Cleveland State Drops Wrestling

By | January 24, 2025

Who wants to read I told you so? This isn’t the beginning of our problems; it’s a continuation of problems.

So, what are? To begin, we have too many Head Coaches scoring high marks with their technical skills and too few of them who have degrees, or interest, in administration, marketing, or promotions.

Our survival means that our head coaches must have a minimum level of CEO proficiencies.

Being able to teach stands ups and switches don’t fund programs. Successfully teaching wrestlers how to play the edge with a 1 or 2 point lead doesn’t do anything for a universities scholarship fund.

But our coaches keep doing the same thing over and over again . . . why? Because that’s the way they’ve always done it; and it wins matches. But, it’s also why over a hundred collegiate wrestling programs are no longer with us.

Pouring salt into our wounds, we have a Rules Committee who doesn’t have a clue how to attract new fans to the sport. And through a combination of their myopic vision and stubbornness, there will be more Cleveland State’s in our future.

I bet, not one coach who wrestles in the league with Cleveland State has reached out to their administrators to see what might be possible to help Cleveland State.

However, I would imagine that half of the wrestlers at Cleveland State have already heard from those same coaches asking if they might be interested in transferring?

The sport has changed, all sports have changed. The NIL, wrestling’s RTC’s, and the NCAA’s very relaxed transfer rules have energized our top-of-the-line programs, but at the expense of the bottom 58 of wrestling’s 78 D-I programs.

The only answer I see regarding our over-the-top challenges is to find a way to have the NCAA create an administrative commission that oversees the various non-revenue Rules Committees.

The basic concept being that non-revenue sports need to create increased funding through creative and immediate alterations. The first source of any increased revenue production for us has to be the adoption of new fan friendly rules that spectators are willing to pay to see.

Not the fans wrestling already has, but the 2 million fans we don’t have, but could have, if the sport was engaging. Which it’s not.

No, please don’t respond to this by telling me I’m wrong, or saying you have a better way. I’m not, and you don’t.

If you’re going to sell anything, you have to start with a product that people want to buy. If we had such a product, I wouldn’t need to write, and Cleveland State wouldn’t have athletes looking for places to go.

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