Wrestling squad faces final tests

After an 11-0 start, the second best in Duane Goldman's 14 seasons as the Hoosiers head coach, the IU wrestling team hit a string of four top 10 opponents in a row. On all four of those occasions, the Hoosiers came away on the losing end, with their latest fall being last Friday's 27-8 loss to No. 8 Penn State.\n"We've been having good practices," Goldman said about the team's response to its latest loss. "We've been doing a lot of talking as well as wrestling, trying to work on all angles."\nThe Hoosiers finally get a break from facing top 20 opponents, although it's not much of one. On Friday, the No. 17 Hoosiers travel to Evanston, Ill., to face Northwestern. The Wildcats were ranked No. 13 in polls released Wednesday. This will be the second time this season the Hoosiers travel to Evanston, with the first being December's Midlands Tournament. In the tournament, which took place Dec. 29 and 30, the Hoosiers finished in eighth place. \nThe Hoosiers were led in that tournament by senior Brady Richardson, who took home a third-place finish. In the third-place match, Richardson defeated defending Big Ten Champion Matt Delguyd 3-2. He will face Delguyd again during the match against Northwestern. Since the Midlands match wasn't a Big Ten dual meet, Richardson said there will be more at stake this time around.\n"This will take precedence over that match," he said.\nAfter the Northwestern match, the Hoosiers will travel to Ann Arbor, Mich., to take on No. 3 Michigan on Sunday afternoon. The Michigan dual meet will be the last competition for the Hoosiers before the Big Ten Tournament March 4 and 5 at Assembly Hall.\nWhile the Hoosiers said they would like to take home team wins in the dual meets, the focus has started to shift to the individual matchups and seeds for the Big Ten Tournament.\n"We kind of have an idea pretty close to where each individual's probably going to be seeded," Goldman said. "So certain matchups this week have a lot of bearing on that. Of course, it would be nice to win some of these dual meets, but as far as the impact of the Big Ten Tournament, it's more for those seeds."\nEach team will send a wrestler in each weight class to the tournament, but only eight of the 11 wrestlers in each class get a seed. \n"It's going to be really tough regardless," Richardson said. "If you're not seeded you're going to have come through an even harder route."\nRichardson, who is competing in the 197-pound class this season, was the No. 5 seed in the 174-pound class last season before falling 6-2 to eventual champion Pete Friedl in the semi-finals.\nFreshman Andrae Hernandez currently has only one loss in Big Ten competition, and based on what he saw last year when he red-shirted, he said he hopes to win both of his matchups this weekend to get a good seed and a good paring for Big Tens.\n"If I go 2-0 these last two matches, I think I'll be seeded pretty high just with one loss in the Big Ten," Hernandez said. "Whereas if I lose one match or two matches, that would bring my seeding down pretty low and I would have someone tough in the first round"