No. 1 Penn State Wrestling grades, MVP from throttling of No. 3 Iowa

Grades continued:

No. 5 Alex Marinelli 10-2 major decision over No. 11 Brady Berge

Grade: C-

Not everything was puppies and roses for the Nittany Lions on Friday night.

From the opening whistle, it appeared the game plan for Berge was to bide his time, play defense, wait to see any openings, and wrestle to not lose anything worse than a decision.

However, it was readily apparent that Berge didn’t have his best night as Angel Rivera called a stall warning on him 40 seconds into the match. Yes, that is correct. Forty seconds.

Halfway through the third period, Brady was able to get out of Marinelli’s clutches to earn the escape and narrow the score to 4-1. All he had to do was defend Alex’s offense and try to possibly counter with some shots of his own.

And with under a minute to go in the match Marinelli was able to land a single leg and get yet another takedown. Which wasn’t the end of the world because this only gave him a 6-2 advantage after Alex gave up the free escape point to start back at neutral.

But with 28 seconds left in the third period, Rivera slapped another stall warning on Berge and this time it gave Marinelli a 7-2 advantage. Again, Berge just needed to try and defend and not give up a takedown to prevent giving up a major.

Which is exactly what didn’t happen. Marinelli continued his onslaught of Berge and grabbed a single leg along the top of the mat. And with 13 seconds remaining in the match, he took Brady to the mat one more time, thus giving Marinelli the major decision, tying up the dual score 10-10, and re-energizing the Hawkeye crowd.