Thad Matta's unranked basketball Buckeyes lost 86-73 to No. 2 UCLA yesterday but not before trailing by just three at intermission and only six with 6:40 to play.
Two and half weeks prior, Matta's crew went on the road and lost by only two points to No. 7 Virginia, a game they led by 12 at the half.
A decreasing portion of the fan base slants toward celebrating these two moral victories as a sign the program is trending in the right direction. Meanwhile, a growing portion of the fan base thinks this is just the continued decline of a program that hasn't been nationally relevant since the 2012-13 season.
In the spirit of full transparency, I've generally been a Thad apologist as recent as leading into this season but unless Matta pulls a rabbit out of his hat and finds a way to take this team to the top quarter of the B1G standings and through at least one round of the Big Dance, I'm no longer interested in touting Matta for what he has done at the expense of what he would not have done over the last four seasons.
As sincerely as I can type it, I do hope Matta gets things squared away in a hurry and these losses to Virginia and UCLA – sandwiched between an uninspiring win over Farleigh-Dickinson, an unfathomable home loss to Florida Atlantic and a tight home victory over a depleted UCONN team – will be blips on the radar as we await more celebratory things to come.
To be clear, the reason we're even discussing Matta's standing as head coach is because of the high expectations he instilled in all of us after saving the program from ruins back in 2004-05.
In the first nine years of his tenure, Matta took the program to heights not sniffed since the early 1960s earning seven NCAA bids, three Elite Eight appearances, two trips to the Final Four and an NCAA runner-up. Amid the tourney success, Matta owned the B1G capturing five regular season titles and four conference tournament titles.
Matta's lofty accomplishments were fueled by bringing in nationally sought after recruits – something his predecessor didn't even try to do – and Thad wasn't just good at it, he was great at it. Over those first nine years in Columbus, Matta cranked out nine NBA Draft picks featuring names like Mike Conley, Evan Turner, Jared Sullinger and Greg Oden.
Those last two paragraphs summarize the cache, and therefore the leeway, Matta earned through putting Ohio State basketball back on the map.
At issue now are really two things. First, just how long of a rope should Matta get as a thank you for past success? Second, is this year's team truly making progress toward being successful enough to give confidence that the program is indeed trending in the right direction, at the right pace?
Speaking of the rope, the reality is Ohio State fans have been forced to cling to moral victories for the better part of three and half seasons. Since Matta's initial big run ended with the 2012-13 season, the Buckeyes have won 74% of their overall games but that includes a large helping of cupcakes. In conference over that span Matta's teams are 32-22 (59%) with finishes of 5th, 6th and 7th place.
Against ranked teams, they are just 9-16 over those 3+ years, hence moral victories even becoming a topic in Columbus instead of reveling in the fact Ohio State had too many weapons for most progams to handle.
These days such weapons are hard to come by, even when the recruiting rankings might cause you to think otherwise.
Matta's 2014 haul ranked 6th in the land and included 5-star D'Angelo Russell, 4-stars Keita Bates-Diop and Jae'Sean Tate, and 3-star big David Bell. Russell was indeed a stud but while Bates-Diop and Tate have proved solid contributors, neither are stars with an ability to fill it up on a consistent basis. Bell remains a pivot project who plays hard but if we're being real, he's an end of the bench guy on any good team.
In 2015, Matta brought in the nation's 5th-ranked class featuring five 4-star guys in JaQuan Lyle, Daniel Giddens, Austin Grandstaff, A.J. Harris, and Mickey Mitchell. That class turned out to be a major dud as only Lyle remains in the program after the other four showed their way out after last season's 21-14 trainwreck.
Acting out of character, Matta somewhat publicly criticized the four who transferred out and while I buy that they weren't great fits for the program from an attitude standpoint, they also weren't very good players to begin with and Matta was in love with them enough at one point to bring them into the fold.
After that debacle, the 2016 class ranked 41st headlined by 4-star Derek Funderburk and a trio of 3-stars in Micah Potter, Andre Wesson and juco transfer C.J. Jackson. It's obviously too early to tell how these guys will pan out but they certainly don't appear poised to challenge Matta's past classes for historical significance.
This is all important because just like football, recruiting is the lifeblood of any elite program. As the saying goes, it's not as much about X's and O's as it is the Jimmy's and the Joe's. Right now, Ohio State has a host of role players or bench guys with no real stud or studs to lean on to do things like stop opponent runs, hit a big shot in crunch time, take over a game, or be the acting head coach on the floor. Matta's great teams of the past had all of those.
It's obviously not my place to say who should be the head coach at Ohio State or how much time Matta's past successes should afford him to right the ship. I would love to see Matta do exactly that this year. He's Ohio State's all-time winningest coach for a reason. If he doesn't however, hopefully it doesn't signal a long-term shift in what the powers that be see as the markings of a successful basketball program in Columbus.
