There’s something happening in the Ohio State basketball program, and it’s very difficult to find words to appropriately describe it. What’s easier is to describe what isn’t happening at Ohio State. What isn’t happening is a scandal like we’re seeing at Arizona, Louisville, UCLA, and well, basically every major Adidas school in the country. Ohio State is, by all accounts, as clean as any basketball program can be in 2018.
More importantly, what isn’t happening at Ohio State is what had been happening at Ohio State since Aaron Craft departed in 2013. Without going into too much painstaking detail about the struggles of the end of the Thad Matta era, it’s fair to say that when the 2010 class was gone, Matta was already far beyond a place where he could successfully do everything that is required of a coach in today’s college basketball environment, due to things completely out of his control (like a botched back surgery).