Ohio State is known as a football school, but men’s basketball coach Thad Matta has built a perennial contender in Columbus. Last season, however, the Buckeyes took a step back with 21-14 record and a second-round NIT exit. Things went from bad to worse as an exodus of highly touted freshmen then transferred.
In total, four players (all freshmen) left Columbus. Center Daniel Giddens is gone to Alabama. Forward Mickey Mitchell packed his bags for UCSB. Point guard A.J. Harris moved west to New Mexico State. That trio followed guard Austin Grandstaff, who transferred from OSU to Oklahoma during the season, and has now transferred again to DePaul without playing a minute for the Sooners.
The mass exodus left Thad Matta with just 1/5th of his fifth-ranked 2015 recruiting class in guard Ja’Quan Lyle. Given how high profile Ohio State is as a program and the unusually high amount of transfers out by multiple four-star recruits, it’s honestly a surprise this hasn’t been a bigger story. The impact may be much larger off the floor for Ohio State, where it’s easy to see rival coaches using the past year’s events as a tactic to try to steer potential recruits away from Columbus. On the floor, neither of the players who left were even in the top six in scoring on the team and they collectively contributed a combined 13 PPG.
Initially, Matta was diplomatic about the players leaving. He told the Columbus Dispatch back in April that it was about finding players who were the right fit for the program and that the transfers weren’t a surprise to the coaching staff.
“I want to make sure that we do get the right fit for what we need,” he said. “Our core is back, and I think from that perspective, we move forward and try to find the kind of guys that have a special kind of connection to the university.”
This week, Matta was much more unreserved in his comments on the four freshmen transfers. At a golf outing in Columbus, Matta said “we got rid of problems but we kept solutions.” He also said that he encouraged whoever was going to transfer to text him instead of meeting with him because he was “tired of looking” at them. Ouch. Video via @ThisWeekSports.
OSU hoops coach Thad Matta talks about his team during the Joe Mortellaro Golf Classic on July 11 at Scioto Reserve. pic.twitter.com/AyPgFRchfy
— Columbus Dispatch Preps (@DispatchPreps) July 14, 2016
And the transcript via Eleven Warriors:
I like the guys we’ve got in here. We’re going through a transition where we lost three guys. After the Florida game this year, I told our guys two things after the game.
Number one, I’m tired of the B.S. I’m going to coaching basketball. I’m going back to running this program the way we did when we got here.
The second thing is, some of you are going to transfer. You don’t know it yet, but whatever you do—don’t come see me. Just shoot me a text, because I’m tired of looking at you.
And we got rid of some guys we needed to get rid of. We got rid of problems, but we kept solutions.
When four highly touted players leave a program within months of each other, it’s patently obvious that something dramatic is going on behind the scenes. Matta has never been the type to air his team’s dirty laundry in public, so these comments are even more telling about what was really happening within the Buckeyes program. Additionally, if all four of those players were “problems” and not “solutions,” then perhaps they were bad fits for Ohio State from the outset.
And if that’s the case, then it’s fair to question Matta’s recruiting and the current state of the OSU program. For what it’s worth, Matta missed out on Ohio’s top in-state recruits in that 2015 class like two-time Mr. Basketball Luke Kennard, who went to Duke. After four straight Sweet 16 births, Ohio State has now gone three straight seasons without reaching the tournament’s second weekend. Last year was supposed to be a rebuilding year and it showed with inexplicable non-conference losses and a late-season rally that ultimately fell short. It was Ohio State’s first time missing the big dance since 2008.
It’s understandable for a team to miss on a recruit or for a recruit to transfer if things don’t work out, especially in the current state of college basketball. Two recruits leaving in the same period would cause some eyebrows to be raised. Three would set off major alarm bells. But four recruits? That’s almost unheard of barring some kind of cataclysmic situation at a university.
The Bucks are definitely going to be a team worth watching this coming season because it could be one that sets the foundation for Matta’s future with the Buckeyes. It may be another rebuilding year for Ohio State, but even with the recent history of success, the Buckeyes aren’t a program that allows for too many mulligans. Hopefully the players that left and the Ohio State program will all be better off in the 2016-2017 season and beyond.
