‘It Was a Big Risk’: Teague Travis Qualifies for NCAA Championships with Fourth-Place Finish at Big 12s

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TULSA — Coming into the weekend, Teague Travis hadn’t had a wrestling match since mid-November, but now he is headed to the NCAA Championships.

Travis on Sunday beat South Dakota State’s Avery Allen in the consolations of the 149-pound bracket at the Big 12 Championships. That win secured Travis a top-four finish in the tournament and an automatic bid into the NCAA Championships later this month. Travis finished fourth in Tulsa after dropping the third-place match to North Dakota State’s Gavin Drexler.

Travis suffered a knee injury during his second match of the year. The plan from there was, at least momentarily, for Travis to get a medical redshirt and try again next season. Only having two matches coming into the weekend, there was an abnormal amount of pressure for Travis to get an automatic bid because he didn’t have enough matches to get an at-large bid. So, had this weekend gone wrong, Travis would’ve lost an entire season.

“It feels really good to kind of get that pressure off because it was a big risk,” Travis said. “I could lose a whole year and be like, ‘Well, that was stupid.’ Now it’s just focusing on (the NCAA Championships) because that’s the end goal. This tournament, I didn’t have really a lot of room for error, a lot of room to kind of experiment because this is the first time getting down to weight, making weight, wrestling a two-day tournament.

“There’s a lot of excuses I could’ve had, but I didn’t really have time to focus on all the things that could go wrong. I had to go out here, and I had to go place top four and get a bid.”

Another wrinkle in Travis’ story is that 149 pounds wasn’t where he wrestled to start the year. Travis was the Cowboys’ starter at 157 coming into the season, the same weight he manned last season. After his injury, Caleb Fish burned his redshirt to jump into the Cowboys’ lineup for the Cliff Keen Las Vegas Invitational in early December and has performed well. Fish also finished fourth in Tulsa.

“I tried to tough it out and I was going to wrestle Vegas, but I mean, it was killing me,” Travis said. “I was off the mat for probably like eight weeks, and then I started just slowly coming into drilling. Tweaked it a couple times, but then it just started feeling better. Kind of just toughed it out, really.”

Travis said his recovery started on a bike before working his way up to a VersaClimber. Then he said he worked with strength and conditioning coach Nick Montoni to do the “hardest, stupid thing” he was able to do to start getting back into shape. Travis said he didn’t start wrestling live again until mid-February.

All the while, Travis’ team was taking off. The Cowboys climbed as high as the No. 2 team in the country this season. They broke the program’s average attendance record. Cowboy wrestling had a refreshed energy to it while Travis was in the shadows grinding in case an opportunity was available. One did, and he took advantage of it.

“It was hard, especially like, a lot of the guys I’ve been on the team with, it’s their last year,” Travis said. “Next year, I’m gonna be the older guy in their last year. It sucked to not share that opportunity with them, especially with the group of guys that have been here the last three, four years. We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs, so it kind of hurt to not be on the team with them while they finish their careers out.”