OSU Wrestling: Cowboys Set Taylor Era Point Record with 43-6 Win against Air Force.

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STILLWATER — In a season in which the Cowboys have scored a ton of points, they scored even more points than normal on Friday night.

Oklahoma State beat Air Force 43-6 in Gallagher-Iba Arena. It’s the most amount of points the Cowboys have scored in a dual since beating Air Force 45-0 in 2021. — making this the most points OSU has scored in a dual under first-year coach David Taylor.

“This week, we had a very specific training plan and things that we needed to work on,” Taylor said. “It was good to see guys going out there and wrestling like that. I just keep telling them, like, ‘Hey, we need to reset your standard and reset your expectation.’ Maybe what you thought you were gonna do in the beginning of the year, maybe you’re doing what you thought, or maybe you’ve surpassed it, maybe you’re below that — whatever it is. OK, let’s reset that. What is your standard that you wanna go out and wrestle like? It’s not about anyone else but you. How do you want to go wrestle? I think that was good to see.”

The most impressive part was that the Cowboys had only nine wrestlers to Air Force’s 10. OSU forfeit the 133-pound match, as Taylor said Reece Witcraft and Cael Hughes are recovering from injuries. Here is what Taylor said about not sending anyone out at the weight.

“Reece, his knee has been kinda tweaked since Vegas,” Taylor said. “He’s been wrestling through it, so I felt like this was a time to get healthy. We talk about the orange singlet being something that you earn. Guys had a chance to get their weight down and wrestle, and they didn’t do it appropriately. And they weren’t gonna go out and wrestle … so we didn’t send someone out there.”

OSU gave up just one takedown all night — coming in Luke Surber’s tech fall win at 197 pounds. Of the 25 points Air Force scored across the night’s 10 matches (nine if you don’t count the forfeit), 22 were off escapes, which means Air Force got taken down a lot.

Every regular Cowboy starter who wrestled Friday won by at least a technical fall. At 174 and 184, Dean Hamiti Jr. and Dustin Plott had a bit of a beat-the-clock challenge going on, as both won via first period pins. Hamiti pinned Jack Ganos in 1:55, while Plott bested that by pinning Gage Musser in just 1:46. Confetti cannons shooting from the rafters after a pin is a new tradition of the Taylor era, but Friday’s pins happened in such quick succession that they didn’t have time to get reloaded for Plott’s win.

Troy Spratley, Tagen Jamison, Carter Young, Caleb Fish and Luke Surber all won via technical fall. Jamison had a bit of an interesting night despite the solid result. He took an inadvertent headbutt early in his match, which dislodged a tooth.

“Tagen is really tough,” Taylor said. “We’ve kinda figured that out this year just a handful of different times. I actually lost a tooth one time. I was teaching a session at a camp. A kid came up, kinda like that, headbutt, knocked all my front teeth out. My reaction was much different than his. I did not keep my composure very well. He just kinda got up and was like, ‘I lost my tooth.’ He came over, and he said, ‘Gosh dang it — just like Cutter Sheets.’ Just kind of his personality.

“Then he didn’t lose his whole tooth, so then it cut his mouth open. He’s got all this blood in his mouth, and he’s holding it in his mouth while he’s wrestling, finishing out the period. It’s just nice to have tough guys.”

There were a pair of irregular starters in the lineup for the Cowboys — one a freshman and one a fifth-year senior.

Colin Young made his dual debut at 165 pounds. He took on freshman Andrew Harmon, with Young winning with an 8-2 decision. With the win, Young advances to 5-2 in his freshman season with all his other matches coming at the MSU Open, where he got fifth. Young was a late addition to the Cowboys’ 2024 recruiting class. He won an Iowa state title as a high school senior at Wahlert Catholic.

Doucet wrestled at heavyweight in place of Air Force transfer Wyatt Hendrickson, who announced Thursday that he wasn’t going to be wrestling against his former squad. Doucet won 2-1 thanks to a well-earned riding time point. A two-time NCAA qualifier, Doucet is 5-0 this season after he won the MSU Open.

Hendrickson did take to the mic midway through the dual, thanking military members on the “Vests for Vets” promotion night. Hendrickson ended his speech by saying, “God bless America. God bless our troops. God bless the Cowboys.”

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