When I was watching the volleyball match today, my mind started to wander: what are the other Olympic Sports I'd invest in if I were ADAG? After some to and fro, eventually I concluded wrestling.
In my view, like volleyball, it has to be at least a decent spectator sport. That to me rules out soccer and baseball. Other may very much disagree with that, but work with me here.
It has to have some kind of wedge that allows us to compete even without much investment. In this case, despite having heavyweights like PSU and OSU nearby, the local talent is enough/should be enough for us to be able to be competitive from the jump, so we're not exactly building from scratch.
It has to be relatively inexpensive, in terms of facilities, roster size, NIL benchmarks, and travel budget and at least have a decent chance of becoming a ticketed draw like volleyball has. Wrestling appears to be a smaller roster than say, baseball or soccer, and would also seem to have a more guaranteed ROI.
So if we wanted to upgrade our recruiting, get 10 solid starters (plus a reasonable amount of backups/projects), what do we think we're talking about budget wise? I may have blue and gold color glasses on here but I suspect if we had a top 5 wrestling team we'd be able to get a lot of people into the Pete to watch a match, which would in turn get a virtuous cycle going. But to me it seems like right we're getting good recruits, not great recruits and to jump start that cycle we'd need some upfront investment into NIL.
(And as an aside, while I absolutely know and agree that football is the straw that stirs the drink, I'm of the opinion that while investment in a sport like volleyball or wrestling might not impact the department's immediate bottom line, success in those sports will get students to the games, which makes them far more likely to continue supporting the teams and the school post-graduation.)
Am I way off here?
