The Ohio State basketball team got out of the gates extremely fast in 2019. It had huge wins early on over Cincinnati and Villanova at home, on the road at North Carolina, and on a neutral court against Kentucky. On the surface, those wins look good on any college basketball resume.
Now that 2020 has hit though, things look much different.
Cincinnati looks like just an average team, Kentucky has had its struggles, and North Carolina is in a downward spiral it hasn’t seen since what seems like the advent of the industrial revolution. So while those are still some very, good wins, they aren’t what they seemed to be early on.
On top of that, the Buckeyes have hit a skid that is now no longer just a blip on the radar, but a troublesome trend. Early on, its young talent was playing much more cohesive, sharing the basketball, and showing a toughness well beyond its years.
But now, the rough and tumble Big Ten seems to have reset things a bit. Okay, a lot.
No longer is this Ohio State team playing through chaos, working well together, or taking care of the basketball. What has resulted is a season that has gone from so promising, to one with more questions than answers. To make matters worse, head coach Chris Holtmann seems to be at a loss as to how to get this group to play like what we’ve been accustomed to seeing under his tenure.
It's very hard to play quality basketball when you're laying down, and that's what it appears #OSU did Saturday at Penn State. https://t.co/hvEuFpVsXm
— Bruce Hooley (@BHOOLZ) January 19, 2020
What is clearly his most talented team to date, now has to be his most perplexing.
There are even signs of some behind-the-scenes grappling going on. Though the details are sketchy, guards Luther Muhammad and Duane Washington were suspended for a game for “a failure to meet program standards and expectations.” Drama in the midst of a serious swoon is never a good thing.
The two are now back, but where there’s scarlet and gray smoke …
The Buckeyes must face the reality of where things stand. At 2-5 now in the league, a shot at a regular-season Big Ten Championship is most likely down the tubes. There’s still a chance at a deep run in the Big Ten Tournament and an NCAA Tourney appearance to potentially look forward to, but somehow Holtmann will have to keep this team motivated in the face of reset expectations.
And about those NCAA prospects? What was once a projected No. 2 seed is in a free-fall with every passing loss. Ohio State has lost six of its last nine. That resembles nothing close to an NCAA Tournament team. It barely resembles an NIT team.
The good news is that there’s still time to get this thing turned back around. The schedule eases a wee-bit over the next few games, and Holtmann has shown that his teams generally figure things out as March comes closer.
But it won’t be easy. There’s no doubt this team has lost some confidence and swagger, and it’ll be tough to wrestle that back in the deepest league in the country where there’s simply not a stretch of games to build momentum without going out and taking it.
It’s been 15 minutes since Chris Holtmann and the #Buckeyes coaching staff went into the locker room to talk with the team.
— Adam Jardy (@AdamJardy) January 18, 2020
This Ohio State team might still be pretty good, and once it gets to March might even find more of what was going right early in the campaign. But the painful truth is that the 2019-2020 Buckeyes just aren’t what we thought they were in early December.
It’s time to reset expectations — and not in a good way.
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