Should NCAA replace Wrestling with MMA?

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Using amateur MMA rules with 3 minute rounds and padded headgear

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Obviously you couldn’t do that to get people to buy into it. I’m not sure what type of workaround you’d have with the commission with them being college athletes with NIL, scholarships, etc.

My main thought in this is a benefit to the younger prospects in trading training at a local gym and having to work part time jobs and such in favor of being on a college campus with no cost to use facilities, medical care, etc

I don’t think that would work or be a good idea. 4 years of high school wrestling isn’t adequate if you want to be an elite wrestler. 4 years in a college program like Minnesota, Penn State, or Oklahoma State is way more beneficial to an MMA career than getting 4 more years of wear and tear along with brain damage fighting college MMA, which would still be a niche sport anyway.

I also don’t see colleges, especially smaller colleges, being able to staff a full MMA coaching staff. Wrestling requires a wrestling coach; MMA requires a head coach, a striking coach, a wrestling coach, a Jiu jitsu coach, and possibly a conditioning coach if you want to be any good. And if your college can’t afford those things, you’re getting your kids asses brutally beaten by colleges who can, rather than just losing your wrestling match and going home.

That’s not even getting into the high liability of full contact striking compared to the relatively low liability of grappling. Just not seeing how that could work for the athletes or NCAA

With the way college sports are going they should replace it with WWE wrestling.

They’d have to add womens MMA too because of Title IX

man get real.

lol

Want to take a stab at how many Fighters that have UFC contracts also have College Degrees? LMAO

You can wrestle every weekend. In highschool, we had dual meets on Wednesday and tournaments on Saturday.

You can’t do that with MMA

No.

The problems with amateur wrestling at the NCAA level aren’t a lack of interest as much as Title IX killing a lot of programs outside of the Midwest.


LSU used to have one of the bigger amateur wrestling prospects of the time in John Tenta in the early 80s. Then the wrestling program got killed for Title IX reasons. He did football for a while before moving onto other pastures including sumo wrestling and pro wrestling.

In general, a wrestling program doesn’t tend to cost much in facilities or other areas but it is an easy target to cut scholarships in order to pay for other non-revenue sports.