BATON ROUGE, La. - Justin Wells was able to keep his promise Saturday.

After getting roughed up early on in his relief pitching outing against LSU at Alex Box Stadium, the Arkansas junior righthander began to turn things around. And once he did, all he asked was for his teammates to believe in his stuff.

"Wells came in and he was pretty determined," Arkansas senior Casey Coon said. "He came in the dugout around the seventh or eighth inning and said, 'they're not scoring no more so let's get it done.' And that's exactly what we did."

In incredible fashion - capped by a 10th inning home run from Tim Smalling - the Razorbacks rallied from nine runs down after three innings to beat LSU, 14-13, on Saturday. But none of it would have been possible unless someone shut down the Tigers' bats.

That's where Wells came in.

"Once we saw the goose eggs come out, we knew we had a chance," Smalling said. "It gave us confidence at the plate and we started attacking, and this is a big win for us."

Wells worked a career-high 7 1/3 innings of relief and threw 126 pitches to get the win. But it was his stuff in the final five innings which stood out the most, as the Bryant native limited LSU to just one hit after the fifth inning.

"When I started getting roughed up, the very last hitter in the fifth - (Matt) Clark I think that I struck out - I had dropped my arm a little," Wells said. "And I've been trying to find my arm angle since I've got to Arkansas, even in the fall. I've been way too over the top and when I got Clark to end the fifth I just said I'm going back to a high, three-quarter arm angle.

"After that, I didn't have to think at all. It was just me and the catcher."

But after that rough fifth inning in which the Tigers added two more runs against Wells, it didn't appear he would make it much longer in the game. Nor did Wells seem to be a likely candidate to go more than seven innings.

But he did, keeping his promise along the way.

"We were trying to figure out if we should take him out or not," Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn said. "His pitch count was up and he did not want to come out of the game. Coach (Dave) Jorn was talking to me about it, I guess that was about the bottom of the 10th. And I said, coach if we take him out of the game and lose the kids will kill us."