Ohio State fired its coach, but the Buckeyes won’t be down for long

It’s tempting to sort out the reasons holding back any college basketball program that makes a midseason coaching change. Even to dig into whether a school finds itself at a crossroads.

There isn’t much of a point in doing so in the case of Ohio State firing Chris Holtmann this week in the middle of his seventh season. There really isn’t much to prevent the Buckeyes from being really good again really soon.

The school has plenty of money, which means it can command an excellent candidate pool. There are no NCAA sanctions to overcome, and even if there were, Thad Matta demonstrated almost two decades ago those could be shrugged off quickly.

And while the Buckeyes aren’t as good as they’ve grown accustomed to being, they’re not thoroughly outmatched in game after game after game. Tuesday’s 62-54 loss at Wisconsin dropped Ohio State to 14-11. It is 71st in the NET rankings, 67th in the KenPom.com metrics.

Great? No, certainly not with a defense that has offered diminishing returns for a few seasons now. Awful? Absolutely not.

It unraveled in a hurry on Holtmann, whose teams won at least 20 games in each of his first five seasons en route to four NCAA tournament appearances. (What surely would have been a fifth was wiped out by the pandemic). The Buckeyes were 10-3 last season and ranked No. 24 nationally in early January before losing at home to Purdue on a late Fletcher Loyer three-pointer.

And then they lost. And lost. And mostly lost.

They went 6-16 to end last season starting with that Purdue stumble, with half of the wins coming during a surprise run to the Big Ten semifinals. They dropped nine of their last 11 this season before Holtmann’s dismissal.The Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy astutely points out that losing Malaki Branham two seasons ago and Brice Sensabaugh last year as unanticipated one-and-dones set the Buckeyes back. But there’s also a case to be made Holtmann — who made three NCAA tournaments in as many years at Butler before coming to Columbus — was too reliant on a traditional program-building method at the wrong time.

Ohio State fired its coach, but the Buckeyes won’t be down for long

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