This past off season the University of Nebraska wrestling team and head coach Mark Manning suffered a major setback with the departure of ace assistant coach Tony Ersland, who became the head coach at Purdue.
I guess Manning had trouble finding a new assistant who was any good, so he scraped the bottom of the barrel and hired some scrub named Jordan Burroughs, who has only won one Olympic gold medal and two world championships.
Burroughs, who has been in Lincoln for nearly a decade now, joins a program with big aspirations in the coming year.
Nebraska is one of the few teams in the nation with good chance at multiple individual national champions, particularly in the form of their seniors James Green and Robert Kokesh, who wrestle at 157 pounds and 174 pounds respectively. Both are two-time All Americans who will enter the season ranked in the nation’s top four.
Joining Kokesh and Green as a potential big point scorer for the Cornhuskers is 149 pound senior Jake Sueflohn. Sueflohn has had some wonderful regular seasons, and has enjoyed very high national rankings in the past couple years, but has yet to finish on the podium in March. I think this is the year that the Wisconsin product finally turns the corner and earns another All-American finish for Nebraska.
Outisde of their big three, Nebraska fields a lineup with solid talent and youth, including five other returning national qualifiers. Among these five, Austin Wilson and Timothy Dudley (from the Upstate) should be in the thick of the All American race. I can see all ten of Nebraska’s starters qualifying for nationals, leaving the team in great position to earn some house money at the NCAA tournament.
Once again, with the help of Earl Smith at D1collegewrestling.net, I have a tentative lineup for the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
125-Tim Lambert (So)
133-Eric Montoya (So)
Hayden Tuma (Fr) (big time recruit and freaking beast of a kid, I hope he develops fast because oh lordy is he fun to watch))
141-Anthony Abidin (Jr)
149-Jake Sueflohn (Sr)
157-James Green (Sr)
165-Austin Wilson (Jr)
174-Robert Kokesh (Sr)
184-TJ Dudley (So)
197-Micah Barnes (So)
285-Collin Jensen (So)
Points Breakdown
I picked James Green to win it all this year, and based on his curve of improvement and commitment to off-season wrestling, I think my pick is a good one. Additionally, I fully expect to find Kokesh in the finals, as either the national champion or runner up. This alone gives Nebraska 40 team points. I’ll wager that Sueflohn scores 10 or so team points.
This is where projecting team points becomes tricky. The rest of Nebraska’s lineup could foreseeably produce well of 20 more team points, but also as few as 12. The real problem with some of Nebraska’s wrestlers, like 125 pounder Tim Lambert, and heavyweight Collin Jensen is that they are quite good, but just short of punching through into the top layer of their weight class nationally. I’ll go conservative, and estimate of 15 points from the remainder of the lineup, which gives Nebraska a gross team score of 65 points, which now that I think about it is awfully high for the team I ranked 10th.