Complacency? Not for Ohio State's unbeaten 2-time NCAA champ Jesse Mendez
Jesse Mendez ended the first day of the NCAA wrestling tournament undefeated in his quest for a third title. Not that he's resting on laurels, though.
CLEVELAND — There's plenty to learn from a loss that you can't learn from a win. Ohio State senior 141-pound wrestler Jesse Mendez would even agree with you there. "No, definitely," Mendez said told the Beacon Journal March 19 .
"But I mean, you could learn from everything. You could go win everything and still find ways to get better, find places where you can do better. And I'm big on not being complacent, but yeah, I think the losses is more like a mixture of like, yeah, you did things wrong and you're a little butt hurt.
You just took a loss and it's back to the lab, you put your head down, you go do the work. So that's something I've tried to work on is staying in that mindset even when you're not losing. " It's just that Mendez has gone a long time since he knows what those losing lessons are like.
He was speaking after he improved his record to 24-0 affter a 22-6 tech fall of Navy's Caedyn Ricciardi in the round of 16 at the 2026 NCAA Division I Wrestling Championships inside Rocket Arena. The win was the two-time NCAA champion Mendez's 29th in a row, dating back to a March 9, 2025, loss to Penn State's Beau Bartlett in the third-place match of the Big Ten Championships. Meanwhile, and maybe even bigger, it's his 12th consecutive win in the NCAA tournament, dating back to a March 18, 2023, loss to Minnesota's Aaron Nagao as a freshman in the 133-pound fifth-place match.
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