The razor-thin margins of defeat aren’t relevant anymore.
A red-eyed, scratchy-voiced Jake Diebler sat at an elevated stage Friday night, speaking into various recorders and microphones one hour after his team took its third consecutive loss by two-points or less.
Diebler’s first Ohio State team has put two blowout losses in the rearview mirror, and has been competing in tight contests for basically a month straight.
The issue is, they’re not winning those tight contests.
With Friday night’s 77-76 overtime loss to Indiana officially etched into the scorebook, Ohio State is now 10-8 on the season and 2-5 in the Big Ten. The Buckeyes have Purdue coming up next in Mackey Arena — a venue the program has not won at in nearly eight years.
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“We’re tough enough to handle this,” Diebler said.
“As a program and across the board, we’re tough enough to handle this. And we’ve got a lot of opportunities left.”
It’s true — Ohio State has 13 Big Ten games remaining, plus an opportunity for extra credit in the Big Ten Tournament, if they qualify. With the conference expanding to 18 teams this season, the bottom three teams will no longer compete in the conference tournament. In essence, those three teams’ seasons will be over.
Right now, Ohio State is in 16th in the Big Ten. If the season ended today, the Buckeyes wouldn’t qualify for the NCAA Tournament or the Big Ten tournament.
Contrary to what you might think, Ohio State’s current state of misery is not reflective of a miserable brand of basketball. The Buckeyes lost by two points to a ranked Oregon team, by two points to a ranked Wisconsin team, and now by one point in overtime against Indiana.
Bruce Thornton has upped his level of play from a season ago, as has sophomore forward Devin Royal — who was not available Friday night as he recovered from a wrist sprain. Freshman guard John Mobley hit five three-pointers Friday night after hitting 13 in his last nine games combined.
The metrics that help determine NCAA Tournament seeding have loved Ohio State all year, and even with their eighth loss, still do. Friday night’s loss was OSU’s first non-Quad-1 loss of the season. They’re still No. 33 in KenPom, and don’t expect them to fall much deeper than 40 in the NET on Saturday morning.
Now that Ohio State is in 16th-place in the Big Ten, they cannot afford any more one-point or two-point losses. They can’t spend time after games explaining how “close” they are or how there are “positives to take away’ from yet another one-possession loss that was up in the air until the very final second of the game.
If Ohio State loses their next 13 games by two points, those who watched will know that the Buckeyes are a talented team that seems to make just one too many mental mistakes during each game, that ultimately costs them at the very end.
The people who don’t watch them very often will just know that they’re 2-18.
Is this Ohio State team resilient? Do they have the personalities on this roster to draw a line in the sand and recognize that even though it’s only January, the season is teetering? Diebler seems to think so, but the next two weeks will ultimately answer that.
Diebler was asked Friday night, point-blank: Is this team resilient, or is that still to be determined?
After a long pause, he cleared his throat.
“I do think we’re resilient, I do. Like I said, I think we fight, we play hard, we play tough, we need to play smarter. I think we are resilient, yes. And we’ll see that in the results column when we can play smarter. We’re not in these situations over and over and over again if we weren’t resilient.”
Purdue has not lost at home at all the last two seasons — the Boilermakers are 26-0 in their last 26 games at Mackey, which awaits Ohio State Tuesday. There’s a level of toughness that will be needed to win that game. Jake Diebler seems to think his team has it. Everyone else probably needs convinced.