Boyle was awesome fellas! He would have been an Olympic caliber wrestler if he had not chosen football. Jerry Coroner went on to all-American several times in D2 as did Keith Blaske from Onaga.
Boyle has my vote for the best Kansas wrestler any wieght that I have witnessed in 20 years of coaching!!

Ifs, Buts, Candies & Nuts !! JEREMY LAY proved it as an NCAA DIVISION *1* ALL-AMERICAN..... on THE MAT ! Lets give him his due folks !!

Gotta go with Harry, No heavy dominated like Boyle, what fun was he to watch, growing up in Sabetha in the 80s I happened to see the Maddens (ACCHS) & Jon Beal, The Hollister boys, Jerry Quick from Chapparal. I also saw a lot of Beltran in recent years as a coach and offical, but none could hold a candle to Boyle. Lay was an awesome kid from a great family but no where near the dominant force. Good Topic.

Jeremy Lay was good but not exceptional as a high school wrestler. He did go on to do exceptionally well in college but the question was not who was the best college heavyweight it is about high school. Jeremy was a teriffic kid who I think very highly of but he came to his prime after high school.

Boyle was the most dominating, if not the best heavyweight I saw. One thing that tickles me though Kyle Deere is just how you saw people wrestle while growing up in Sabetha in the 80's that graduated in the 60's and early 70's. Ralph Madden who was an exceptional Hvy and the first state champion in NE Ks outside of Topeka wrestled in the 60s and in 1970. How old were you Klint. Henry who was the youngest and won grand state in 76 was 185. What grade were you in Klint 4th grade??

Boyle was awesome and finished his senior year undefeated and 28 pins and 28 takedowns. 28-0

Sorry fanatic---did not mean to say i saw em, but definitely grew up hearing all about em---thanks for the fact check,,,send me an email sometime and lets catch up,,,,,

Ubben and Lay were both very dominant. But I think Boyle was better. And as for saying that Lay is better, because he was better in college. Boyle chose to play football at Wyoming instead of wrestle, and he was a monster. He was one of the best nose guards in Div. I when he played. He would prolly be in the NFL if he didnt have really bad knee trouble.
Last year, one of my friends who currently plays football for Wyoming told me that Boyle bench pressed 225 pounds 45 times in a row. That's impressive. I think he would have went on to do great things in wrestling had he chosen to go out.

The two best heavyweights I saw were Lon Austin of Kinsley and Danny Lankis of Attwood. They wrestled each other in the state finals in 1965 Austin winning 2-1. They went to K-State and played right beside each other at linebacker for three years and were co-captains their senior years. Great athletes and tremendous wrestlers.

Boyle for sure. He was a 3x state champ, #1 ranked heavyweight wrestler in the nation for all of 1997, and was a 1st team All-American on every wrestling magazines list that year too. And actually he did go on to play in the NFL and is still playing today. He plays for the Cincinnati Bengals.

ubben

Going 28-0 with 28 pins and 28 takedowns is pretty impressive. He did not humiliate people by taking them down 20 times like he could of. He was a good guy and may still make it in pro football.

In the mid 80's Chanute could have boasted
that they had all of the best. HWT state
champion 4 years in a row 4 different
wrestlers!!!!

1985- Dave Gossett
1986- Sonny Manley
1987- Dan Smedra
1988- Todd Brandon
Rumored that some of these guys claimed
as juniors that the only wrestler in
Kansas that could beat them wrestled on their
team!

P.S. Manley won it at 185 in '85, went on to
wrestle at Nebraska. I beleive was All-American?
And legend has it that while practicing for the
Shrine Bowl, was working out with 315 on the bench. May or May not be the best of all time, but
deserves mention. As did the awesome feat of Chanute's dominance in the Heavyweight division!!!

With all due respect, wrestling has changes a lot from the 60's and even the 80's for that matter and Jeff Boyle would kill anybody that has ever wrestled Hwt. including Andrew Ubben. Boyle was a flat out animal. Mitchel Schlepp was a good one too, but Boyle would kill him.

I get a large charge out of people who say that wrestling has changed so much since the 60' 70's or 80's. Wrestling is a 2000 year old sport. Do you really think that it suddenly evolved in the last thirty. I am not of the opinion that the current rules configuration (which is the only thing that has changed one iota) has made wrestling better or worse it is just different. I know it is romantic to say that the wrestlers of your era would have whomped wrestlers of any other era but it just isnt really a factual statement. This state has produced some very very good heavyweights over the years. It would be very difficult to really say which ones would have been dominant but completely foolish to say that any are better simply because of the time that they happened to take the mat. I doubt that the human animal has evolved greatly in the heartbeat of twenty or thirty years. Lots of people would tell you they are softer now than they were then. They would probably be just as wrong.

Good call, Westfahl, getting on here and
stating facts, is OK, and so is stating
an opinion based on facts. Fact of the
matter is that wrestling has not changed
that much in the last 20 years. So to say
that someone would beat someone else just
because he wrestled in the last decade,
is wrong. Most wrestlers today are being
coached by a wrestler who wrestled 10,15,
20,30? years ago. But it is still fun to
say my guy would have killed your guy IF
they would have wrestled. Maybe we should
start a fantasy league, they have them in
every other sport!

Fantasy wrestling what a good idea ..... can I have Sanderson?

no

The idea that wrestling hasn't changed in the last 20-30 years at the high school level is up for debate. Weight training? Year round conditioning and training? Performance based nutrition? Not to mention the strong influence of collegiate and international techniques. Moves that come out of college or international get to the high schools so much quicker these days when you have guys like Eric Akin in the community. ALL sports change and evolve. Most old tried and true concepts will always work, but would you have seen a 4x state champ freestyle tilting to countless tech falls opponents in 1972? Used to be 30 years ago that the USA was not a major factor on the international level. Times have changed and wrestling has changed.

Thirty years ago Wayne Wells, Dan Gable, and Sanders were Olympic Champions as were Ben and John Peterson, and Loyd Keaser. I think sometimes we give ourselves way too much credit when we decide that the training of today is so much better than the training of a while back. Back in the sixties Pudge Wilson had his entire St. Francis team buck bales all summer long to get strong. Some of those kids and many others in the state were by far equal to any strength oriented kids in this state today. I wrestled then I coached now, and I tell you from my perspective the sport has not changed one way or the other to any decernable degree. I don't think kids work as hard today even though they have the opportunity to do so, I know there re the priveleged few who have money and can afford to travel all over the country to learn their craft but the bulk of wrestling in this country is not made up of those kids. Eastern Kansas didnt have guys like Aken in their communities then but in Western Kansas almost every school had many men in their communities who were very very talented collegiate wresltlers in their day. I just don't think 20 or 30 years is as long as people think it is in the evolution of a sport as old as this one is. It does make for a nice debate doesnt it.