Three years of missed NCAA Tournaments will be enough to breed disengagement with any major college basketball fanbase and its team, let alone one that just saw its football team win a national title.
The Buckeyes were left out of the Big Dance for their third straight season on Sunday, as anticipated, which will force Jake Diebler to make changes to his program after his first year as Ohio State’s head coach.
One step we don't anticipate is that Diebler being fired, as he's under a five-year contract, was recently backed by athletic director Ross Bjork and deserves another shot before final judgments are made about his coaching viability at Ohio State. But Diebler will need to improve the Buckeyes’ roster while evaluating what he and his staff need to do better from a coaching perspective to position Ohio State for success.
The first objective will be to retain stars Bruce Thornton, Devin Royal and John Mobley Jr., who are all likely targets for other teams to try and get to enter the transfer portal. Ohio State will also need to make multiple transfer additions – and get better results from those transfers than it got from most of its transfer additions this season – to improve its post play and bolster its depth across the board.
All of that will be made more difficult by a fanbase growing increasingly apathetic, which will make NIL support harder to obtain. Regardless, Ohio State has too many resources for missing the NCAA Tournament to ever be acceptable, let alone it happening three years in a row.
Eleven Warriors' Andy Anders and Dan Hope discuss the state of Ohio State men's basketball in an extended edition of Press Coverage, which you can watch at the top of the page.
