Tigers beat Cornhuskers

Wrestling team wins Big 12 competition on Sunday 31-11.

By Ryan Huber

Published Jan. 30, 2007

After 14 days without a competition, the No. 2 MU wrestling team opened up Big 12 competition Sunday with a 31-11 win over visiting No. 20 Nebraska.

With a record-setting 2,728 fans filling the Hearnes Center, Missouri showed even with only an intense two-week training phase, it had enough to overpower the Cornhuskers.

"This was a good win for us," coach Brian Smith said. "It's always nice to start the Big 12 season with a win, especially over a good program like Nebraska's. I knew I trained them really hard, and we knew we could train through this match and our kids would find a way to win, and we did. You saw a couple of matches and guys looked tired, but they fought through it."

With the NCAA Championships less than a month and a half away, defending national champion Ben Askren had a positive message after the match.

"We weren't our best today," he said. "We don't need to be. We need to be March 15 through 17. We are training right now, we are working hard. We still had a lot of good performances, but the few down performances we had will be fixed by the end of the year."

Junior 149-pounder Josh Wagner put the Tigers on the board with the only fall of the dual at the 1:03 second mark of the first round to put MU up 6-4.

"Josh, of all my wrestlers this year, has really stepped up," Smith said. "He is wrestling to his potential finally. He went out and dominated a kid that dominated him last year."

Following Wagner, sophomore 157-pounder Michael Chandler had a frustrating match against Cornhusker Chris Oliver that ended in a 4-3 defeat.

Redshirt freshman Ashtin Primus shared the only other Tiger defeat with Chandler to No. 8 Dominick Moyer in the opening match-up.

"It's always hard when guys are just out there to slow you down," Chandler said. "Tiger-style wrestling, we push the pace and stay on them the whole seven minutes."

The most solid part of the MU line-up — weight classes 165 through 197 — dominated the Cornhuskers by scoring 18 points against four Nebraska opponents.

Askren didn't get the pin, but nonetheless gave the crowd a show for its money as he dismantled 174-pounder Marc Harwood with nine takedowns for his 28th straight

victory on the season.

"I was disappointed I didn't get the fall," Askren said. "He was just trying not to get pinned though. I wrestled hard. That's all I can ask for."

Askren's younger brother, Max Askren, didn't have quite the match but pulled out an 11-3 victory in the 197 weight class.

"We are in a training phase where we are at a higher level of conditioning, so we were a little worn down coming into this," Max Askren said. "We showed our mettle, pulled it out and beat them decisively anyway."

The fans in black and gold came out loud and in numbers for the second home dual this season, and Max Askren said he fed off every bit of it.

"It was great to see a big crowd again," he said. "We had a big crowd for the Pittsburgh dual in December. It was huge, it was awesome. It was good to see the community come out and support us."