For Ohio State, a season that started as a mission to ascend to college basketball's zenith ended in the first round of the NCAA tournament on a dreary March afternoon in dreary Buffalo.
A heart-stopping loss to in-state foe Dayton was the final page of an underwhelming campaign that fell considerably short of aspirations and expectations. It was the Buckeyes' swiftest exit since 2009.
"After we lost, it was like there’s another three or four weeks in the basketball season. I didn’t even want to watch the game," senior point guard Shannon Scott said at the team's Media Day Thursday. "I didn’t know how to really approach that situation."
So Scott, like most of his teammates, shut it down. He turned the television off. The notion of watching a March Madness without Ohio State in the conversation was too much to bear.
"It was real tough, none of the seniors had ever experienced that. None of us had ever lost before the Elite Eight. You know, we had gone to the Final Four, we had gone to the Elite Eight and really should’ve won that game," senior forward Sam Thompson said.
"To lose in the first round was really sort of a foreign feeling to us and it’s a feeling that we definitely don’t want to repeat. That’s what we’ve been working toward all summer."
It makes sense then why, almost seven months later, they still seemed gutted by the way things ended.
"(We) have that bitter taste in our mouth, just being in a situation that we don’t want to be in. We understood that, last year, we were knocked out really early and it was just hard to watch after that. We all felt bad for each other but we don’t want to be put in that situation again," Scott said.
Yet, in a way, it seemed like a fitting end for a team that was more or less a mystery last season. After all, the Buckeyes were a team that toppled Big Ten leaders like Michigan State and Wisconsin but inexplicably fell to bottom dwellers like Penn State and Indiana.
After roaring out to a 15-0 start and No. 3 ranking thanks to a weak non-conference slate of games, Ohio State finished the year 10-10. In particular, a dismal January span in which head coach Thad Matta's crew lost five-of-six games served as a microcosm for a team that seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse before suddenly coming back to life before crumbling again.
Inconsistency doomed the Buckeyes last season. And without program stalwarts like Aaron Craft, Lenzelle Smith Jr., and leading-scorer LaQuinton Ross, expectations for this team seem humble compared to years past.
"Since you touched on it — and I don’t care — I really don’t know. For me, it’s an interesting collection of guys. I think in terms of the expectations, I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I have set it stone what I’m expecting out of this basketball team," Matta said.
"I think there’s gonna be a growth period but with that said, we have to accelerate the growth. We have to push guys in the way that we practice and the way that we implement the things that we’re going to do."
Or else this season could end like the last one, where Scott said Matta had to more or less beg his players to play harder.
"I think their level of playing hard and my level playing hard, at times may have been at different end of the spectrum — opposite ends of the spectrum," Matta said. "I think those are things that we talked about in the offseason, we want to have this level of play and knowing that it’s like life — it’s never going to go exactly the way we prescribe or hope that it does. But with that said, there has to be an element of those late-game situations where there’s not the breakdowns that we had last year in terms of mental and physical breakdowns."
Of course, those are the things that cost Ohio State throughout the season and in the end against Flyers. Matta said he's used the offseason to make necessary adjustments.
"We tried a lot of different things this summer and some are good, some weren’t, but now building off of that and having an understanding that, 'Hey it’s on now,'" he said.
"And when we get going it’s going to be non-stop and fast-paced. As we always tell guys going into it, those that don’t get on board get left behind."
