Nomad pushes back on US men's U23 panic after Bassett loss
The argument over the US men's freestyle showing in Las Vegas turned into a fight over context.
The Wrestling Nomad spent the days after the U23 World Championships arguing that the US men's freestyle result was not the collapse it felt like, a direct counter to the reaction that followed Bo Bassett's quarterfinal loss and Jon Kozak's verdict that the team's performance was very disappointing.
Christian Pyles laid out the Bassett sequence first. Bassett held the criteria advantage in the closing seconds and could have given up one point and still won, then gave up feet to back exposure and lost 6-3.
Nomad's ranking of the results
The Wrestling Nomad did not defend the Bassett match. He called it an underperformance and wrote that Bassett knows it, Virginia Tech knows it and USA Wrestling knows it. His counterweight is age. Bassett is still U20 eligible, which makes it a Junior eligible wrestler dropping a match at U23s.
He went further on the broader reaction, writing that US fans had started treating coin flip matches as near locks and that at some point that regresses to the mean.
On the other side of the ledger, Nomad graded Jayden James winning silver as a first year U20 wrestler as at or more likely an over performance, noting that Lom-Ali Baitukaev is older and was making his fifth Worlds appearance. He also called Justin Rademacher's silver an over performance and pointed out Rademacher wrestled Khaniev better than Kyle Snyder did. On Sinclair, he pointed readers to Kozak's tweet about the credentials of the Moldovan and said anyone who still thinks Sinclair was favored should argue with a wall.
He acknowledged the Aeoden result stings because of the 0-1 finish with no team points, but argued that leaving out Aeoden's Junior eligibility and his draw makes for an unfair over or under performance discussion.
The absentees
Nomad's other point was who was not in Las Vegas. He listed Jax Forrest, Jesse Mendez, Mitchell Mesenbrink, Levi Haines, Josh Barr and Max McEnelly as U23 eligible, while saying up front he was not playing the missing guys game.
His conclusion split the difference. Team USA is probably not going to win seven of the next nine senior titles, he wrote, but the US is not suddenly going to finish sixth or worse year after year either.
USA fans started believing 50/50 matches were gonna be 90/10 America
Bo had the criteria advantage in the closing seconds, could have given up 1 point and still would have won.
Team USA is probably not going to win 7 of the next 9 senior titles.
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