Feb. 15—It’s rivalry weekend for the Oklahoma State wrestling team.

In a unique scheduling twist for the Cowboys, the program will face two of its most storied rivalries in back-to-back duals to close out the regular season — first with a home dual Thursday night against Oklahoma, then a trip to Iowa City to face No. 2-ranked Iowa.

“I think it’s always fun to wrestle both of those teams,” super senior Wyatt Sheets said. “Bedlam, of course, but Iowa is really close to our least favorite, if not our least favorite — it’s them and OU. It’s always exciting.”

Obviously, the biggest question surrounding the Bedlam dual isn’t about this particular meeting, but the status of future schedules with Oklahoma’s athletic department moving to the SEC following the 2023-24 athletic season.

However, with the SEC not having NCAA sanctioned wrestling within its conference — with the lone program being Missouri, which recently rejoined the Big 12 Conference as a wrestling affiliate — there is hope that it won’t be as impactful for the sport in which the Bedlam rivalry was founded in.

“I think we’ll hopefully have Oklahoma wrestling in the Big 12 following next year,” Cowboy coach John Smith said. “I think that’s what they’re hoping, I think that’s definitely what Oklahoma State and the Big 12 hopes. We’re gonna come out of this, I think, better than most.”

Beyond the significance of the rivalry among the programs themselves, the Cowboy wrestlers expressed how much of an impact it has on the entire state of wrestling within the border of Oklahoma.

Many of the Oklahoma natives on roster recall going to many Bedlam duals — both in Gallagher-Iba Arena and in Norman — and with the surge of girls wrestling at the high school level, and younger, in Oklahoma, the meeting between the only Division I programs in the state can have a rippling effect.

“It would be bad for the sport, especially in Oklahoma, if you take that dual away,” senior Kaden Gfeller said. “... Even a lot of OU fans come to the Bedlam dual, and if you take us out of their schedule, I don’t know who comes to their duals.”

The previous meeting between the two earlier this season certainly brought the atmosphere that can produce future college wrestlers who took it in at a young age.

With the dual tied heading into the final match — which featured a former Oklahoma State wrestler competing for the Sooners in Keegan Moore — Luke Surber pinned Moore in 34 seconds to send the Cowboys in attendance into a frenzy.

“You embrace it, it’s fun,” Sheets said about the Bedlam atmosphere. “The bigger the crowd, the more fun it is.”

While Bedlam has been a little more competitive of late, the same can’t be said about the series with Iowa.

Smith lives by the motto used regularly by the national media when talking about one-sided rivalries that both teams have to win every once in a while for it to be a rivalry.

And for Oklahoma State, it hasn’t been easy to knock off their rivals to the north.

The Hawkeyes have won the past two duals by a combined score of 57-15, with the Cowboys winning just twice in the past eight meetings. It goes a little deeper even still since Oklahoma State had its winning streak of nine-straight duals snapped in 2009, with Iowa holding a 8-4-1 record against the Cowboys over the past decade.

“I don’t think it is right now, unless we go up there and whip them,” Smith said. “A rivalry is a team that’s winning more than once every five years. It’s not much of a rivalry. We’ve got to do our part.”

For Gfeller, who has been in the program since 2017, this meeting with the Hawkeyes will be a little more unique.

Though he has faced off with Iowa in a dual setting before — including last year’s Bout at the Ballpark in Arlington, Texas — he has never before tussled with Iowa at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, which has a capacity of over 15,000.

“I’m looking forward to that. That should be exciting,” Gfeller said.

The last time Oklahoma State wrestled in Iowa City was just a few short weeks prior to COVID-19 shutting down sports globally. In that 2019 dual, Iowa rolled to a 34-6 victory in front of 13,109 fans.

There are only three holdovers from OSU who wrestled in that dual — Reece Witcraft, who recently returned to the starting lineup for Oklahoma State though he is down at 125 pounds, along with Sheets and Travis Wittlake.