Only one team in Ohio State basketball history has ever won an NCAA championship.
Fifty-nine seasons have passed since the 1960 Ohio State men’s basketball team won the NCAA Tournament, and the Buckeyes haven’t been able to win the sport’s biggest prize since. A few teams have come close – most notably, the 2007 Buckeyes, which lost to Florida in the national championship game – but none of them have been able to go all the way.
Even so, Jerry Lucas – the star of that 1960 team and one of the greatest players in program history – believes the expectations for Ohio State shouldn’t be anything less than what he, John Havlicek, Larry Siegfried and the rest of his teammates accomplished 60 years ago.
“I think the hope for any Ohio State team is to win the national championship,” Lucas said in a press conference Thursday night before he and the rest of the 1960 team were honored at the Schottenstein Center. “Obviously that hasn’t happened in awhile, but I think that has to be the hope. I know that Coach Holtmann would like that to happen, and I know all the players would like to have that happen.”
It would come as a surprise, even after winning nine of their last 11 games, if this year’s Buckeyes won the national championship. Ohio State hasn’t even made the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2013, so just getting back to the Sweet 16 would be a step in the right direction for this season. Lucas, though, believes the right pieces are in place for Chris Holtmann and the Buckeyes to chase bigger goals.
“This is a talented team,” Lucas said. “They have some good players, and they’ve done some great things. They’ve been a little iffy at times, but they have talent, and especially defensively. When they clamp guys down defensively, they play well, and they do well.”
Ohio State’s 1960 team, which followed that up by also making the next two national championship games (losing both to Cincinnati), had a collection of talent that few Buckeye teams have come close to matching. Lucas, Havlicek, Siegfried, Joe Roberts and Mel Nowell – all of who grew up in Ohio – all went on to play in the NBA, and back then, college basketball players weren’t allowed to leave school early to go to the league.
While current rules allow players to declare for the NBA draft after just one year out of high school, Lucas believes it would benefit everyone if college basketball players were required to stay in school for at least three years before making the jump to the league, as is the case in football (and baseball for players who choose to attend college rather than sign MLB contracts directly out of high school).
“I wish there was a rule that kept players in school for at least three years,” Lucas said. “Baseball has that rule, football has that rule. And so I wish basketball had the same rule, but it’s never gonna change, I’m sure. If anything, they’ll be allowed to leave from high school, because of the circumstances and what’s happened in the past.”
“Obviously that hasn’t happened in awhile, but I think that has to be the hope. I know that Coach Holtmann would like that to happen, and I know all the players would like to have that happen.”– Jerry Lucas on why all Ohio State basketball teams should have national championship expectations
Roberts agrees with Lucas, believing that most basketball players aren’t ready to begin their professional careers directly out of high school or after just one year in college.
“You take a kid coming out of high school, he’s not ready for the physicality of the NBA, nor mentally is he ready,” Roberts said. “And you’re gonna find a lot of these guys one-and-done, in three years they’ll be done with their careers. They won’t have no education, no money, and they’re just out there because they haven’t prepared themselves for the future.”
As for the game itself, there are clear differences between college basketball now and what it was in 1960. Back then, there was no 3-point line or shot clock – though the Buckeyes were ahead of their time with the pace at which they played the game and with Lucas’ ability to play away from the basket as a center.
“I’ve had a conversation with Coach Knight, we used to go on some golf trips, and I said to him, I said ‘Bobby, how many points do you think we would have had if we had a shot clock then?’ He said ‘Dick, it would have made no difference. We never held the ball that long anyway,’” said Dick Furry, one of the 1960 Buckeyes’ captains. “I don’t think many people realize how fast of a team we had for the size. So the 3-point rule may have made some difference, but I don’t think the shot clock would have made any difference with our team, on the offensive end.”
Today’s game is different philosophically, as driving the ball to the basket and 3-point shots are typically favored over mid-range jump shots, which Nowell believes can be to current teams’ detriment.
“They forget the mid-range game is very effective,” Nowell said. “Those who use it are usually getting much better shots, and hopefully we will see more of that from this team here that’s coming back from having shown that they can be great.”
Roberts believes there was a greater emphasis in their day on running plays to expose other teams’ weaknesses, as well as on playing with physicality.
“Now, coaches, they don’t think. Everybody runs the same stuff. But when I played, you better be on your P’s and Q’s, because if a guy couldn’t play defense, they would keep running plays at his man,” Roberts said. “Just keep running plays, make him play. And wear him out. But now, they let a guy like that stay on the court. In my era, they wouldn’t let you stay on the court. They would take advantage of you, and the coach couldn’t afford to keep you out there.
“And I liked the physicality of the game. It was real physical. But now, everybody just goes where they want to go.”
Some things still haven’t changed, though. Sound fundamentals are still important, as is good coaching and tough defense. And perhaps most importantly, great teams are those who not only have the best talent but also the best chemistry, which the 1960 Buckeyes still consider to be the key to their success.
“There are a lot of great shooters on (the current Ohio State) team, and when they continue to work on figuring out how to make sure that those shooters get shots that they want, they will be very effective,” Nowell said. “But more than anything, when you see them play well with good chemistry, chemistry is something that you can’t buy, it has to be between those young men, in this case now having so much to play for to hopefully have as a future. But when they can put that aside and just make sure they make the passes, those things, that make guys feel great about being on that team with you, it makes a world of difference in how effective they can be.”
