Sammy Sasso doesn’t care where he’s ranked.

Ohio State fans care: Clearly, they say, he should get top billing after knocking off No. 1 and No. 4 in the same weekend. Iowa fans care: His win over Lugo was controversial because Lugo took shots and got hosed on official review, they say. And Oklahoma State fans care: Clearly, undefeated Boo Lewallen should be king of the hill because, well, he’s undefeated.

But none of that matters to Sasso. All that matters to him is the next match

More reserved with members of the press than one might expect for a wrestler as dynamic as Sasso, if you ask him about any given match he’ll respond by saying something like he did in a pre-dual gaggle at the start of Big Ten competition this season: “Just excited to compete and be able to do what I love. I’m ready to go scrap.” 

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When you watch him wrestle, you understand what he means when he says he’s “ready to go scrap.” Every match against Sasso is a dogfight, and if you’re going to take him out, you need to be ready to scrap, too.

Pat Lugo found that out last Friday inside Carver-Hawkeye. For all that Iowa fans kibitz about Sasso’s attack rate in that match – and they’re right, Lugo was the shooter in the bout – their guy couldn’t finish. Sasso wrestled one of the best defensive matches of the season, and it paid off in one of the sport’s toughest environments.

“Lugo’s wrestling well, Sammy’s wrestling well,” Ohio State head coach Tom Ryan said ahead of the Iowa dual. “This could be a semifinal match.”

And that’s just what it looked like, with 13,000 screaming fans in the background and a pair of gladiators scrapping until literally the final second of the match.

Two days later Sasso did it again in Minneapolis, scrapping with Brayton Lee and avenging his second loss of the season. In three matches over the past 12 months, Sasso holds a 2-1 advantage over Lee now, and Sunday’s bout felt like a preview of college wrestling’s next great rivalry. It was a high-stakes match: two potential NCAA finalists in a nationally-televised dual in the final bout of the evening.

Again, the Twitter punditry quibbled over Sasso’s attack rate, but here’s the thing: The redshirt freshman is hitting bonus in 55 percent of his matches on the season, and he’s smart enough to know when he needs to shoot the lights out, and when it makes more sense to take what your opponent gives you and play the long game. In his three matches with Lee, it’s been 6-4, 6-4, and now 2-1, so both men have a pretty good idea of what to expect from one another at this point and game-planned accordingly.

Sasso is done with the toughest stretch of his dual-meet season, and he acquitted himself well in a pair of top-five matches on the road in Big Ten competition. He’s 18-2, with subsequent wins over both men who beat him earlier in the campaign.

But none of that really matters. What matters is the next match, and another chance to scrap.

Andy Vance is a Columbus-based journalist who covers the Ohio State University wrestling program for Eleven Warriors, the largest independent sports site on the internet for Ohio State news, analysis, and community. He is co-host of the site’s Eleven Dubcast podcast. Follow him on Twitter @AndyVance