Ohio State finished 9th in the final standings of the NCAA Wrestling Championships Saturday night in St. Louis, behind national champion Iowa, runner-up Penn State and fellow Big Ten foes Michigan and Minnesota. For a program that had finished no worse than third in the five most recent NCAA tournaments, it was a down year.
The Buckeyes were paced by a trio of All-Americans, including national runner-up Sammy Sasso at 149 pounds, 5th-place finisher Ethan Smith at 165, and 8th-place finisher Tate Orndorff at heavyweight. Three is the fewest number of All-Americans the team has placed since 2014, when Nick Heflin and Logan Stieber went 2nd and 1st, respectively.
“Bottom position is a direct correlation to our coaching... that's on me, that's on our staff. And it's something we absolutely have to address.”– Ohio State Head Wrestling Coach Tom Ryan, after the Iowa dual
It's been a great run for the Buckeyes since Tom Ryan's arrival in Columbus. The Ohio State head coach has now led 61 men to All-American honors during his tenure, surpassing the 57 total All-Americans his predecessors had coached from 1929 through 2006. Ryan's teams are averaging more than four All-Americans per year, and have had fewer than four just five times in that span.
But with rival Penn State crowing four individual NCAA champions at this year's tournament, and Iowa, Penn State and Oklahoma State each more than doubling Ohio State's team score, it's clear the Buckeyes need to make some strides this offseason to get back in the hunt for team trophies – and more importantly, for team championships.
One clear area for improvement is getting better at folkstyle mat work, particularly on bottom.
Smith would have been wrestling in the NCAA finals last weekend, but Pitt's Jake Wentzel rode him for nearly three full minutes of the match; he would drop his consolation semifinal match to Oklahoma State's Travis Wittlake (a wrestler he defeated earlier in the tournament) in part because he gave up reversals and couldn't get off bottom.
But Smith is not alone in turning in matches like that. With the exception of Sasso, nearly every starter on the roster struggled getting off bottom at some point during the season, and longtime fans of the program have cited this as a continual irritant and major difference between the Buckeyes and teams like the Nittany Lions and Hawkeyes.
“It's something we absolutely have to address”
Days after the Buckeyes lost a dual meet to Iowa midway through the season, Tom Ryan took responsibility for the team's shortcomings on the mat.
“Bottom position is a direct correlation to our coaching,” Ryan said. “I think bottom position is a coaching staff issue; that's on me, that's on our staff. And it's something we absolutely have to address, and it'll be addressed after the season.”
With so much talent in the program — Ohio State has consistently turned in one of the top recruiting classes in the country — it's hard to imagine how subpar wrestling off bottom has continued to be an Achilles heel for the program. To some extent, this is a function of Ohio State's focus on attracting and developing elite freestyle wrestlers.
“Typically, this team has so many good guys that we go into a freestyle mode,” Ryan explained in February. “The season ends, and you're very focused on making world teams, and U23 teams, and you focus on a lot of freestyle.”
But this season was a wakeup call for Ryan and the staff. He said that shift from folkstyle to freestyle in the offseason “won't happen this year.”
“This team will get better on bottom because we'll put more time and energy into it,” he continued. “And it's not like we don't see it, but we've got to do something about it. There's an action piece that has to happen.”
Getting comfortable being uncomfortable
Critics of Ohio State's mat skills frequently point to the way wrestlers at Iowa and Penn State relish generating offense on top, and rarely get abused on bottom. As I heard it put once, "Ohio State is an excellent freestyle team that doesn't much care for folkstyle wrestling."
Nikos Frazier / Journal & Courier via Imagn Content Services, LLC
Ryan, for his part, would cop to that criticism. He is very much a “buck stops here” kind of guy. Fixing the problem starts with what he calls “chosen suffering.”
Part of the fix is simply dedicating the consistent time and attention in the offseason to developing those skills, including timing and situational awareness on the mat.
Ryan used the example of highly-touted recruit Anthony Echemendia, the Cuban freestyle phenom, who found himself pinned by Iowa's Jaydin Eierman in this season's dual meet. Echemendia, who wrestled just a single high school season of folkstyle prior to his arrival in Columbus, lost more due to technique than talent.
“[T]here is something that you can't put a price tag on, and that is intense training in the positions you need it,” Ryan said of Echemendia's loss to Eierman. “I thought he would overcome this with his athletic ability, and you can in most cases, but when you get a master on top like Eierman ... something is going to get exploited that you don't want exploited.”
In this case Eierman, “put a leg in, we stood up which is not a good choice, he cradled us easily and ripped us over,” Ryan explained. “So Anthony just needs more training. He's a freshman, he's got four years left, this would be a redshirt year for him, and he's just going to need more time to develop in the positions that are critical that you have to have to stand out at this level.”
Acknowledging that Echemendia only had 20-25 folkstyle matches to his credit explains his struggles on bottom, but what about the six or seven other members of the team who found themselves giving up multiple minutes of riding time at some point during the season?
“For a lot of these elite guys, they're never on bottom,” Ryan said after the Iowa dual. “They wrestle their entire high school career and for the most part, they're never on bottom. They take you down, they ride you, they pin you.”
By committing to spending time every day just working on bottom, Ryan expects his men to evolve and improve. For a group of men used to wrestling takedown to takedown, that may be just what the doctor ordered.
“It's a time issue; It's an awareness issue,” Ryan concluded. “The brain has to make a split-second decision and it can make the right decision, but if it's too slow, you get hit by the car. It's something we just need to put a lot more time into from a training standpoint. So that falls on us.“
With the 2021 season firmly in the rear view, the offseason is officially here. And for the Buckeyes to get back on top, they know they have to get better where they're the weakest: Off the bottom.
