With their nail-biting 72-69 win over Iowa in the third round of the Big Ten Tournament on Thursday, the Ohio State Buckeyes removed even the slimmest sliver of doubt about their spot in the Big Dance.
Most prognosticators, bracketologists, and bookmakers believed Jake Diebler’s team had already done enough to earn an NCAA Tournament berth even before the postseason began, but given how things have gone for OSU over the past few seasons, I could understand why some fans might have been concerned anyway.
Had the Buckeyes gone out and played as poorly against Iowa as they did on Feb. 25 (a 74-57 loss that looked even worse than the score indicated) and then a bunch of bid-stealers won their respective conference tournaments, I suppose there could have been a scenario — as unlikely as it would have been — in which Ohio State would have been left out of March Madness.
However, with four straight wins since that late-February loss to Iowa, 21 victories on the season, three Quad 1 wins, six Quad 2 wins, and a No. 26 ranking in KenPom, the Buckeyes are officially going dancing, or as officially as someone with no influence over the selection process can decree.
While the last four seasons of Buckeye basketball have been pretty tumultuous, OSU has played exceptionally well in March over that span. Following their last NCAA Tournament appearance in 2022, the Buckeye men are 12-6 in the month of March, a trend that has bridged the tenures of both Chris Holtmann and Diebler.
It’s nice to know that, despite how disappointing the previous three campaigns were, this team doesn’t quit, no matter how bleak things might look. Of course, things might not have seemed quite so bleak if they hadn’t spent the last four seasons digging out of a collective 13–21 January hole. Nonetheless, this team has proven that it knows how to kick things into an extra gear down the stretch, and I’m excited to see what that looks like today against top-seeded Michigan, and especially next week in the NCAA Tournament.
With Thursday’s win over Iowa, I feel pretty confident in saying that any Buckeye fans who were still guarding their hearts and bracing for the worst when it came to the men’s basketball team can safely let their guard down and start finding their spot on the bandwagon.
Is Diebler’s team likely to make a run to the national title? The Final Four? Hell, even the Sweet 16? Probably not. But now that Ohio State is assuredly going dancing, everything else is icing on the cake. Let go of whatever posttraumatic stress you have been harboring around this team, and enjoy whatever is left of this season. One of the greatest Buckeyes in the history of the program is in the final few games of his OSU career. So do yourself and Buckeye Nation a favor, root for Bruce Thornton with reckless emotional abandon.
I know it might feel foreign to drop the shields from around your heart for this team, but even in almost certain eventual defeat, they deserve it, and, frankly, so do you.
