Slowly but surely – with an emphasis on slowly – the 2021-22 Ohio State hoops schedule is coming into view.
Last season, the Buckeyes played 26 regular season games due to the fact of dealing with a mid-pandemic season and a cancellation of their matchup with Alabama A&M. But next season, they’ll expect to play a full 31-game slate.
As of now, after learning this week who the Buckeyes will play in the Big Ten portion of the season, 25 of their 31 games are accounted for.
Here’s what’s publicly known about the 2021-22 schedule, as of mid-May.
- Ohio State will play a 20-game conference schedule, facing all 13 other Big Ten teams at least once and matching up with seven of them twice. It’ll meet Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Penn State and Wisconsin both on the road and at home, will take on Iowa, Michigan State and Northwestern only at home, and will play Illinois, Purdue and Rutgers only on the road. The dates of the conference games will be released at a later time. Both transfer additions – Indiana’s Joey Brunk and Penn State’s Jamari Wheeler – will get two shots at taking down their former teams in regular season conference play.
- The Buckeyes have locked up a spot in the Fort Myers Tip-off, a four-team tournament that’ll be played on Nov. 25-27. They’re guaranteed to play two games. California, Florida and Seton Hall are the others in the event. Matchups are not set yet. Holtmann, whose team will play in the Maui Invitational the next year, plans to make Ohio State’s involvement in early-season tournaments a regularity.
- Ohio State will play its annual game in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge. Its opponent is unknown.
- Towson will be part of the Buckeyes’ non-conference schedule, per CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein. The game will be played in Columbus, but the date has not been revealed. The Tigers were originally part of the team’s 2020-21 schedule, but they were dropped from it since the pandemic shortened the regular season.
- Ohio State will meet John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats in the CBS Sports Classic, per Adam Zagoria of Zags Blog.
Six openings on the 31-game schedule remain.
It’s unclear whether or not the Buckeyes will be involved in the Gavitt Tipoff Games – eight annual games between Big Ten and Big East teams – in the upcoming season. They participated in them in both 2018 and 2019 and weren’t scheduled to play in them in 2020 before they all were cancelled.
Several of the remaining games will be “buy games” where Ohio State faces low-major and mid-major opponents. Thus far, the Buckeyes only have one such team – Towson – on their schedule. For reference, they played six buy games in 2019-20, seven buy games in 2018-19 and eight buy games in 2017-18. They’re a part of every team’s schedule, so it’s fair to expect to see several more added to their schedule.
Notably, Ohio State doesn’t have a non-conference home game against a high-major team on its schedule yet. Because each of the last two ACC-Big Ten Challenge games were on the road, it would be fair to expect that to be a home game. It’s not yet known whether the Buckeyes will set up any other one-off home games against out-of-conference high-major competition.
“For us, it's about building a quality schedule,” Holtmann said a couple of weeks ago. “The 20-game schedule of the Big Ten has changed things a little bit. The addition of those preseason tournaments have changed things a little bit. So as far as playing another home-and-home against the likes of the teams that we've mentioned, right now we don't have those on schedule for this coming season.”
