Penn State Wrestling: 5 Bold predictions for B1G Wrestling Championships
By Chris Snyder
We’re breaking out and dusting off the magic 8 ball to come up with five bold predictions for Penn State Wrestling at the upcoming B1G Championships.
Normally, if you’re covering a sports team it’s easy to come up with bold predictions. Sprinkling in a little bit of optimism with a dash of crazy can be fun for both the writer and the readers.
But trying to come up with bold predictions for the Penn State Wrestling team is almost impossible, especially when the predictions are for the B1G Championship.
On any given year saying “Yeah, Penn State is going to dominate, win a handful of individual championships, and lap the field” would hardly be seen as bold.
The Nittany Lions have won each of the past five Big Ten Team Championships and have crowned 16 individual champions along the way.
This year though?
The Penn State Wrestling squad is a mix of talented veterans and inexperienced underclassman. Couple this with an absolute powerhouse in Iowa? And we can safely come up with a list of 5 bold predictions for the Nittany Lions heading into the B1G Championship next weekend, March 6-7.
Bold Predictions No. 1
149 No. 11 Beau Bartlett will finish in the top 3
I’m coming out of the gates swingin’ on this one.
Yes, yes, I know Bartlett has only wrestled in two B1G dual matches this year, but in the dual meet against Ohio State on February 19th, he gave No. 2 Sammy Sasso all he could handle in a narrow 3-5 defeat. His other match was versus a Maryland grappler, so this didn’t tell us anything other than “Maryland stinks at wrestling”.
The main factor I’m going with in this prediction is it appears the 149 group in the B1G is mess as I detailed in Ranking PSU’s Title Contenders in the B1G Championships. Sasso is clearly the No. 1 seed but after that it appears each ranked wrestler is exponentially* worse than the next. Sasso pinned Iowa’s No. 6 Max Murin when they squared off, the Fighting Illini’s No. 10 Michael Carr lost to both Sasso and Murin, and Michigan’s No. 9 Kanen Storr just lost to an unranked wrestler from Michigan State.
Bartlett made his Penn State dual meet debut, against the clear No. 1 seed at 149, and he pushed Sasso to the limit. And based on this, I believe he can make a deep run in the B1G’s.
* – not actually possible when it comes to wrestling but it sounds good
