Let me start this out with the fact that I am so sick of seeing schools drop wrestling. Here are three things that I think could help wrestling in the long run.

1 Change the date of the NCAA championships. It is insane from a marketing standpoint to have the championships during the first week of the final 4. I dare you to find a worse weekend in the entire calendar year to have the championships. Everyone follows the march madness because of the bracket challenges. My wife could care less about sports and she fills out a bracket at work.

2 Have the National Duals after the NCAA championships. Take like the top 8 teams from the championships and run a dual meet tourney over the next couple of weeks. Each dual meet will be held at the higher seed home gym. This is the most important aspect. Wrestling needs to create more casual fans. Wrestling is doing just fine with the die hard fans. The fans wrestling needs to get involved are the people who go to say all U of Wisconsin athletic events. Have a big dual at home and market it to the casual fan. This will build wrestling's fan base which is what is needed in today's athletic climate.

3. Wrestling and in particular the acc and the big 10 need to lobby the NCAA to increase the minimum number of sports that are needed to be division one. Schools like Marquette don't care at all about athletics. They only want to be division one so they can have a good basketball school. In fact I have no doubt that if the NCAA were to decrease the minimum number of sports to be division one Marquette would have mens basketball and thats it.

I think it sounds good. The only thing that I don't agree with is taking the Top 8 Teams from NAtionals-a great tournament team is not always a great duals team (Iowa might have blown my arguement this year). I love the idea of a bracket for team and a final duals champion as a result of a national tournament, not just conferences.

Good ideas-now just get them to the people in the NCAA that do care about wrestling.

I think thses are good ideas, but it is only going to make the strong teams and conferences stronger. None of these ideas, if successful, save low performing DI schools like Portland St, Del St. or Wagner.
And they don't help DII / DIII schools like Norwich, Carson-Newman or MIT.

Too often when someone speaks of improving or saving college wrestling they are only really talking about NCAA Division I. Starting the season in the second semester and having all college wrestling national championships after the basketball tournament seems to make sense to everyone.

Most people who want to change National Duals have never been to National Duals. The true beauty of the event is that you get to watch young people at all levels and both genders compete. This total exposure is probably better for the sport overall than replicating a high school dual meet championship tournament. If you've never been to National Duals, I challenge you to attend (of course - the weather will suck) and see all of the types of athletes that love competing in the sport.

As for media - they cover those things they think people will read about or watch. Why pay a reporter to cover an event that only a few hundred people care enough about to attend?

There is a huge audience of ex-wretlers who don't need to be educated who don't follow college wrestling at all. This is true in New England where there is very little big time wrestling to watch, but also true in PA where HS wrestling is huge and there are a many big time programs.

Why aren't ex-wrestlers (besides the handful of us hard-core fans) interested in watching wrestling?

Originally Posted by ODH

There is a huge audience of ex-wretlers who don't need to be educated who don't follow college wrestling at all. This is true in New England where there is very little big time wrestling to watch, but also true in PA where HS wrestling is huge and there are a many big time programs.

Why aren't ex-wrestlers (besides the handful of us hard-core fans) interested in watching wrestling?

The answer I think is so simple it hurts. Most ex wrestlers are interested in watching wrestling but what wrestling has lacked in good marketing. Think about it. Wrestling holds its best event at the same time as the most hyped sporting event in the country.
The national duals are a great idea but putting arguably the best 20 some dual meets of the year in one location at one time is terrible marketing. Instead wrestling should focus on trying to get as many people as possible to see as many good dual meets as possible. This just can not happen if you hold the national duals at one place over one weekend. Right now you have to be a hardcore fan to know when and where good college wrestling is taking place. Wrestling needs to get the casual college sports fan invited and involved in its events. Yes these ideas are focused more on the big time conferences and schools. But if wrestling can reverse the trend of dropping programs. To schools making money and starting programs you better believe there will be a trickle down effect. You know why Oregon needed to have baseball. Not because it will make money for the university, because that is a mathematical impossiblity. They started baseball because their rival OSU won the national title and they were jealous.