How Zack Ryder Pinned TJ Stewart (NCAA 7th) | Southern Scuffle 2025

About 25 seconds in, TJ does get a takedown off of a lateral drop. This is set up due to Zach trying to do this chest whip here. It’s the second time he tried it this match, and although I’ve seen wrestlers like Aaron Brooks and Trent Hidlay teach it, I just feel like it’s kind of a dream scenario to just be able to push someone to their back like this. You must really have to get them to lose their footing to get this to work. In the lower weights especially I doubt you can get it unless you get lucky, you’re clearly outclassing your opponent, they aren’t paying attention, or they randomly trip or something. I wouldn’t expect this to work easily in middle school, let alone college. This is the issue with trying to go upperbody and attempt throws, in my eyes it’s 50/50 at best, you live by the throw, die by the throw, that kind of thing. Leg attacks are just so much more consistent. Score is 3-0 TJ.

TJ doesn’t try hard to ride Zach out, just kind of lets him go, Zach makes his way up to his feet, TJ pushes him away 3-1.

Not much happens for the rest of the period, heavy tie ups like underhooks and over-unders as you usually see at these upper weights. For either of these guys to get a good attack going they need to hand fight better, be a little bit farther from their opponent so they’re not so cemented in place, and transition through the tie-ups. If you stand there and hold one tie up, then fight for another tie up and hold, you never give yourself a good chance to start setting things up. I preach this a lot, it’s taught in college often, to transition from tie-up to tie-up, pepper in fakes in between, until a shot is so easy to get it’s just right in front of you because your opponent’s having difficulty keeping up with all of the transitions.

Second period, Zach chooses down, TJ again kind of just lets him get to his feet, doesn’t try very hard to hold him down. 3-2 TJ. This is why being able to ride out your opponent would be a great benefit. If TJ rode Zach out the entire match up to this point, he would have over 2 minutes of riding time and the score would still be 3-0, but I digress.

A little over a minute in the period, Zach fakes a double which gets TJ to sprawl and fall down to his knees, who then dives at his own double as Zach approaches. Now this is one thing you can do from this position, but if your opponent has a good first line of defense, head position, a downblock maybe, and approaches at a lower level, you’re going to fall flat on your face like this. The problem is he has no penetration step going, his legs and hips are not underneath him as he shoots, and so any traveling he would be doing is only with his upper body, which can only move so far until your face meets the mat. If he was able to muster up a better penetration step at this attempt he would either land the double easier or penetrate back up to his feet where he can continue wrestling without a disadvantage.

Zach gets a front headlock, tries this chest whip yet again, this is like the 10th time he’s tried it this match without getting much out of it. The front headlock loosens, Zach snaps the head forward and then starts chasing the angle, which is something that works insanely well and has grown in popularity immensely these days, so much so that David Taylor says it’s the number one takedown in wrestling at the moment. Zach gets to a single, TJ does go shin whizzer, but doesn’t really use it much. You need to pull that whizzer situation forward to try to break up your opponent’s grip a little, and apply a hell of a lot more hip pressure, driving the bone of your forearm into the back of their arm as you rotate your leg and knee out to the side. This traps the arm, breaks your opponent down, hurts, and gives you a lot of options. He’s just not doing that, so Zach is fairly comfortable here and is able to limp his arm out. As he does, TJ dives at the far leg to funk or do a leg pass, but rather unfortunately falls into a turk from Zach. Notice Zach’s right leg start to hook TJ’s right. This looks to be kind of a lucky situation that Zach fell into, it’s not something that would be easy to target as someone tries to funk like this. TJ tries to pull the leg across but is just a tad bit slow with it, and Zach is able to catch the cross-face and cement this position for the fall. This is how you would defend this kind of funk, try to stay on the near side, find a way to control the hips ie a turk, navy ride, low leg single grip, so they can’t roll across their back, and then attack the head with a cross face. I first saw that get done at a high level when Spencer Lee pinned Nathan Tomasello at NCAA’s all those years ago in a similar situation, but it seems to be more and more common these days.