Ohio State’s tournament hopes are alive after winning three of their last four games.
Having just watched his team’s three-game winning streak come to an end this past weekend in Champaign, Ohio State head coach Jake Diebler thinks his team’s best basketball is still ahead of them.
“We are not playing our best yet, we haven’t peaked yet,” Diebler said on Monday afternoon.
“We’ve got to keep fighting to get there.”
It was impossible not to see images of the past two Januarys in your head following Ohio State’s 77-76 loss to Indiana on January 17. Each of the last two seasons, the Buckeyes looked to be on their way to the NCAA Tournament before the calendar flipped and snatched the souls of every player, coach, and fan.
The past two seasons, Ohio State, led by then-head coach Chris Holtmann, had a combined record of 4-13 during the month of January. The first month of the year has been accompanied by disappointment and misery for fans, but certainly not surprise.
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That loss to the Hoosiers dropped Ohio State to 10-8 overall and 2-5 in the Big Ten. The Buckeyes weren’t anywhere near the NCAA Tournament bubble. In fact, they’d fallen so far in the standings that if the season would’ve ended that evening, Ohio State would’ve been one of three prestigious teams that would’ve missed the Big Ten Tournament.
The loss marked three in a row for Ohio State, all by two points or fewer. Diebler felt his team was close, but he also knew you don’t get much credit for that.
“I don’t mean to oversimplify it, but it’s literally just a couple possessions,” he said after the loss to IU. He went on: “We have to be smarter. Our shot selection has to better. We have to do (those things) right now.”
Four days later, the Buckeyes did, in fact, flip those couple possessions. After watching a lead slip away at home against Indiana, it was the Buckeyes who played spoilers that night in West Lafayette, coming back from down 16 to pick up a marquee road win over the Boilermakers.
After that game, Bruce Thornton pushed aside the notion that the 73-70 win was some kind of breakthrough — that they were finally over some sort of a proverbial hump. No, he insisted that this is the team Ohio State has been all year. The frustration has always been the fact that by their own fault, they’ve refused to get to a level he knew they were capable of reaching.
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After seeing a bit of life re-injected into its season, Ohio State picked up two dominant wins over teams who were just as desperate as them, winning by double-digits in both games and looking as good as they have all season. In fact, Ohio State’s wins over Iowa (82-65) and Penn State (83-64) marked the first time since the 2017-18 season that the Buckeyes had scored 80+ points and allowed fewer than 70 in back-to-back games.
The winning streak elevated them back to an even .500 in Big Ten play, pulling them off of the NCAA Tournament bubble for the right reasons this time. Instead of sitting on the outside looking in, Ohio State was pegged as a nine or 10-seed most places.
It also helped Ohio State finish with a 4-4 record in January — the first time since 2022 that the program has had a .500 record in what’s now become a God-forsaken month for fans of the team over the past decade or so.
However, fans’ heads were abruptly yanked down from the clouds on Sunday afternoon when Illinois outscored the Buckeyes 22-11 over the final seven minutes of the game and sending them home with an 87-79 loss. It was the toughest remaining game on Ohio State’s schedule according to KenPom.com, as the analytics site gave them just a 33% chance to win.
The Illini dominated Ohio State on the glass, out-rebounding the scarlet-clad visitors 43-31 and outscoring them in the paint, 52-30. The Buckeyes were without 6-foot-9 sophomore Sean Stewart, who undoubtedly would’ve helped in that area but probably not enough to even out that substantial of a rebounding disparity.
At 13-9 overall and 5-6 in the Big Ten, Diebler’s team finds itself in a tie for ninth-place in the conference. Even with the nine losses, Ohio State is still projected as a 10-seed in the NCAA Tournament according to Bracket Matrix thanks to the brutally tough schedule it has played to this point. The Buckeyes have played the eighth-toughest schedule in the country, according to KenPom, and have two of the best resume wins of any B1G team with its wins over Purdue and Kentucky.
Ohio State is also favored to win eight of its final nine games, with the toughest one coming on the road at UCLA on February 23.
On Monday, Diebler acknowledged that Ohio State “doesn’t need to bat a thousand” over the final nine games to make the NCAA Tournament. His team needs to win games down the stretch, and luckily he doesn’t think that the Buckeyes have even played their best basketball yet.
If that’s true, Ohio State has saved its best stretch of the year for the most crucial time, the final four weeks leading into the NCAA Tournament — plus the tournament, of course. If it turns out to not be true and the last week was as good as it gets, their postseason fate could be up in the air until Selection Sunday.