It’s time to give Chris Holtmann credit for the job he’s done this basketball season

The Ohio State basketball team is on an upward trend, and it’s time we recognize the coaching job Chris Holtmann has done this season.

The Ohio State basketball team started the 2019-2020 season out white-hot, jumping out to a 9-0 start that included wins over Cincinnati, Villanova, and at North Carolina. The Buckeyes made it all the way up to a No. 2 ranking before the Big Ten season hit. It was jubilation and the national media began discussing the Buckeyes as a final four, national title contender.

Then the scarlet and gray wheels fell off.

A season on the decline

Ohio State went into a tail-spin in January, losing six of seven and falling to 2-6, just one spot from the cellar in the rough and tumble Big Ten Conference. The Buckeyes went from a potential No. 1 or No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, to close to bubble territory. It seemed Chris Holtmann couldn’t pull the right strings no matter what he did.

Then further adversity struck in the way of personnel. The team lost an extremely talented freshman that was averaging about 25 minutes a game when D.J. Carton took a leave of absence. Glue guy Kyle Young missed time with appendicitis and surgery to correct it. The team couldn’t take care of the basketball and didn’t have the tough mindset needed to contend in the Big Ten.

And you could read it on Holtmann’s face at press conferences. You could almost feel it too. The hunt for a Big Ten title was over before it even got started, and all the team had left to play for was the shot at catching lightning in a bottle in the postseason — if it even made it to a postseason close to its team goals before the start of the campaign.

The media jumped on the team, wondering what was wrong. Fans began calling for Holtmann’s job as a knee-jerk reaction many of us around here have become too accustomed to.

Where are all those Tweets and sound bites now?

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Next … The remarkable turnaround