The Penn Stater Magazine

Another Chance for Penn State Wrestling Against Iowa

January 19, 2012 at 5:58 pm Lori Shontz Leave a comment

Quentin Wright hopes the Nittany Lions will be on top during this season's dual meet, not just the NCAA tournament.

Quentin Wright didn’t want to get ahead of himself; he didn’t circle Jan. 22, date of the wrestling team’s dual against Iowa, back when the schedule went out over the summer. (Plenty of other people did, though; individual match tickets sold out 90 minutes after they went on sale in October.)

Recently, though—even as the defending national champions have dominated January, winning the Southern Scuffle tournament and giving up only nine team points, total, against Big Ten foes Michigan State, Northwestern, and Wisconsin—Wright has had the Hawkeyes on his mind.

“I don’t know about their side of the story,” said Wright, the defending NCAA champion at 184 pounds, who’s ranked No. 2 this season. “But definitely, this is one match of the year that we’re fired up for.”

Wright thought the dual might mean more to the Nittany Lions, who have over the years, as he said, “been on the lower end, getting beaten up, most of the time.” But it seems like seems like Iowa is pretty fired up, too. At the Hawkeyes’ postseason banquet last April, it seemed that coach Tom Brands had already forgotten how they had dominated Penn State at Rec Hall in a dual and was focused on how Penn State beat them at the NCAA championships.

“Are you OK with being down a couple of notches? Are you OK with getting whipped? Are you OK with getting whipped by Penn State?” Brands asked. “If you’re not, do you have an imagination to go beyond where you are now and what you think is hard work, and what you think is the right way, and what you think is doing everything you can to really open up the flood gates to realizing your potential?”

All of which is to say that the dual, 2 p.m. Sunday in Rec Hall, is getting a lot of attention. Iowa’s ranked No. 2, Penn State is No. 3, and there will be 14 ranked wrestlers competing. None of the Nittany Lions have ever been on a team that has beaten Iowa in a dual, and the one milestone coach Cael Sanderson hasn’t achieved in his storied career is being part of a team, as an athlete or coach, that’s won a dual meet against the Hawkeyes.

Asked about that hole in his résumé, so to speak, and whether he’d heard talk about it, Sanderson said, “You hear a lot of stuff. I live in my own little bubble, so I’m not too worried about anything outside.”

Sanderson did say that last season’s loss to Iowa, painful as it was, paid off. He thought he’d been outcoached by Brands, who schools his wrestlers in strategy—primarily counter-offense (waiting for the opponents to attack, then taking advantage) and hanging back until the final minute, when they can take advantage of their conditioning. Sanderson’s style is to go hard for all seven minutes, and the Penn State wrestlers have bought into it. After last season’s loss, he spent some time thinking about how he needed to change. One thing he realized was that his perception of Iowa wrestling needed to change, too.

“You kind of think it’s a straight-up dogfight and we want to outfight them, but I think they know that’s what we’re doing and kind of using it against us,” Sanderson said after last season. “They’re blocking, countering, scoring on the edge. And a lot of that’s my own pride. Living in the state, you hear about how aggressive those (Iowa) guys are, so my own pride was like, ‘We’ve got to be more aggressive than these guys, be tougher than these guys.’

“But those guys are well-coached. You know, they have strategies going into matches. They don’t win on aggression. They do in some cases, but they do what they have to do to win matches.”

So what’s that all mean for Sunday’s dual? Impossible to tell, but I imagine it’s going to be an entertaining afternoon.

Lori Shontz, senior editor

Entry filed under: Penn State wrestling. Tags: Cael Sanderson, NCAA championships, Quentin Wright, Tom Brands.