Let me start this by saying the following: wrestling is a sport that should be getting more positive coverage instead of negative. It’s a sport that is only on the main ESPN channel one time a year, with smaller networks doing more coverage and what happened on Saturday added to the negativity that wrestling is accustomed to.

In case you don’t know, allow me to give my perspective on what took place at Gilbert High School on Feb. 22.

Marcus Coleman, needing to go 5-0 to get an allocation spot and attempt to qualify for the NCAA Tournament in March, went 5-0.

His fifth win was an actual match, defeating North Dakota State’s TJ Pottinger by a 15-4 major decision Sunday in the final dual of the season for Iowa State.

The previous four? The most activity Coleman did was walk on the mat and have his arm raised.

Four matches with four injury defaults, and the Ames native met the 15-match requirement, not only improving his winning percentage but also being at the center of controversy.

As in the case of today’s world and on the Twitter-verse, everyone piled onto a wrestler, who had the first half of his season wiped away due to bumping up 10 pounds and needing to accumulate wins and matches, and a head coach for allowing this to happen.

Yet it’s Kevin Dresser who, following his team’s 22-16 win over the Bison, said publicly that it’s all gamesmanship and no rules were broken.

“There’s instances where guys needs matches for [the rating percentage index (RPI),] win percentage and coaches’ ranking,” Dresser said. “This year, injuries, we shift some weights, so we needed the Last Chance Open. It started to be a perfect storm a couple weeks ago.”

In real time as it happened, I had many thoughts running through my head. It was shady; it didn’t sit well with me. And it just made Dresser, for all the good he’s done in turning the Cyclones’ program around in three years, look really awful.

Rules, in fact, were not broken. So for the people calling these matches fixed, that the NCAA should step in and strip these matches away from Coleman, I’m going to say one word for those individuals:

Listen.

Iowa State put five guys in the 184 bracket. Tate Battani, Austin Stotts, Caleb Long and Julien Broderson joined Coleman. There was a simple rule Dresser put in place if his guys matched up with each other at any point during the tournament.

“Everybody had to wrestle; that was healthy, and they did not, if they hit each other, did not have to wrestle each other if they didn’t want to,” Dresser said. “I said, ‘If we’re on the championship side, that’s up to you guys. Both guys want to wrestle, you gotta wrestle.'”

Both Dresser and Coleman were expecting the latter to wrestle multiple matches. What the former didn’t expect was Battani and Long winning their matches.

That caused a wrench in the plans, as Battani defeated Minnesota’s Caden Steffen and South Dakota State’s Jacob Schoon, while Long won 4-3 over Caleb Orris of South Dakota State.

Had those two guys lost their respective matchups, Coleman would’ve legitimately wrestled at least two matches, which made this whole spectacle more of an issue than it would’ve been.

“I thought we’d hit Minnesota; I thought we’d hit South Dakota State. That was the goal, to get him matches,” Dresser said. “When he hit our guys, one guy was coming off the flu [and] didn’t want to wrestle again; the other guy didn’t want to wrestle, probably because of what happens in the wrestling room a little bit.

“I’m not going to go against what I told my team; the rules were going to be for the open tournament.”

And in terms of what happened with Wisconsin’s Johnny Sebastian, it was told to the media that Dresser and the Badgers’ Head Coach Chris Bono had a discussion on how to approach that matchup between Coleman and Sebastian.

This is how I see it. Everyone is mad because the young guys that wrestled their opponents won. People are upset because Battani and Long did what they are attending a Division I program to do, outside of getting an education, which is to wrestle.

This puts the ordeal into perspective.

Anger shouldn’t be put toward Coleman and Dresser; it shouldn’t be pointed toward anybody. Nobody did anything wrong or flagrant, and no one broke a rule. The way it takes to qualify for the NCAA Tournament, this is it, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

I can’t see how people who view this in complete context leave and say, “Well, it’s still fixing,” or “Well, Coleman shouldn’t qualify for NCAAs.”

One, it’s not fixing when, per the NCAA rules, injury defaults count towards the 15-match requirement.

Two, Coleman struggled in the first couple weeks in his new weight, but he has been building confidence, and I think it’ll show next weekend at the Big 12 Tournament.

Will he beat Northern Iowa’s Taylor Lujan? Probably not. Can he defeat the Jackrabbits’ Zach Carlson? Maybe. Oklahoma State’s Anthony Montalvo is someone an aggressive Coleman can beat.

In my eyes, he’s the fourth best 184-pounder in the conference. And I don’t think that’s a reach either.

All this showed me is that people love to overreact and immediately attack a college wrestler who wasn’t prepared for something like this to happen. 

“The guy that I probably need to apologize to is Coleman; he needed the mat time,” Dresser said. “… He wanted matches. Coleman would’ve wrestled seven guys if I would’ve put seven guys out there; I just couldn’t get anybody to wrestle him.”

And while we’re at it, let’s discuss that Dresser is an advocate against this. He’s going to use it while it’s still allowed because what coach wouldn’t? While viewed from the outside as shady, it’s strategic and smart. Wrestlers stay fresh and healthy, which is what every single coach in the country wants.

I applaud Dresser for speaking against the approach it takes to qualify for the final tournament of the season.

“The way the system is set up is very, very messed up,” Dresser said. “We had two kids, one from Little Rock and one from Wisconsin; they came and probably got NCAA bids, and they did nothing wrong, just were gaming like the rest of us. They will get NCAA bids for their conference because their athletes showed up and defaulted out of a tournament.

“To me, that’s not how we want to roll.”

If people want to twiddle their thumbs and tweet angry, go right ahead. It won’t change what happened, and it won’t change Coleman’s record or the reputation Dresser has established at Iowa State.

Nor should it.