ZANE RICHARDS' MONEYBALL! (Updated)

 

WHO:  ZANE RICHARDS

WHAT:  Pan Am Olympic Games Qualifier

WHERE:  Acapulco, Mexico

WHEN:  Friday, March 1 @ 2:00 pm (Central)

WHY:  Select Wrestlers for Paris Olympics

TV/STREAMING:  FloWrestling (subscription service)

UPDATE

Well, much of what is written below has been f-d up by the draw and by UWW rules and seeding decisions. Zane Richards will have Costa Rica or Guatemala in his first match. Second match will probably be either Darian Cruz or Ecuador. Win those two, and he's qualified the weight. Darian Cruz is the toughest match, but Zane has already handled him multiple times.

MONEYBALL! 

In this post, we dive into the characteristics of Zane Richards' major challengers at the Pan Am Games Olympic Qualifier. This is our Moneyball look at his opponents. What stances and ties do they favor? What kind of shots do they take? What kind of shots do they convert? 

While watching the matches of potential opponents, we stop the video and note which ties are being used, which takedowns are being attempted, etc. From the data we have mined, we churn out pretty little pie charts. 

CAVEATS

There are a number of caveats about this project. Most importantly, we are limited by the number of freestyle wrestling matches that we can find on the internet for each wrestler. For a wrestler like Puerto Rico's Darian Cruz, that's a lot. For a newbie like Roman Bravo Young, there are only a few matches.

Because of the special nature of this event, we don't have to look at one possible contender. In this case, it appears to be the same Darian Cruz mentioned above. According to this entry list, Zane will be a top seed, while Cruz will be the second seed. 

Because of that, they will not wrestle, as the tournament will only go until semifinal winners emerge. Both finalists have qualified their country for the Olympics and do not have to wrestle. 

WHAT IS A CONTENDER?

The list of contenders is actually very short for this tournament. That's in part because other countries in our hemisphere don't have the same training opportunities, and in part because Zane Richards has leveled up. 

Darian Cruz might be here, but he should be on the opposite side of the bracket. Moreover, Zane has handled him in the past. The Colombian who Zane beat in the Finals of the Pan Am Championships, Oscar Tigreros, might be here, but Zane teched him easily. He is a two-time Pan Am runner-up. 

In Episode One of the Threeee Is the New Twoooo Podcast, Zane states that he won't take any wrestler for granted:

THE CONTENDERS

Osmany Diversent Martinez was the Cuban representative to the Pan Am Games. He finished in third and was beaten by the Colombian that Zane teched. There was no rep from Cuba at 57kg this past weekend at the 2024 Pan Am Championships. Cuba had a very dismal showing at those recent Championships with one silver and one bronze. Yet, they finished second as a team to the US at the earlier Pan Am Games. 

El Cubano is listed as a possible contender here more as a placeholder. He is young and quick and strong, but as we noted before, he got beat by a guy that Zane teched. The mystery here is whether Cuba will show up with this guy, somebody else, or nobody at all. This is a video that Martinez set up on his own YouTube channel. 

There is a first place in the 2021 Pan Am Junior Championships where he beat Ryan Miller 8-6. Miller is in his third year at Penn as a two-time NCAA qualifier. He has split matches 1-1 with Justin Cardani during his career. This is one of the Cubano's qualification matches at Pan Am Juniors (@ 2:41:00). Then in the quarters, he wrestles @ 3:50:00 of same video. 

His semifinal match is @ 4:38:00 of the same video. The final against Ryan Miller is @ 1:25:16 of this video. He scored on a single and a couple of chest locks. Miller scored two single leg takedowns. An American challenge wiped off one of the chest locks, but it also erased one of Miller's singles. Miller would go on to score with a rubber arm in the seatbelt position. El Cubano's final score was another chest lock, while Miller earned a step out. 

He was obviously well-developed for his age--if that was his real age--and was able to rely on superior strength in all of these Junior matches, mostly with whipovers, quarter nelsons, double unders, front headlocks and such. He does have a quick duck from a collar tie and a wrist. 

The fellow is pretty tall, and that may explain why he didn't want to make weight two weeks in a row. Weigh-ins start at 8 am, and the matches don't start until 2 pm, so there is recovery time. Osmany's liable to gas late in the match, so those snaps and good fakes might help early on.

Not sure why we included Ozmany in our contenders list. He's prone to mistakes, is youthful (at least acting) and likely to gas. Perhaps it was only because of the Shelley poem:

 I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

We now know RBY's middle name. Well, actually, his left-center name. It is "Guillermo." Of course, nobody beats Zane Richards in the name game. Nobody. Roman Guillermo Bravo Young skipped last weekend's Pan Am Championships because he probably couldn't (or didn't want to) make weight.

It could be a minor injury or illness as well. 

Zane Richards has become a real pro at hitting 57 kg. That's something Bravo Young hasn't done since high school. That's seven and one-third pounds he hasn't given up for years. 

His only match with an ILLINI in college was a 3-2 win over Dylan Duncan at 133, the weight he's been at for years. Of course, recently, he's most famous for getting trounced at NCAAs by Vitali Arujau 4-10. 

We know his usual modus operandi in folkstyle against a skilled opponent: Stay by the edge of the mat, then wait for a shot to counter-attack. There's lots of video of that! There isn't much freestyle video available because he hasn't wrestled much freestyle. 

He did wrestle a tournament in France with a 2 kg allowance, which is about 4½ pounds, but the best competition he saw was Daniel DeShazer, who might get the sixth or seventh seed at OTT. DeShazer can be a tough matchup, but Zane beat him at the Last Chance qualifier a couple of years ago in the semifinals, and while Zane has steadily gone up the charts to #1, DeShazer is now out of Flo's Top Ten at 57 kg. 

At the Henri Deglane, you can find his matches in this video (Finals; 10:27:47), (Semifinal; 6:50:31), (Quarters; 2:56:56), (Eighth Finals; 1:35:42). Sign up is required. Then, there's a Covid quarantine match with Jack Mueller a couple of years ago here. 

Not many matches. That's for sure. Overall, Bravo Young is balls-a-fire against over-matched opponents, but against anybody with a pulse, he will not shoot a takedown. Against both Daniel DeShazer and Diamantino Iuna Fafe, the NLWC kid took exactly ZERO SHOTS in nearly ten minutes of match time. 

ZERO SHOTS!

What he does well is keep his butt in the center of the circle, get back to the circle quickly on restarts to take up his opponent's space. That's how he beat those guys, with passivity calls! He stalemates front headlock-go-behinds by grabbing the elbow or wrist. Finally, he has a funky turn attempt that looks like a reverse flip-over chest lock. One ref stopped it for choking, and he does put an arm directly across the neck. Here's what all that looks like in pie charts when you crunch the data:

Opponents scored against Roman Bravo Young with a step out, a single, a gut wrench, and a hands to the face penalty. Interestingly enough, and possibly apocalyptical for the NLWC kid is that it was Kael Lauridsen, the #64 high school recruit from last year who scored the gut wrench and single leg takedown. 

Pedro Jesus Mejias Rodriguez of Venezuela finished second at last weekend's Pan Am Championships. He scored a couple of points against Spencer Lee when Lee got sloppy later in the match. We could've gone with Colombian Oscar Tigreros here--but both Zane and Spencer have teched him. Instead, we'll go with the fellow who had the best, recent result. 

Mejias is big and strong and a bit of a plodder. But he's been around for awhile, and he has some wily veteran moves. He finished 14th in the World Championships back in 2014. We're going to look at matches of his against decent competition. 

He used to shoot from distance more than he does now. He's into the short offense today. For example, in the matches surveyed, Mejias attempted eight singles and three doubles. He was only succesful with one of the singles. The Venezuelan also used to use a true tricep tie but now it is modified to be a hand placed on the top of the shoulder. 

We looked at matches against Darian Cruz of Puerto Rico, Oscar Tigreros of Colombia, Maya of Ecuador, Joey Dance, Spencer Lee, and Alves Do Nascimento of Brazil. Here's what those matches looked like:

Opponents scored against him with a duckunder, a couple of step outs, singles and trapped-arm guts, four gut wrenches, a head-in-the-hole, a couple of leglaces, an exposure during a scramble, an elbow push to far ankle pick (i.e. "The Lackey") and because of a head butt penalty. 

CONCLUSION

Zane Richards has got this. 

He won the Pan Am Games recently, and he's had the best training partners in the world to work with him. His tournament simulations were against better wrestlers than he'll see in Acapulco. 

The United States is coming off of a clean sweep of the freestyle Gold medals last weekend, so not only do the Americans have the momentum, they also have the appearance of invincibility in the hearts and minds of their opponents. At 57 kg, Spencer Lee gave up a total of two points in his matches. You know, that's exactly how many Zane gave up at the Pan Am Games.