Thad Matta has always been an interesting college basketball coach, from some of his sideline antics (picking up gum that dropped out of his mouth onto the floor and then chewing it again is one example), to the time where he helped model the Buckeyes new uniforms himself:
Media day today! No players around yet to try on our new style uniforms so Coach Matta gave it a shot! #StillGotGame #GoBucks pic.twitter.com/hDfhcC6KYU
— Ohio State Hoops 🌰 (@OhioStateHoops) September 29, 2016
But Matta is an older man, and not all older people have fully grasped the world of social media. In a profile of Matta for The Ringer written by Mark Titus, we can see that Matta doesn’t get social media, at least not yet:
“I’ll be honest with you,” Matta says. “I don’t understand that world. When they took the picture, they said, ‘Can we post this?’ I don’t even know what ‘post this’ means. I don’t understand. They’re saying this had so many hits, and I’m like, ‘Explain to me what a hit is.’ I don’t understand. Someone texted me, ‘You’ve now got street cred,’ and I’m like, ‘What is street cred? Who do I have street cred with?’ I had no idea. As soon as it came out, [former Ohio State All-American] D’Angelo [Russell] was texting me and he’s busting my balls. So someone says D’Angelo has 500,000 followers and I’m like, ‘What is a follower?’ So they’re explaining that if he sends that out then 500,000 people see that because they’re linked to him and I’m like, ‘What the [expletive] is going on here?’”
Luckily for players like Russell, and many others, Matta is not clueless when it comes to coaching college basketball, and is still one of the more underrated coaches in the game today. Everyone is on the same page with that, unlike social media, which it looks like Matta will take some more time getting used to.
