Last night, Ohio State’s football team toppled Minnesota, 28-14. But while you’re likely to still be recovering from Saturday night’s game, there’s another event happening Sunday that may have slipped your mind.
The Ohio State basketball team opens up its 2015-16 campaign this afternoon at the Schottenstein Center. Kind of.
The Buckeyes host Walsh at 4 p.m. for their lone exhibition of the season.
| WHO | WHERE | WHEN | TV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walsh | Schottenstein Center | 4 p.m. | BTNPlus |
“I think we’re all anxious as a whole,” redshirt sophomore guard Kam Williams said Friday. “We all want to show the world what we can do and we want to exceed everyone’s expectations. I’m looking forward to having fun with everybody on the court.”
Williams is one of four players Ohio State fans will recognize. The rest of the roster? Not so much.
The Buckeyes are one of the youngest teams in all of college basketball this season and feature a six-man freshman class (including a redshirt) as well as a sophomore transfer. In total, that’s seven newcomers to this Ohio State team.
The Buckeyes also did not receive a single vote in the preseason AP poll for the first time since Thad Matta’s first year as head coach. Matta likes it that way, however. He enjoys the mystery that surrounds this year’s team with all of the new faces.
When Matta was made aware of Williams’ comments saying Ohio State wanted to “exceed everyone’s expectations” on Friday, Matta quipped, “Should be easy, right?”
“I like our size, I like our athleticism. We’ve got some guys that can score the basketball, that can make shots,” Matta said. “But defensively, especially for the new guys, they are still struggling with doing it the right way. You can’t shortcut it. You may be able to shortcut a certain situation in practice, but in the game it’s going to come back and bite you.”
Williams, Jae’Sean Tate, Keita Bates-Diop and Marc Loving are the only returners this season for Ohio State. The Buckeyes will have to find a way to replace a five-man senior class along with last year’s superstar freshman D’Angelo Russell.
Loving is the team’s leading returning scorer; the junior forward averaged 9.4 points per game last season. Tate is the team’s leading returning rebounder (5.0 per game last season) and he also averaged 8.8 points per game last season as a true freshman. Williams and Bates-Diop were bench contributors a year ago who each had their moments throughout up-and-down seasons.
The six-man freshman class includes guards JaQuan Lyle, Austin Grandstaff and A.J. Harris and forwards David Bell, Daniel Giddens and Mickey Mitchell. Mitchell, however, is currently ineligible from competition for an undisclosed reason. Matta said Friday the team is hoping he’ll be eligible to play this season.
Ohio State’s opponent, Walsh, is a Division II school located in Canton, Ohio. The Cavaliers compete in the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletics Conference and finished last season with a 17-11 record making the semifinals of their league tournament.
The Buckeyes should roll, though we have seen a pair of Division II teams defeat Division I schools in exhibitions so far. St. Thomas Aquinas College blasted St. John’s recently, 90-58, and on Friday night Iowa fell to Augustana, 76-74.
It won’t tell us much about what to see from Ohio State this season, but it will at least give some kind of insight. For a team with so many unknowns, that’s about all anybody can expect at this point.
“It’s a little bit of a crapshoot but I’m excited to play. I’m excited to see how guys react and what they do,” Matta said. “This has been a process of teaching, crawling and walking at the same time with the youthfulness that we have, but I think that we’ve learned to practice at a higher level over the last couple of weeks and we’ve attempted to keep things as simple as we possibly can.
“I don’t know if, truth be told, we are ready to actually play a game, but I think this will be good for us.”
