As postseason competition gets underway in the next two weeks, fans and writers naturally start thinking about what next year’s lineup might look like for a given team. Nomad took a crack at predicting Ohio State’s 2019-20 lineup last April; comparing what looked like a pretty solid stab at projecting a Buckeye roster to the lineup Tom Ryan will field next month in Piscataway paints a pretty good picture of what this season has been like for his team.

Nomad’s lineup looked pretty good: a trio of seniors in Pletcher, Hayes, and Moore leading a group of young up-and-comers with potential to make it to the podium in Minneapolis. But injuries, weight changes, and defections radically altered the picture such that only three names show up in the same spot now as one might have guessed 10 months ago

The biggest shift came when Luke Pletcher decided he was done cutting down to 133. After two years of being one of the densest ‘33s in the game, the senior captain made like George and Weezy and moved on up. That decision triggered a series of dominoes that led to Quinn Kinner moving down to ’33 before moving up to 157, and to Jordan Decatur peeling his redshirt and cutting down a class to take Pletcher’s old spot.

Like Malik Heinselman a year ago, the Decatur move feels like it came a year too early, but the true freshman from Akron appears to be settling into the weight and handling the cut much better than he was in January. How many points he can score for the Buckeyes in March remains to be seen, but there’s little doubt that he has the potential to be one of the most exciting men on the roster.

Pletcher’s move certainly paid dividends for him, as he spent all but the first and last weeks of the season ranked No. 1 in the country and seems likely to have at least one and maybe two more shots at Penn State’s Nick Lee over the next four weeks. He’s wrestling the best matches of his career and scoring at more than double his career-average bonus rate in his final season.

Likewise, at 149 Sammy Sasso stepped into what seems to be the perfect class for him and has made his presence felt from the word go. Nomad’s crystal ball was pretty clear when he wrote, “Sasso walks into next season as a national title contender right off the bat. He won't be No. 1 to start the year, and he probably won't go undefeated, but Sasso is good enough to win NCAAs given the makeup of the weight.”

Indeed, that is a pretty good recap of the regular season: Sasso wasn’t No. 1 to start the year, and he didn’t go undefeated. But he is a national title contender sitting atop the standings in his first season as a starter in Columbus.

Middleweight Mayhem

One weight that has given Ohio State fans no shortage of frustration is 157. Elijah Cleary has been a serviceable but not spectacular middleweight, winning most of the matches he was supposed to and also dropping most of the matches he wasn’t. His coaches and teammates continue to praise his approach to practice and his talent and capabilities, but that hope seemed mostly confined to the Jennings Family Wrestling Facility, rarely showing up on the mat.

At various times during the season fans clamored for Ke-Shawn Hayes to bump back up to the spot, prayed that recent pledge Anthony Eschemendia would enroll right away and take the spot, and most recently celebrated the massive bump up by Quinn Kinner.

Kinner’s weight management this season is one of the wilder storylines of the year, as he dropped from 141 to 133 and then ballooned up to 157 over the holiday break. He’s wrestled well in open tournaments at the heavier weight and went 2-1 in Big Ten dual meets after making the leap, most recently defeating Penn State’s Brady Berge in State College.

One of the more unfortunate developments of the year was the absence of Ke-Shawn Hayes. His injury-riddled career took its final shot at the Michigan State Open, where he went 3-1 before ending the tournament due to injury. Although he continued to train with the team and Ryan indicated at points during the season that he might still be in play, Hayes will finish a Master’s in Finance this semester and either pursue an MBA or take a swing at the world of corporate finance.

At 165 and 174, Ethan Smith and Kaleb Romero swapped starting spots from a year ago, and Romero has blossomed. Last year he went 2-3 in Big Ten matches and 3-5 in duals overall; this year he’s gone 5-3 against conference opponents and 9-3 overall in dual meets, clawing his way into the top 10 seemingly one match at a time.

Smith’s record in dual-meet action is pretty similar year over year, and unfortunately, he finished the regular season this year on a three-match slide. Ohio State needs him to shake off those losses to a trio of ranked Big Ten foes and go earn some points in tournament season.

Nomad rightly predicted that Rocky Jordan would crack the starting lineup this season but was off a class as to where the St. Paris, Ohio, standout would do so. 

“The three-time Ohio State [high school] champ was in serious contention to be the starter before undergoing season-ending surgery and not being able to wrestle a single match,” Nomad noted last April. “So there is some concern about health and putting him out after not getting any redshirt matches to assimilate to college, but the staff seems confident in his talent.”

That confidence proved to be well-placed. Although Jordan started the year at 174, when Gavin Hoffman struggled with the cut to 184, the youngest of the three Jordan brothers asserted himself as a contender and worked his way into the top 15 of the class. Hoffman would move up to heavyweight and win four open tournaments, providing some interesting possibilities for the lineup down the road.

God Bless Gas Tank Gary

Kollin Moore went wire-to-wire as the No. 1 man in the country at 197 and will likely find himself as the top seed in both postseason tournaments he’ll wrestle. As the only Buckeye to finish the dual-meet season undefeated, he set the standard for excellence on the team this season.

His companion on the heavy end of the weigh sheet changed in December, as then-No. 9 Chase Singletary went down to injury at the Cliff Keen Las Vegas Invitational. With the precipitous defection of 2019’s top recruit Greg Kerkvliet, the Buckeyes were suddenly without a brand-name heavyweight and looked to Cincinnati native Gary Traub, Sycamore High School’s all-time leader in wins and pins.

Traub quickly became one of the biggest fan favorites in recent memory, as his late-match heroics against bigger opponents (literally and figuratively bigger, as Traub typically weighs in on the lighter end of the heavyweight class) paired with an electric environment in Ohio State’s new Covelli Center to create “the legend of Gas Tank Gary.”

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What started out as a bit of fun hype with the former walk-on stepping into the lineup and winning matches against less athletic opponents turned into something more as Traub proved to be an incredibly savvy wrestler, making smart decisions late in matches to pick up win after win. His schedule was a bit of “feast or famine” with regard to quality of opponent, with only six of his regular-season opponents ranked and four of those inside the top six of the rankings.

His 20th win of the year was also his most impressive, as he downed No. 12 Seth Nevills of Penn State inside the Bryce Jordan Center in the final match of a sold-out dual. The match reinforced the notion that Traub is a man nobody wants to face in the bloodround, and who will come into the postseason with plenty of fan support behind him.

The 2019-20 season was very different for Ohio State than what it has experienced in recent years, with more spots in the lineup open at the beginning of the year, and plenty of exciting storylines to follow. As one Buckeye staffer put it in the offseason, this year was to be an “unboxing of talent” for the team, with four or five first-year starters in the mix.

With the regular season in the books, Ohio State turns its attention squarely on the goal of capturing a sixth-consecutive team trophy at the NCAA championships. As David Bray noted last week, after Iowa and Penn State, Ohio State is the team most likely to bring home a trophy from Minneapolis. 

While nearly 85 percent of the team’s projected point total comes from Pletcher, Sasso and Moore, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that some combination of Ethan Smith, Kaleb Romero, and Rocky Jordan could end up on the All-American podium as well. And should Gas Tank Gary catch fire in Minneapolis? Well, that might just be the icing on the cake.

Andy Vance is a Columbus-based journalist who covers the Ohio State University wrestling program for Eleven Warriors, the largest independent sports site on the internet for Ohio State news, analysis, and community. He is co-host of the site’s Eleven Dubcast podcast. Follow him on Twitter @AndyVance.