Ohio State women’s basketball landed in second place in the Big Ten standings after it swept both games of a West Coast trip, and the Michigan Wolverines fell to the UCLA Bruins this weekend. Head coach Kevin McGuff’s side is on a five-game winning streak, and the return of redshirt freshman forward Kylee Kitts from a shoulder injury gives a team with mixed expectations before the season momentum heading into the postseason. However, Ohio State needs more than momentum in the final five games of the regular
season with the toughest remaining schedule in the Big Ten.
Before the start of the season, Big Ten voters put the Buckeyes as the fifth-best team in the Big Ten, behind the UCLA Bruins, Michigan Wolverines, Maryland Terrapins, and USC Trojans. At the same time, Associated Press voters, who select the weekly top-25 rankings, left the Buckeyes out of it. Now, with a handful of games left, Ohio State is behind only the undefeated in Big Ten play UCLA Bruins, are tied with the Michigan Wolverines in the standings, and sit at No. 8 in the top-25. Not a bad change in fortune for Ohio State.
The curbed expectations behind the Buckeyes were not without merit. After all, Ohio State lost three starters from last season and returned only five players who saw any court time in the 2024-25 campaign. Combine that with an 11-player roster with three upperclassmen, and waiting to see what happened was the safe bet with McGuff’s side.
“I wasn’t really sure in the beginning,” McGuff told reporters. “I just knew I really liked our team, and I thought we had a lot of good pieces, but I also knew we had a long, long way to go.”
Now, with five games remaining, a spot in the top four is by no means guaranteed for Ohio State. The importance behind a higher place in the standings is seeding for the upcoming Big Ten women’s basketball tournament from March 4-8. If the Buckeyes are in a top-four position, they start the win-or-go-home playoff in the quarterfinals.
At the time of publishing, 13 of the 18 Big Ten sides have a mathematical chance at getting one of those top-four positions. All five of the Buckeyes’ remaining games are against teams in the top-nine, and all five are either tied with or behind Ohio State, hoping to leapfrog over the Scarlet and Gray.
It starts Sunday against the Maryland Terrapins, followed by a trip to face the Minnesota Golden Gophers, a pair of home games against the Michigan Wolverines and USC Trojans, and then the final game of the season in East Lansing against the Michigan State Spartans. That is the toughest remaining schedule for any Big Ten team, and the numbers back it up.
Using the NCAA’s NET rankings, Ohio State opponents have an average ranking of 12.2, compared to a 37.4 for the Wolverines and 64 for the Terrapins. Now, that is the easiest way, but not the fairest, because the NET rankings at the bottom of the Big Ten are outliers. Northwestern sits at 130, and the Rutgers Scarlet Knights are at 14,9 while 12 teams in the conference sit at No. 35 or better.
Instead, Sports Reference’s college basketball stats database has something called the “simple rating system” SRS that accounts for a team’s point differential and strength of schedule to come up with a figure. The higher the number, the more difficult a matchup for a team. These figures are consistent for each team, meaning that Ohio State’s score does not fluctuate depending on who is playing them. For example, at the time of writing, the Buckeyes’ SRS is 31.21 for any team they face.
What that means is that Ohio State has no easy matchups in the remaining five games. At the end of the regular season, the complete picture of the Buckeyes will be finished. Is the current top-four position a product of having all of the side’s less difficult matchups behind them against teams at the bottom of the standings, like the Penn State Nittany Lions and Purdue Boilermakers? Of Ohio State’s 11 Big Ten victories, nine of those teams currently sit in the bottom half of the 18-team league.
Or is Ohio State at a position now as one of the top teams in the power conference after they were on the fringe of relevance a few months ago?
The final five games of the season will ultimately answer those questions, but it is hard to argue that Ohio State has not improved over the season. Outside of a tough matchup against the Iowa Hawkeyes’ dual bigs, early into losing Kitts to injury, the Buckeyes won all but one game in-conference. That defeat came against the likely No. 1-seeded UCLA Bruins, where, until its three-point win over Michigan on Sunday, was the closest margin of victory for the West Coast side at seven points. However, this is not curling, and close does not count.
“We’ve gotten better, and it’s a credit to our team just committing to showing up every day and working hard and making sure we get a little bit better,” McGuff said. “I still think there’s room to get better, and especially in the consistency department.”
Now is the time for the Buckeyes to see if that road to consistency paid off against a group of five teams that will, if nothing else, have Ohio State ready for the postseason. Either showing that McGuff’s side can compete with the best or what needs to be done to get to that point.
