COLUMBUS, Ohio –– Ohio State got 80 minutes of game time to spend with the bull that is Trayce Jackson-Davis in two games against Indiana last season, but somehow the Buckeyes avoided getting the horns in either matchup.

He was one of the Big Ten’s better players as a true freshman, but Jackson-Davis is a whole new beast this year, and Ohio State might not have the same fortune in limiting his offensive output.

“Kaleb [Wesson] was able to defend a lot of interior guys well, I give Kaleb a lot of credit. It’s gonna be a different challenge, and much more of a challenge this year,” head coach Chris Holtmann said Friday.

The Hoosiers upset the Buckeyes in their first meeting of the 2019-20 season, and they’ll hope to do so again when the two teams meet in Columbus, Ohio, this Saturday. However, they won the aforementioned game despite an unusually quiet day from Jackson-Davis, a 6-foot-9 freshman that entered the year as the No. 35 prospect in his class.

Jackson-Davis, who averaged 13.5 points and 8.4 boards last year, scored just six points on 1-of-3 shooting in his first look at the Buckeyes. On the glass, he pulled down just three rebounds, and it wasn’t like he was short on time; Jackson-Davis played 28 minutes.

That was all the Hoosiers needed from their star freshman in order to pull out a 12-point win over a Buckeye team that had been struggling at that point, but a similar individual performance did not coincide with the same team result when the teams matched up again three weeks later.

Ohio State got the better of Indiana in the rematch, and Jackson-Davis was essentially shut down once again. The Indiana native scored just seven points on 2-of-6 shooting, which would end up being tied for the second-worst shooting performance he’d have all season in terms of percentage.

"Trayce was young. Trayce is a better player now –– he was a very good player last year –– he's an even better player now," Holtmann said.

This year though, Jackson-Davis hasn’t been as ineffective in a single game as he was in both contests against Ohio State a season ago, emerging as one of the best players in the country as his repertoire has expanded.

So, what’s changed about the athletic big man from Year One to Year Two?

The most obvious observation is the proliferation of Jackson-Davis’ scoring figures, where he’s made a jump of six points to average a Big Ten fourth-best 19.4 points per game, which also makes him a top 50 scorer in the country.

But Jackson-Davis has not added a 3-point shot to his arsenal. In fact, he hasn’t taken a single shot from beyond the arc all season. Instead, he is simply getting more looks, taking and making more 2-pointers, and drawing fouls at a higher rate.

Jackson-Davis is shooting about 4.6 percent worse from the field this season than he was in 2019-20 –– well over 50 percent in both cases –– but he’s attempting nearly five more shots per game, and all of them from 2-point range.

Averaging 8.5 free throws per game, up from 5.3 as a freshman, Jackson-Davis has made and attempted more free throws than any other player in the Big Ten this year. In fact, he’s taken nearly 60 more than Ohio State sophomore forward E.J. Liddell, who has the most attempts on a team that leads the conference in free throw makes.

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“I think he continues to get to the foul line, I just think he impacts the game. He’s a terrific shot-blocker, elite rebounder, runs the floor really well,” Holtmann said. “I think every area of his game has improved.”

There hasn’t been a single game so far in which Jackson-Davis has scored under double-digits, and he’s only scored less than 15 points in four of Indiana’s 19 games. Jackson-Davis had six 20-point games as a freshman, but he already has 10 as a sophomore with plenty games left to play.

Jackson-Davis is also one of the top rebounders in the conference, averaging a Big Ten third-best 9.4 boards per game. However, he’s not quite the threat on the offensive glass that several other Buckeye opponents have been this season, such as Purdue’s Trevion Williams, Iowa’s Luka Garza or Rutgers’ Myles Johnson.

When Ohio State meets Jackson-Davis at home on Saturday, he’ll be coming off of his worst offensive performance of the season, a 10-point affair in double overtime against Northwestern in which he didn’t make a free throw for the first time all year.

However, four of Jackson-Davis’ top nine scoring outings this season have come after games in which he scored in the mid to low-teens.

The Buckeyes get their next crack at Jackson-Davis, and a chance to win their sixth game in a row, at noon tomorrow at the Schottenstein Center.