Saturday morning’s wrestle-offs signaled the start to a familiar fall routine for Illini wrestling – making the move from the third floor practice room to Huff Hall’s main mats.

The Illinois coaching staff closely monitored the team’s annual intrasquad scrimmage, which featured a number of missing names and a pair of notable performances by the team’s newest grapplers.

A pair of first-round wins pitted freshmen Daryl Thomas and B.J. Futrell against each other in the final 125 lb. match of the day. With overtime looming in the final minutes of the match, Thomas scored a two-point near-fall and sealed a 9-7 win.

After months spent honing his skills on the mat in preparation for the new season, Thomas acknowledged, “I performed way better than I expected to.

“We’ve been working real hard, the past three months,” Thomas said. “It just felt good to get out of the (wrestling) room and be done practicing for a little bit, and come out to competition. I guess that was just something I was waiting for – the competition.”

Two of the Illini’s most formidable senior wrestlers, Mike Poeta and John Dergo, watched from the sidelines with injuries that head coach Mark Johnson predicted will keep them off the mats “another couple weeks.” With next Saturday’s Big Ten/ACC Clash marking the Illini’s first intercollegiate action of the season, Johnson must “piece it through” while the two leaders nurse their injuries.

“We just saw kids that want to compete and see who’s going to be our guy in the early part of the season,” Johnson said.

“We’ll sit down as a staff and evaluate things and plug in our best lineup out there.”