More than 8,000 fans packed Hilton Coliseum Saturday to see Cael Sanderson wrestle for the final time in Ames. They were there to see Sanderson win his 151st career match. And win he did, defeating Justin Ruiz of Nebraska with a 24-9 technical fall. The 151 career wins is a Cyclone record, which is yet another milestone for Sanderson.

Sanderson should be congratulated for his amazing feat, which most likely will not be the last time his name becomes a new entry in the record books.

Perfection is something people say doesn’t exist. It’s supposedly impossible among us mere mortals. Everyone has a bad day. Everyone, sooner or later, will meet his or her superior.

“Nobody’s perfect” is a phrase one will undoubtedly hear hundreds and hundreds of times over a lifetime.

If this is true, how do you explain 151-0? Sanderson has never been beaten as a collegiate wrestler. To try and fathom this unbelievable accomplishment is a difficult task.

Sanderson’s 151 opponents were not weak and pitiful wrestlers, although a lot of the time Sanderson sure made them look like it. They were top-quality peers of Sanderson, who were beaten – sometimes very quickly and very badly – by a wrestler who was obviously in a league of his own, performing on a different level.

The legacy of Cael Sanderson is something that will be synonymous with ISU athletics for ages. An athlete like him comes around once in a lifetime for sports fans – if they’re lucky. And right now Iowa State University is lucky to have him. The ISU community, past and present, should be proud and honored to be here at a time when one could have witnessed such an athlete first-hand.

Wrestling is not the high-profile, money-making college sport that football and basketball are. It doesn’t pull in equitable ad revenues. It doesn’t get on network television and it doesn’t fill stadiums and coliseums with tens of thousands of screaming fans on a regular basis.

Sanderson sometimes made it feel like it did.

In his time at Iowa State he made the sport interesting to some people, people who wouldn’t normally watch an event but decided to go anyway to see “that guy who never loses.” He took the sport and put it on a higher level of consciousness in the ISU community.

Sanderson is an ISU icon. He is an athletic hero on the same level or beyond any ISU athlete that came before him. Whether the humble Sanderson says it, he just may be the greatest collegiate wrestler of all time. Not many can lay claim to being the greatest anything of all time. But Cael can; 151-0 allows him to.

So while the age-old adage, “nobody’s perfect,” will still be said, we’re willing to argue the contrary on behalf of Cael Sanderson. Marcus Fizer, Jamaal Tinsley and Fred Hoiberg all were fan favorites who brought ISU athletics to a new level. But none were perfect.

editorialboard: Andrea Hauser, Tim Paluch, Michelle Kann, Charlie Weaver, Omar Tesdell