationalize things Lehigh just needs to recruit better. They're mostly getting second tier eager beaver solid citizens. Once at Lehigh they get coached up to an acceptable EIWA standard but are completely overmatched at nationals. Just not landing the alphas.

So give us the solution. How do you do that? I'll assume that all of the "alphas" are being courted by the top teams in the nation. If I look at last year's polls, Lehigh is ranked #12, even though they beat 2 of the teams ahead of us. All 11 teams before us come from Power 5 conferences.
1.) We are by far the smallest school in the top dozen
2.) We are the toughest school to get into in that group
3.)We are the most expensive in that group
4.) We have little to no easy majors here so you will need to work academically
5.) We don't provide the meal stipend that the P5 schools do

If you think for a moment that we don't recruit the alphas that could fit here, you're wrong. The problem is that we get on a bunch of short lists but we only have to lose to 1.

From time to time we find academically qualified blue chips who understand that the real value to wrestling is a ticket to the best education available. Everything else is just temporary. Unfortunately what makes many of the alphas is that they are driven only by what is best athletically.

There are 63 teams in the tournament and LU is presently tied for #31. A top half finish will be nip and tuck.

TMH wrote: ↑Fri Mar 19, 2021 10:23 pm

mookie wrote: ↑Fri Mar 19, 2021 8:42 pm So no need to rationalize things Lehigh just needs to recruit better. They're mostly getting second tier eager beaver solid citizens. Once at Lehigh they get coached up to an acceptable EIWA standard but are completely overmatched at nationals. Just not landing the alphas.

So give us the solution. How do you do that? I'll assume that all of the "alphas" are being courted by the top teams in the nation. If I look at last year's polls, Lehigh is ranked #12, even though they beat 2 of the teams ahead of us. All 11 teams before us come from Power 5 conferences.
1.) We are by far the smallest school in the top dozen
2.) We are the toughest school to get into in that group
3.)We are the most expensive in that group
4.) We have little to no easy majors here so you will need to work academically
5.) We don't provide the meal stipend that the P5 schools do

If you think for a moment that we don't recruit the alphas that could fit here, you're wrong. The problem is that we get on a bunch of short lists but we only have to lose to 1.

From time to time we find academically qualified blue chips who understand that the real value to wrestling is a ticket to the best education available. Everything else is just temporary. Unfortunately what makes many of the alphas is that they are driven only by what is best athletically.

Well said. Every manager I ever had told me that he didn't want his staff to bring him problems, he wanted them to bring him solutions.

Pat Santoro has told me that he just can't match the offers that other schools hand out. The answer to that is probably a mountain of money and a re-work of Lehigh's academic structure.

Outside our control is that more major schools now take wrestling seriously. The elite schools used to be the Oklahomas and the Iowas -- remember those days? This passage was in Mat Wrap this year:

"Beyond winning is simply the challenge of cracking the Top 10. We've done that for long periods, but it's harder to crack the Top 10 than in the past because now more big schools care about wrestling on a consistent basis. In the decade of the 1960s, the "small" programs that cracked the Top 10 at NCAAs were Lock Haven (4x), Northern Illinois, Cornell, Lehigh (6x), SIU-Carbondale (2x), Syracuse (2x), Ohio, Navy (3x), Army (2x), Air Force, East Stroudsburg, Portland State (3x), and Temple; maybe Colorado State and Colorado, Wyoming, Cal Poly (2x), and Pittsburgh (4x) if you count them as small.

Fast forward fifty years, and these are the "small" Top 10 programs of the 2010s: Cornell (10x), Lehigh (2x), Boise State, American. That's it: three EIWA teams and one that's discontinued its program. That's unless Virginia Tech, Rutgers, and NC State can be considered small (er, no). The big guys showed up at the party and decided to stay and hog the cake and punch. And that hasn't just impacted the small programs. At one time the elites were the two Okies and the two Iowas. How've Iowa State and Oklahoma been doing lately? Michigan State, home of the Milkoviches?"

What hurts Lehigh, relatively is that so many P5 schools lack Wrestling. Leave us face it. Other than Vanderbilt, 95% of SC athlete aren't even getting a single look from Lehigh admissions. Even at the academically best of B1G (Save NW) the majority of the SEC Student athletes could become B1G athletes. Same with PAC 12, Same with Big 12 (I don't put USC and Baylor at NW level) ACC is a little different other than Florida State the Wrestling lacking schools have academics of quality.

The point is, of course, If the P65 said, let's all establish, and fully fund wrestling, it would pull down the net quality of all existing programs, but it would pull down EIWA a lot more than any of the other programs

So the commonality of it all (bottom line, that is)... is MONEY, and MORE PROGRAMS WANTING TO BE BETTER.
Lot of hands grasping for the prize.
D3