2014-15 IOWA WRESTLING DEPTH CHART AND REMAINING ELIGIBILITY

Ah, depth charts.  We pore over them in football, regardless of how meaningful they actually are.  We generally ignore them entirely in basketball, since frequent substitutions and an increased tendency to play match-ups generally renders them useless.  But they can still be a useful way of conceptualizing the pecking order for various athletes competing for the same spot and seeing where a team has a lot of talent and where they might be somewhat lacking.

So I decided to try and create a depth chart for the 2014-15 Iowa wrestling team.  I should make it very clear right up front: this is entirely unofficial.  Unlike football, where Kirk Ferentz (or at least a football team staffer) submits a depth chart as part of an official weekly release, no wrestling depth chart is released beyond the list of likely starters that appears in the official weekly release.  Those lists -- and a little common sense -- can give us a starting point to create a depth chart, though, which is what I've done.

The top-listed guy at each weight is the presumed starter there.  The next-listed guy is the presumed second-string and so on.  Honestly, the starters were fairly easy (other than 149 and 157, which are essentially just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ at this point), but everything beyond that a fair amount of guesswork.  When in doubt, I generally defaulted to the most experienced wrestler at a given weight.  At 149 and 157, that meant Brody Grothus and Mike Kelly, respectively.  Personally, I would be very surprised if Brandon Sorensen didn't man one of those starting spots for Iowa, but I also didn't feel comfortable slotting a redshirt freshman in at one of those spots just yet.  Likewise, I think there's a good chance that Edwin Cooper could start at 149 or 157 -- if he just wanted to wrestle at the D-I level, there had to be easier places to go than Iowa -- but until I see him wrestle a few matches for Iowa, I didn't feel great about slotting him as a starter.  Also, true freshmen were listed at the bottom of each weight by default, even if some of them might be better than wrestlers listed ahead of them.  That's because true freshmen wrestlers at Iowa redshirt about 99% of the time (the only exception so far has been Nathan Burak, who was still two years removed from high school when he took the mat for Iowa, thanks to a year at the Olympic Training Center), so there's no realistic chance of them competing at the varsity level this year.

You'll also note that the weights don't necessarily align with the listed weights on the official Iowa roster page.  This is because, frankly, I don't put a lot of stock in those weights.  Guys often end up wrestling at very different weights than what the official roster lists them at.  Case in point: Jake Kadel was listed at 133 on last year's roster -- he wrestled the entire season at 157 lbs.  So I tended to slot guys at the weight that they actually competed at last year unless I knew for sure he would be wrestling at a different weight this year (i.e., Cory Clark wrestled at 125 last year, but we've had confirmation from Ryan Morningstar that he'll be at 133 this year).  The incoming freshmen are, however, listed at their given weights on the official Iowa roster (since I have no other information to rely on), while the listed weights for incoming recruits are pretty much just guesstimates.

Aaron Bradley was a part of Iowa's 2013 recruiting class, but he went on a Mormon mission after he graduated from high school.  I believe he's still expected to join Iowa in fall of 2015 (so for practical purposes, he's essentially a member of Iowa's 2015 recruiting class), which is why he's listed that way here.

As things change and we get more information about which weights guys are actually wrestling at, I'll update this chart.  If you've got questions, hit up the comments.

If you want another visual representation of Iowa's eligibility situation, check out Wrestlestat.