wvmat.com

The forum has been a little slow. Here is an interesting tale about Marion County and surrounding areas.

East Fairmont graduates two wrestlers that have had a major impact on WV wrestling for the past four seasons. Cole Laya and Brock Whorton. When you watched Cole, Brock was always next up. Two 4x state tournament finalists. Two 3x state champions. Brock finished undefeated and Cole had one loss to the son of an Olympic Silver medalist.

In the Dutton Award voting, Brock finished third behind Josh Humphreys and Braxton Amos. It is unknown where Cole finished in the voting.

Another award was announced and Brock was named the Times West Virginian Wrestler of the Year (Fairmont News paper). I am not aware of who might have come in second.

The next event in this story was the NHSCA Senior National Wrestling Tournament. Brock did not attend and Cole finished as a runner up.

After NHSCA, the Big Ten Conference named Cole Laya as the Big 10 Conference Wrestler of the Year.

One could ponder who would have won what if all of the voting for all of the awards happened AFTER NHSCA.

Brock placed at Flo Nationals and Cole did not attend.

They say timing is everything. Maybe so.

Good luck to both on the college mats.

Looking at it from a purely statistical standpoint, the three of them were very closely matched in win/loss percentage. Humphreys won 96% of his matches, Laya won 96.4% of his matches and Whorton won 93.6% of his. Whorton won considerably more matches than Humphreys (191 vs 168), but he also lost nearly twice as many matches (13 vs 7). I think the key factor was state championships.

If I were voting, one thing I would look at is their weight classes and championships. Humphreys wrestled a new weight class every year (106, 120, 145, 152) and won a state championship every year. Laya and Whorton won two state championships in the same weight class (106 and 113 respectively) then after bumping up in weight classes they both finished 2nd before winning a state championship in those weight classes the following year. To me that says that Humpheys was more dominant. No matter what weight class he was in, he was the man to beat and at states nobody could.