ST. LOUIS
With March Madness here, everyone is talking about their upset specials and which Cinderella team they are picking to make it the farthest.
So far this year, there have been plenty of both. In the circus that has been the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, victories by obscure mid-major teams over major conference powerhouses have become commonplace. Vermont over Syracuse, Bucknell over Kansas, Wisconsin-Milwaukee over Boston College and Alabama — what is really an upset at this point?
With hoops as a backdrop, the NCAA Wrestling Championships, which are often even more unpredictable than their basketball counterpart, provided a stark contrast this year. The national tournament wrapped up in St. Louis on Saturday, and when all was said and done, where were the upsets? Where were the surprises?
Of the 10 weight classes in the competition, five were won by the No. 1 seed, while another three titles were taken home by the No. 2. In a final round that saw five one-versus-two battles, the highest-seeded wrestler to even make it to the championship bout was an eight.
This top-heavy tendency was more pronounced in some weightclasses than in others. For instance, Penn’s own Doug McGraw at 141, not even ranked in the top 20, beat the nation’s No. 12 wrestler in his first match of the competition. Elsewhere, Lehigh’s two No. 1 seeds did not see the finals, but both still earned third place in their respective brackets.
To spectators in the Savvis Center, though, the heavyweight tournament looked scripted. The weightclass saw a final that pitted No. 1 Steve Mocco of Oklahoma State against No. 2 Cole Konrad of Minnesota, with Mocco emerging the victor. Rounding out the top six was the No. 4 seed in third, the No. 5 seed in fourth, the No. 3 seed in fifth, and the Quakers’ own Matt Feast, ranked No. 6, finishing where? Sixth, of course.
Feast too was struck by the situation in his weightclass, with the top six wrestlers all finishing in the top six.
“It seems like this year it’s less variable than the previous years I’ve been in this tournament, “he said. “I don’t know why that is. If you look at all the lighter weightclasses, there’s huge variance, lots of upsets and returning national champions not even placing.”
In Feast’s first two matches of the event, he found himself pitted against two unranked wrestlers. In both matches, the senior never looked likely to lose. Neither one could so much as bring him down, whereas Feast seemed to be able to score at will.
For all the dominance the Penn wrestler displayed in those matches, he paled in comparison to his next round’s opponent, No. 3 Cain Velasquez of Arizona State.
And he would lose to Velasquez not once, but twice.
Velasquez won the first match by a score of 4-2 and the second 5-1. The ease with which Feast attacked his early round opponents was gone, and Velasquez essentially assumed that role. Feast did not take the ASU wrestler down once over the course of the two bouts, but was taken down three times himself.
Velasquez is “a tough kid, he’s really quick and he has quite a gas tank, “said Feast, full of praise for his junior opponent. “He doesn’t tire at all and he has some good technique. He’s tough on top and pretty much solid all around. He’ll probably do a lot of things next year.”
When Velasquez faced Konrad in the semis, the roles were yet again reversed. There, the Minnesota wrestler put on a show of dominance and won the bout, 6-1. Then, ascending to the final rung of heavyweight ladder, Konrad went on to drop the decision to Mocco in the finals, broadcast on ESPN.
Feast came to St. Louis with one goal in mind: winning the tournament. It’s no insult to him to say that that was never going to happen. Short of some outrageous circumstances, there was no way for him to get past Velasquez, who was lurking in the quarterfinals from the day the brackets were released. In fact, watching how the tournament panned out at 285, one had no reason to believe that things would have developed any differently if the tournament had been wrestled five times over with identical matchups.
Mocco was always going to win, with Konrad taking second. And in sixth place, you’d have the No. 6 wrestler in the country, Matt Feast, a three-time All-American and one of the best wrestlers to ever don a Red and Blue uniform.
Ilario Huober is a freshman in the College from Syracuse, N.Y. His e-mail address is [email protected].
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