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Penn State Wrestling: Top 10 Nittany Lions of All-Time

By Chris Snyder

PITTSBURGH, PA - MARCH 23: Anthony Cassar of the Penn State Nittany Lions is introduced during the championship finals of the NCAA Wrestling Championships on March 23, 2019 at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Hunter Martin/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
PITTSBURGH, PA - MARCH 23: Anthony Cassar of the Penn State Nittany Lions is introduced during the championship finals of the NCAA Wrestling Championships on March 23, 2019 at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Hunter Martin/NCAA Photos via Getty Images) /
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Ranking Penn State Wrestling’s top-10 grapplers of all time in the internet era

What Penn State Wrestling fans watched on the evening of March 20th was nothing short of magical. Crowning four NCAA Champions on that evening had to rank somewhere in the top 10 moments of Penn State Wrestling history.

Speaking of top 10, this quiet part of the wrestling season is a perfect time to come up with Penn State’s top 10 wrestlers of all time.

A couple of caveats though:
-Wrestlers who have already graduated or moved on will only be considered. This eliminates me trying to guess if Aaron Brooks will win 4 NCAA Titles and 5 B1G Titles (which are totally going to happen, by the way).
-Wrestlers from the internet era (roughly mid 90’s-present) will only be considered. I know, I know. Jeff Prescott and Andy Matter are absolute Penn State Hall of Famers, but it’s incredibly difficult to gauge where they stack up with limited footage and how the landscape of wrestling has changed over the decades. So I’m taking the easy way out and not putting them in the mix.

Now onto my list of Penn State Wrestling’s top-10 grapplers of all-time

No. 10

Anthony Cassar
Career Record: 49-3
B1G Titles: 1 (2019)
NCAA Titles: 1 (2019)
All-American: 1 (2019)

And right off of the bat we’re starting with someone who only wrestled a single full season during his career at Penn State. But boy was it a phenomenal season.

You know the saying about how the brightest stars shine for the shortest amount of time? This sums up Cassar’s career perfectly.

Anthony took the collegiate heavyweight world by storm in the 2019 season as he compiled a record of 30-1 and earned bonus points in 71% of his matches. Cassar’s lone loss came at the hands of Oklahoma State’s Derek White, who then went on to finish 2nd in the 2019 NCAA’s.

Any guess as to who beat him? Yep. Cassar avenged the earlier loss by beating White 10-1 in a major decision in the 2019 finals to claim his sole NCAA Championship.

Another fun fact about Cassar’s 2019 season … He beat Gable Steveson both in the B1G Tournament and the NCAA Championships. And to this day, these are the only losses Steveson has had in his entire collegiate career.

Unfortunately, Anthony Cassar’s Penn State career ended when he sustained a shoulder injury early into the 2020 season. He started the year off 3-0, however this ended up being his last matches ever at Penn State.

Had Cassar not suffered the shoulder injury and had the world not been engulfed in a worldwide pandemic, who knows? I believe he would have won another NCAA title, but we’ll never know for sure.

I do believe, however, Cassar deserves to be in this top 10 list.

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