Fun, it gets tossed around so often at Penn State that it has reporters asking about it, other coaches talking about it and opposing wrestlers questioning its authenticity. Heck, Corey Keener had to transfer in to experience it for himself.

Listen to wrestlers’ interviews in recent years, fun is a word used freely and widely, if not as a rhetorical crutch, an add-on to automatically tack at the end of a sentence. At preseason media day Thursday, returning national champions were saying it. Freshmen were saying it, even those who have been in the program going on five years were still saying it, even if a spot in the starting lineup this year is not a certainty.

A newcomer, Keener utilized the graduate transfer waiver this off-season after qualifying for the NCAA tournament three times for Central Michigan. He did not medal once. There are a variety of other words he would use to describe his college career to date. Fun isn't the first that comes to mind. He had to see if this was for real. Now that he's been on campus for a little while, immersed in the program and learned more personally about his coaches and teammates, Keener is beginning to see what they’re all talking about.

“When I was at Central Michigan everybody (at PSU) is always saying, 'Oh, I just go out there and have fun when I compete.' Those guys are just saying that,” Keener remembers. “Being here and actually experiencing it, I mean, that's definitely true. They make wrestling fun and make you want to go out there and score points and excite the fans.”

Inherent to competition, however, one’s fun must come at another’s expense. In a sport challenged to grow its fan base, is there such thing as too much fun? Could too good start to become a baseline expectation before, eventually, it starts to get boring? The day might not be far off.

With almost 40 media members in attendance Thursday inside Rec Hall there is no doubting that Penn State wrestling draws interest. It’s of the largest crowds to gather for a Sanderson press conference at PSU. To describe the mood of his presser and interview scrums that followed, the word – gasp – fun could be used.

Returning champion Vincenzo Joseph maintained that it is not part of a team motto. Meanwhile his teammates were elsewhere evaluating dodgeball skills and talking about their mom's spaghetti and meatballs recipe. Nick Nevills estimated that there are so many quality wrestlers in the practice room right now that they're about 10 starting spots shy of getting everyone squeezed into the lineup. Then he joked, “I’m not paid to figure out how to put those pieces together.” Matt McCutcheon revealed that the hardest class he’s taking this semester is ballroom dancing, and his roommate Zain Retherford is enrolled with him. Even Sanderson had a smirk or two form at the corner of his mouth when addressing the crowd, as he’s always happy when he doesn’t have to divulge answers about his lineup. Which, for the record, little of the way of news came out of his 40-minute discussion. “No weights have been set as of yet,” Sanderson said.

It's all included into a formula that has produced so many national titles, both team and individual, that soon it’ll be easy to lose count. Last year there were five NCAA champs, tying an all-time tournament record. “People say the stars aligned that night,” said then-freshman national champ Mark Hall. “Maybe we just had a good tournament, but I don’t think it was a fluke.”

Considering that all five champs return to their post this season, it's a very real possibility that only more success is to be realized, more fun to be had. In fact, the odds of Penn State sustaining its run atop the standings are so strong that it’s beginning to subtract from any unpredictability the sport might have otherwise had – not necessarily on an individual basis but at a macro scale. The point of suspense inherent to many team sports isn’t far from being dulled in college wrestling, if it isn't already.

Penn State opens its season at home against Army next Thursday and then hosts Bucknell the following Sunday. It’s heavily favored to win all but maybe one or two of its individual matches. That's not just a nonconference, early-season warmup type of thing, either. Once competition begins in the Big Ten, by far the superior conference in the sport, the predictions won’t be much different. There might be one or two opponents on the schedule against which the final team outcome is undetermined. Otherwise the spectator is left to find enjoyment from observing the nuances of technique and mastery of skills all conducted by some of the best in the sport. For avid wrestling fans, that's part of the fun, but it's probably not the best veneer to attract new ones.

If it isn't noticeable by now, the amount of fun a wrestler has often correlates to their number of wins and positive-point differential against one's opponent. That is a common advantage at PSU. As Keener has already learned in his short stay inside the Lorenzo Wrestling Complex, “Things are a lot more, not necessarily laid back, but you have more fun doing it. You’re working hard while doing it. It’s nice because they make wrestling fun. They make you want to go out there and score points.”

It's a style, or an approach, that Sanderson advocates and aspires for it to have a ripple effect through the sport. For those at the top, fun is a realistic objective for which to strive, but it's more difficult to achieve for those who aren't.

“Wrestling is boring,” Sanderson said. “A lot of times wrestling is boring because we’re winning, 3-2, and points aren’t being scored. People aren’t going to watch that. If you want people to come to see wrestling matches you have to have a great product. Any business in the world, you have to have a great product, so we need to have a great product. We’re constantly looking for that magic bean or silver bullet that’s going to solve all of our problems. Well, we have to solve our own problems.”

To counter the imbalance, there are new conflicts that come into play as ideas vary in how to better or change the sport. Like the continuous attempt to implement new rules, there are committees that try almost annually to tinker with the season-ending championship format, campaigning for dual meets over tournaments in order to decide the team title.

Sanderson argues that the collective is “fighting the wrong battles.” As anyone knows who has listened to Sanderson's outlook on the subject before, he's fundamentally opposed to altering how the team crown is awarded.

“You compete as individuals, but it has that team aspect that makes it – I don’t want to use the word fun, but it just makes it that more fun to go get the bonus points,” he said. “It’s one thing to try to win a national championship as an individual, but if you’re doing that and it’s helping your team win a national championship at the same time, or helping your team go from sixth to fifth, that adds a huge piece of excitement. That’s why if we think we’re going to change the tournament right now, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

No matter which rules come anew, what alterations are made to the championship criteria, a truth in the sport's history is that parity doesn't exist. Never has, really. It’s always been top-heavy; there have been those who have the fun, and those who don’t. For a half of a century, for instance, just three teams won all but seven national championships.

Penn State is by no means a lock for this year's title, as it stands now. With the off-season transfer of arguably the best 125-pounder in the country and question marks hovering above at least a few of the weight classes, Penn State has it's own complications to sort through, while Iowa, Ohio State and Oklahoma State are not to be counted out. But as we project this thing into the future, the chances for everyone else to sustain its fun appear to be diminishing.

This month Penn State is set to sign the best recruiting class yet under Sanderson and it is what many wrestling purists consider to be among the best the sport has seen. Like the word fun, the term the “rich get richer” is a cliche so beaten and battered in this case that it's lost any weight with which to describe the almost exponential separation that PSU is creating. There are only so many good wrestlers to go around; maybe there’s only so much fun to be had.

While the ending of this 2017-18 season is far from written – the introduction has barely been started – you can already fill out a skeleton for future copy that reads, “Penn State wins again,” and save it for most of the dual meets and have it on hand for each national tournament as the Nittany Lions rest squarely among two or three favorites for the foreseeable future. It's just Sanderson serving what he was hired for.

“Time will tell,” Sanderson said. “Our job is to do the best we can and guessing and trying to recruit the correct kids who fit our program and our culture and then also getting kids who can win. We’ll find out.”

Building a new roster each year, configuring the lineup, recruiting the next generation – it’s all part of his fun. It’s also part of the job, and entering his ninth season at PSU, Sanderson has done all that. He’s done it so well, in fact, that it has others in the sport figuring out ways to disrupt his flow, if not by competing against PSU on the mat, then in the board meetings to alter the criteria with which the sport determines its best. Because they know, which Sanderson might not necessarily acknowledge, there is only so much fun to go around before it starts to get boring.