Kyle Dake Study -- Embrace the Scramble: Part I

That's a solid team right there. 4-5 guys are least who are a threat to medal at any intl event.

 

One of my favorite things about all grappling sports but especially wrestling and BJJ are that you can make almost any set of athletic attributes work for you if you're smart about tailoring your game to your strengths. So many sports there are must-have athletic qualities, and that's just not the case in grappling. You can be a traditional explosive, strong guy but you can also just be a dude with tremendous flexibility and great balance and if you structure your game correctly that can be enough to go pretty far.

 

Lets address this point by point.

1. Someone with your vocab understands perfectly how your use of language came across, you can't complain of the "risks" associated with analyzing the greats when you are calling it "noob traps" and the way you wrote it. The entire post came across as the willful ignorance of an old timer justifying losses to "junk" technique or the ignorance of someone who doesn't barely know what they are talking about.
2. The simple fact is that while different people are more suited to certain technique or styles than others, just attributing it to his talent or natural ability is willfully ignorant of the time and hard work he put into developing it that is a matter of record. In fact, something that annoys people like Mark Ellis his teammate and national champion at Missouri is how people over-attribute Askrens success to natural ability because Askren didn't "look" like he worked, lifted, ran, trained as much as the other elite.
3. Continuing the "natural ability" point when talking to a young one about trying what Askren did, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole doesn't work the other way either, trying to make kids of a certain personality, build, tempermant and athletic ability try to wrestling like Terry Brands or Kyle Snyder is just as untainable as making a certain type of kid try to wrestle like an Askren. The greats ALWAYS have certain types of inherent physical gifts and personalities that are very hard to imitate. To actually teach the majority of kids to actually wrestling like a John Smith with his physical gifts would be much harder than teaching a kid to wrestle like Askren..
4. In your studies of the pinners your analysis was too small, "just" studying those types ignores the much vaster collection of wrestlers who may not be on that level of success but have had very successful careers as either scramblers or pinners, for instance, you ignored one of my very relevant examples of Stephan Abas as someone who had success with such techniqes, or an AJ Schopp or even if you want to be current a Seth Gross I could go on
5. As to imitating the amount of coaches that can actually teach is minuscule below the elite high school/college level along with flawed methods of teaching it

EDIT
I had a really long post going in detail over every point addressing the flaws or misconceptions if you will in your arguments but it got cut off and not saved. Polish made another excellent point about Askrens progression as an athlete..

But I’ll maybe do it later. My twin nieces turned 15 and while I’m super proud.. I’m also feeling old and like a curmudgeon because they’re starting to date and I want to tell them not to date and it’s time for cake

 

You really don’t seem to understand how commonplace or at the very “least” never surprised to see the scrambles/techniques Askren popularized are in college and elite high school.. it’s at the lower levels where there is much less coaches who know how to both do and more importantly teach the techniques. In fact many very knowledgeable wrestling people including Askren think one of the big reasons the Penn State wrestlers are so much more willing to attack and engage in actual offense vs wrestlers like places from Iowa.. because they both grew up scrambling because it’s commonplace in PA, and because they play wrestle and work on scrambles, so when they attack there is no fear of getting stalemated or funk rolled or countered because they know what to do and the “scrambling” is simply an extension of wrestling beyond the execution of the technique itself.. vs Iowa where because scrambling isn’t trained as much, the willingness to embrace and commit to offense that opens up more action and flurries is scary

Before it got cut off I went into detail about how scrambling is Essential to the meta of lower and middle weight folk wrestling and not at least underanding it leaves you behind just as not understanding inversion and 50/50 At lower and middle weight in Bjj leaves you out of the lurch and behind. And more, the big thing is though is that you seem to ONLY be looking at certain names when watching wrestling and not seeing the whole picture

 

Well, 7 of them already have world and/or Olympic medals while Molinaro was a win away from Olympic bronze, Taylor teched and pinned 2-3 Olympic/world champs at the last world cup, and Dake has beaten Tsargush, and a bunch of other top guys. Should be a very solid team for sure.

 

Just uploaded Part II, FYI. Feedback -- especially from the experienced wrestlers -- is always appreciated.

 

Not trying to be a negative but it took over 7 minutes to actually show a “scramble”...

 

I'm a bit late to the party here but I would say that Ben's scrambling style is based around getting to 3-4 hub positions - he has transitions to them mapped out from a variety of common spots, and from the "hubs" he has series of techniques 3-4 moves deep mapped out of counters, re-counters, and so on. At each level, if you listen to him talk about it, he's clearly thought about the finer details within each position (where exactly to grab, etc). From what I've heard, when he was in college, they set up mats in the basement and would spend hours every day screwing around in those various positions.

In my experience, the best scramblers do have an of an improvisational flair, but they are able to succeed at higher levels because they spend time in the lab trying to figure out how they can replicate and reproduce the stuff they pull out their ass sometimes.

 

I think that's largely true. A lot of it, as you said, is developing a way to get to your goal positions from almost anywhere. That's most of what a guy like Marcelo did: get to the back or a guillotine from everywhere, and the scramble largely takes care of itself.

 

Part 3:

 

I really really do like your series , my only quibble would be a lot of the sequences in the last two are really scrambles in my opinion. But you do highlight some very important concepts. Overrall very good job

 

Thanks, Jack.

 

No problem, but what do you consider a scramble?

 

I'm using a broader definition than you, I think. Basically, any situation in a grappling match in which control of a transitional position is still being skillfully contested. That's not a perfect definition, and I acknowledge that it encompasses a lot that would normally not be referred to as a "scramble." I'm including:

-The period from the shot / takedown set-up, to the finish (or neutralization/reversal)
-When top control from the referee's position becomes highly contested (Dake v. Taylor ankle elevation clip from Part 3, for example)

The first category is what I'm mostly showing in my videos. It's kind of subjective, but studying Dake's film, and coming up with general principles for winning these types of contested positions has been an interesting project for me.

 

Wrestling through a shot to a takedown with counters and recounters isn’t really a scramble but I understand your logic