Even though Ohio State’s women’s basketball season didn’t end the way anyone would have wanted it to, Kevin McGuff is still proud of what his team accomplished this year.
The Buckeyes finished the year with a 13-7 record after losing their final four games of the season, including a 71-63 loss to Rutgers on Friday night. Because Ohio State self-imposed a postseason ban for the 2020-21 season following an investigation into the program, the Buckeyes will not play in the Big Ten Tournament or the NCAA Tournament, meaning their 2020-21 season officially ended with Friday’s regular-season finale.
Ohio State will likely finish the season ranked outside the top 25 – it was ranked 22nd going into the final week of the regular season – and will never know what it could have done in the postseason. That’s a tough pill for the Buckeyes to swallow. Ohio State was without one of its top players, sophomore guard Madison Greene, for the final five games of the season, and Kevin McGuff believes his team could have gotten back on track in March.
That said, the Buckeyes knew the end was coming Friday no matter how well they finished the season. While both McGuff and junior forward Aaliyah Patty expressed during a Thursday press conference that they were motivated to end the season on a high note – and the Buckeyes kept fighting until the end of Friday’s game even though they trailed for nearly the entire contest – they had been mentally preparing themselves since December for the reality that their season would end early.
Now, all the Buckeyes can do is evaluate and celebrate what they were able to accomplish this season and begin looking forward to next fall.
“It’s tough,” McGuff said after Friday night’s loss. “I think we would have had enough time with a full team to kind of get back to how we were playing and who we were. But we don’t have the opportunity, so we gotta kind of assess where we’re at right now and what went well, what didn’t go well and carry it on to next year.
“It is frustrating. But it is what it is. We’ve dealt with that emotionally. We’ve dealt with that. So we’re going to head to the offseason now and really assess what we need to do to continue to get better.”
There are real positives Ohio State can take away from the 2020-21 season. The Buckeyes were ranked as high as 11th in the AP Top 25 after winning 13 of their first 16 games, including a trio of back-to-back-to-back victories over top-16 teams (Michigan, Maryland and Indiana) in late January.
“We had some incredible moments,” McGuff said. “We had stretches where we played extremely well, we showed how good we can be, and the way we were playing there for a while, there wasn’t a team in the country that I don’t think we could have competed with and had a chance to win.”
The Buckeyes got the news they would be ineligible for the postseason in the midst of a multi-week December pause in team activities following a COVID-19 outbreak within the team, all of which came before they even played a conference game. Yet they rallied through those setbacks to finish with their best winning percentage (65%) in three years, giving them something to build on for the future.
“I’m very proud of the team for them really fighting through it,” McGuff said. “There’s a lot of times throughout the year they could have mailed it in, but they didn’t. They kept fighting, kept playing really hard.
“I’ve told people this, that if you’re ever in a situation where you unfortunately have to go through a postseason ban, on that very day that you find out, you’re gonna really hope that you recruited high-character kids. And we’ve done that. We have really good kids who wanted to play because they love to play the game, and they’re competitive, and they played for each other. And it’s not an easy thing. But our kids did a great job with that, so that’s something certainly to be proud of.”
While McGuff, whose teams have lost some key players to transfers in recent years, said “you never know what’s going to happen” in the offseason, the Buckeyes could have this year’s entire roster back next season. Senior guard Braxtin Miller already announced she will use her NCAA-approved extra year of eligibility, which means Ohio State should return all five of its regular starters from this season, who were all double-digit scorers: Jacy Sheldon (16.7 points per game), Dorka Juhasz (14.6), Greene (13.4), Miller (11.5) and Patty (11.5).
That gives the Buckeyes a lot of confidence about what they can accomplish next season.
“I think we’ve proven ourselves this year. I think we have a great team coming back. I think that’s kind of a scary sight,” Miller said. “We can only get better. We can only improve. Obviously we had some downs, but I think that overall, we’re a really great team. And being able to get that experience this year, all coming together, it can only get better next year. So I’m really excited to see what we’re going to do.”
Braxtin Miller and the rest of Ohio State's starters this season are all expected to be back next season. (Photo: Kyle Robertson/Columbus Dispatch via Imagn Content Services, LLC)
McGuff believes the Buckeyes “have an incredibly high ceiling,” and Patty believes the adversity they had to endure this season has brought them closer together as a team.
“It’s been a struggle for all of us, ups and downs, but just looking back on the team we had, I love these people, my teammates,” Patty said. “It has made us a strong team, connection-wise. I mean, this COVID thing, there’s really no one else you can go see, no one else you can go hang out with … So just knowing that, we do things together, we do a lot together.”
Much like the Ohio State football team after its own season impacted by COVID-19 this past fall, the women’s basketball Buckeyes will take a postseason break to spend some time with their families and away from the daily grind of basketball. Once they get back to work, they expect to be more motivated than ever to work toward becoming a team that can make a postseason run once they’re eligible again next year.
“I think everybody knows that it can be really great, so everybody’s still really excited,” Miller said. “We’re definitely going to work hard. We’ll be in the gym. We’ll be getting a lot in. And honestly, that can only even help us prepare for next year even more. It’s gonna be really crazy.”
The way the season ended, though, also made it clear that the Buckeyes need to get better if they’re going to achieve their goals next season.
Although McGuff’s teams have finished with winning records in six of his eight seasons at Ohio State, none of them have ever made it past the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, and the way this season ended isn’t going to change any of his skeptics’ minds. But he says the Buckeyes are “going to certainly have high expectations” next year, and they’ll critique what went wrong down the stretch of the season to figure out where they most need to improve in the offseason.
“We had incredible stretches this year where we played extremely well, and we’ve gotta focus on just ways to make sure we can consistently be that team and keep the high points kind of going further,” McGuff said. “We just had some slippage in some areas late in the year that we gotta make sure we kind of assess and make sure we don’t do that next year. Because we’ve shown how good we can be. It’s just being that team more consistently.”
