Brooky: Success follows Penn State wrestling coach Cael Sanderson
Imagine for a moment that Babe Ruth hit his 714 home runs, compiled his 2.28 career ERA, and won his seven World Series titles and then went on to became the best manager in baseball history.
Imagine for a moment that Babe Ruth hit his 714 home runs, compiled his 2.28 career ERA, and won his seven World Series titles and then went on to became the best manager in baseball history.
That, essentially, is what Cael Sanderson is in the process of doing in the world of college wrestling.
You can have an argument about who is the greatest college wrestler of all time, but you can't have it without including Sanderson. Your odds of winning by backing somewhere else are slim. The Utah native and son of a high school wrestling coach went 159-0 and won the NCAA title in each of his four seasons at Iowa State. He was a three-time recipient of the Dan Hodge trophy as the best college wrestler in the nation. For good measure, he added a gold medal to his trophy case at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
As incredible as that resumé reads, it is Sanderson's work as the head coach at Penn State that is now leaving the college wrestling community in awe. The NCAA staged its Division I wrestling championships at Madison Square Garden last week. It was the first time the event took place on that grand stage, and Sanderson's Nittany Lions shone once again.
Penn State sent five wrestlers into Saturday night's finals, telecast on ESPN, and from a team standpoint it did not matter if any of them won. That is because the Nittany Lions had already wrapped up their fifth national championship in six years the night before.
Only two of the five Penn State wrestlers won individual titles. Senior Nico Megaludis finished his career by winning his first title at 125 pounds, and Zain Retherford returned as a redshirt sophomore to win with a dominant finals performance at 149.
It says a lot about Sanderson that he was more concerned about consoling the three guys who did not win in the finals.
"It's a tough sport," Sanderson said. "We won the team championship, but some of our individual guys didn't reach their goal, and your heart and energy tends to go with those guys that are really hurting."
Particularly difficult to digest was the second-place finish of Morgan McIntosh, a senior who lost on a takedown with just 10 seconds left in his 197-pound match. It was McIntosh's final chance at an NCAA title.
"I really wanted to see him go out with a win," Sanderson said. "He was certainly good enough to be a national champion. He wrestled a tough kid, and he just got beat. He tried to score late, and that's a risky approach, but he had a great career."
The other two second-place finishers were redshirt freshmen Jason Nolf (157) and Bo Nickal (174), so there is plenty of reason to believe that Penn State will have an outstanding chance to win a sixth NCAA title in seven years next season.
The first of Sanderson's five national titles as a coach came in 2011 at the Wells Fargo Center. It was just his second season at Penn State. The Nittany Lions, with strong urging from Philadelphia businessman and board of trustee member Ira M. Lubert, lured Sanderson away from his alma mater, Iowa State, where he had been the head coach for three seasons. Sanderson was only 29 at the time.
"It really was difficult to leave, emotionally difficult," Sanderson said. "After I processed a lot of things, did a lot of thinking and a lot of praying, it hit me that it was the right decision. I just saw the potential of the program here and how positive and eager the administration was to get things rolling.
"It was different than Iowa State, where the thought process was, 'You won in the '80s, and you should be winning now.' But they didn't necessarily have the support we needed. I could just tell how sincere they were about things here. I did have some questions for them. I wanted to know why they had not been more successful because they had all these resources and were in a hotbed of wrestling."
Sanderson, now 36, got the answers he was looking for and embarked on building a national power with the help of a coaching staff that includes his older brother, Cody, and Casey Cunningham, his head assistant coach. Both men had been with him at Iowa State.
Asked to reflect upon his five national titles, Sanderson said his first Big Ten title was memorable because the Nittany Lions roared back from a big deficit.
But this year's team accomplished more than any other, finishing with a 16-0 record in dual meets, including a season-ending victory over Oklahoma State in the inaugural dual championship series. It was Sanderson's first unbeaten team, and it meant that the Nittany Lions were national champions in two formats even though the dual series has its share of critics, including Ohio State coach Tom Ryan.
Regardless, it's impossible to not be impressed by the work of Sanderson and Penn State.
"Dual meets are really important to us," Sanderson said. "That is where you create your fan base, and for many fans it is the only time they will see you wrestle. There are people who would like to see that be the only way you determine a champion. I'm not one of them. I think it's a better indicator of how good you are when you have to wrestle the entire field."
If you're looking for reasons Sanderson is such a great coach, it might be because of his ability to still wrestle.
"I wrestle every day," he said. "I'm not the same. I wish I could go back to my prime and beat on them just for fun, but it is a great way to teach. As a staff, we all wrestle as much as we can. I try to help them eliminate mistakes. Wrestling comes back to fundamentals, and a lot of kids come out of high school making a lot of mistakes. The best way to eliminate them is to wrestle them myself."
In other words, the Penn State kids get to wrestle the Babe Ruth of their sport on a daily basis. The result has been the emergence of a wrestling dynasty at State College.
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