I'd been on vacation for almost the past two weeks, so just starting to catch up to a few things. Unfortunately, I missed out on the ACC Wrestling Tournament, but it was good to see Pitt manage a few bright spots.
The highlights were ACC championship wins by Dom Forys (133 pounds), Teshan Campbell (165), and Taleb Rahmani (157). Forys and Campbell winning weren't huge surprises as both are top ten guys and more than capable. Rahmani's win, of course, was more of a surprise. But as I've been saying for about half the season now, he is just a very good wrestler, who has continued to impress. He was 23-6 on the year and leads the team with ten pins. All three of those guys, obviously, were named All-ACC as well and will be going to the NCAA nationals in St. Louis next week.
Ryan Solomon did not win a title at heavyweight but finished third and will also be headed to nationals. He sort of caught a tough break as the ACC has two of the top five heavyweights in the nation in Ty Walz and Jacob Kasper.
The good news is that all four of Pitt's guys going to nationals can do major damage. Forys and Campbell have a total of only three losses on the entire season and are top ten wrestlers in their weight class. Rahmani is fresh off an ACC championship. Even Solomon, who did not make All-ACC recently knocked off Kasper in an upset a few weeks back. All four could really do well.
The downside is that Pitt only has four wrestlers at nationals. That's actually the fewest since 2009. They've had six in each of the last two seasons and eight in each of the two years before that. Four is a really light number and sort of underscores the amount of quality depth the team has had this season. It's great that Pitt has some real talent at the top but this is a team that really needs to fill out and be more competitive than they have been at other classes. That's really true when it comes to improving your standing at nationals where teams accumulate points for each win they have. The more guys you have representing the team, the better.
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