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OSU Wrestling Closes Out NCAA Tournament with Four All-Americans

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It wasn’t the best weekend for Oklahoma State wrestling as they close out the NCAA tournament with the worst finish in program history. I write this with the Cowboys being finished and sitting in 12th currently with wrestlers on other teams still going. This will end up as OSU’s worst finish at the NCAAs since they came in 16th in 2009 and the second-worst ever under John Smith.

Here are the write-ups on Day 1 and Day 2

The Cowboys dropped four of their five matches on Saturday with Kaid Brock going down in a pretty exciting consolation semifinal match to 3-seed Luke Pletcher. Brock then picked up the Cowboys only win on the day dominating his way to a major decision and 5th place finish.

Boo Lewallen took on NCAA champ Jason Tsirtsis for 7th dropping the match 2-1 due to riding time. There was what looked like a TD on the edge for Boo that would’ve won the match for him, but after review the refs did not give him the points.

Chandler Rogers and Jacobe Smith both dropped decisions after fighting their way back from early losses to make the podium. Here’s a look at OSU’s four All-Americans for 2018.

Consolation Semifinals

133: No. 3 Luke Pletcher (Ohio State) dec. No. 4 Kaid Brock (Oklahoma State), 12-8

Fifth-Place Matches

133: No. 4 Kaid Brock (Oklahoma State) MD Scott Delvecchio (Rutgers), 10-1

Seventh-Place Matches

149: No. 10 Jason Tsirtsis (Arizona State) dec. No. 8 Boo Lewallen (Oklahoma State), 2-1
165: No. 16 Jonathon Chavez (Cornell) dec. No. 8 Chandler Rogers (Oklahoma State), 10-5
174: No. 11 David Kocer (South Dakota State) dec. No. 13 Jacobe Smith (Oklahoma State), 7-2

It was a tough tournament for us,”  John Smith said. “Obviously, we had four All-Americans but we were hoping to have a little bit better of a day today. It’s something that we have to take and get better from. In the end, we just had tough matches; we won some of them, we lost some of them but we lost at the wrong time. That was the difference in having a little bit better of a tournament.

“This was an odd year for us,” Smith said. I knew it was going to be a struggle. Any time you experience some of the things we did this year, it’s going to get tough. It’s hard to build team chemistry, but in the end we need to go back, go to work and move forward.”

I’ll do some write-ups in the coming week or two on the topic, but all hope isn’t lost on this weekend. Dean Heil closing out his career like he did by losing in Round 4 of the consolation bracket is tough to take. He wasn’t the most dominant guy, but you hate to see a two-time champ go out that way. They literally made a rule that really killed things for his style of wrestling though.

A healthy Preston Weigel probably would’ve been an NCAA finalist and may have won the whole tournament had he not injured his knee. He dominated two of the top three finishers at the weight early in the season. That alone would’ve been enough to jump the Cowboys into sixth place. As many know there is a big pool of talent coming into the lineup next year with Daton Fix, Kaden Gfeller, and Joe Smith, so even though it was a rough weekend, don’t hit the panic button just yet.

No doubt improvements do need to happen though, and again in the coming weeks I’ll touch on some of my thoughts on where OSU is currently and where I think they’ll be going forward and how some things could change to improve the state of the program a bit.

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