COLUMBUS, Ohio – While the entire Ohio State men’s basketball schedule has not been released as of yet, the parts that we do know are not for the feint of heart.
That is just what head coach Chris Holtmann wants as he gets ready to enter his third season at the helm of the Buckeyes.
There are two camps that coaches fall in, those who want to test their team during the non-conference schedule and those who want to pick up wins before they get into league play and let the chips fall where they may then.
Holtmann said when he was announced as head coach that he was more in favor of a challenging schedule out of league play. Well, he got it.
A tough run was made even more difficult when it was announced last week that Ohio State would travel to play North Carolina on the road as part of the ACC/Big Ten Challenge in the first week of December. Couple that with home games against Cincinnati and Villanova as well as neutral site games against West Virginia in Cleveland and Kentucky in Las Vegas.
“I had one of our staff guys say to me when we were talking about who we might scrimmage, he said, ‘We might as well scrimmage the Warriors, given who we’re going to schedule.’ It’s a monster.” Holtmann said last week.
All joking aside, this is the type of schedule that Holtmann wants, even with a team that might technically be younger than last year’s team with four incoming freshmen, along with point guard C.J. Walker coming off of his NCAA-mandated ‘sit year’ for transferring from Florida State.
“There’s some math that goes into it now,” Holtmann added. “We got to Big Ten meetings and you hear these coaches and they’re all talking about scheduling. You hear really a variety of opinions when you have 14 head coaches sitting and talking. And you hear a guy like Matt Painter saying don’t schedule games against these opponents. And he’s talking about opponents that it hurts you if you schedule certain games like this. Talking about the spectrum of division one college basketball. And then other coaches are saying ‘I’m scheduling those games. We need wins.’ It’s interesting when you hear all of that.”
Don’t expect Ohio State’s remaining non-league schedule to be against a bunch of pushovers either. There will be the opportunity to find a good mixture of teams from various parts of the standings. The full non-league schedule announcement should not be too far off in the future.
And as for the Big Ten?
The league continues to have a 20-game schedule and even with some key departures by way of players and coaches, the Big Ten continues to march on as one of the best leagues in the nation.
“Take your lumps and get feedback earlier in some ways that might be more helpful going into what I anticipate being another really good year in the Big Ten,” Holtmann said.
Ohio State will have one-plays against Illinois, Purdue and Rutgers at home as well as Iowa, Michigan State and Northwestern on the road. That means there will be home-and-homes against Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Penn State and Wisconsin this year.
The Buckeyes have been tapped as a preseason top-25 type of team by most of the major prognosticators but they have never had a schedule quite like this under Holtmann as they have made it to the NCAA Tournament the previous two seasons.
Last year was supposed to be a tough non-conference schedule with Cincinnati, Creighton, Syracuse, UCLA and Bucknell. Ohio State only lost one time during that stretch but several of those teams came in under expectations as well.
“I thought last year’s was going to be a harder non-conference,” Holtmann said. “It just so happened that we played some teams that maybe didn’t quite have the years that we thought they would. I would like a harder, more challenging non-conference, I would,” Holtmann said.
