The No. 7 OU wrestling team finished third at Saturday’s Big 12 Wrestling Championships after being edged out by the Missouri Tigers for second place by half of a point.
The No. 3 Oklahoma State Cowboys won the five-team tournament, outscoring the the Tigers by 17 with a 77 total points.
Sophomores Jarrod Patterson (125 pounds) and Tyler Caldwell (165); junior Jordan Keller (133); and seniors Zack Bailey (141) and Nathan Fernandez (HWT) earned silver medals at this year’s championships. Freshman Matt Lester (149) and sophomores Chase Nelson (165) and Erich Schmidtke (184) finished third in their respective weight classes.
The Sooners finished the conference championship without an individual champion for the first time in 20 years.
“This was a tale of two tournaments,” OU coach Jack Spates said. “Going into the finals, I thought we wrestled magnificently. We took some tough losses, but overall we wrestled tough, aggressive and well."
Patterson, the defending Big 12 champion at 125 pounds, was edged out in a tough match against Nebraska’s David Klingsheim after the referee penalized Patterson during the final seconds of the third period on a controversial call for attempting to flee the mat. Klingsheim won the match, 2-0.
Bailey was the No. 1 seed at 141 pounds going into the tournament but was beaten by Missouri’s Todd Schavrien by a score of 3-2 in the championship match.
Oklahoma’s best chance for an individual championship came in the 165-pound weight class. Caldwell, a 2010 All-American, wrestled Nebraska’s top-ranked Jordan Burroughs in the closing match of Burroughs' undefeated season. Caldwell took a 1-0 lead into the third period but gave up a reversal in the waning minutes of the championship match, losing by a score of 2-1.
“There were exceptions, as Tyler (Caldwell) wrestled extremely well and was just a few seconds away from winning the championship over the defending national champion,” Spates said.
Caldwell is the third-ranked 165-pounder in the country and will look to avenge his loss to Burroughs in the NCAA Wrestling Championships on March 17-19.
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