Some will argue that this is premature (especially those on the Wake board) but I think it is clear that the OSU basketball program is coming on strong. Regardless of what Oden and Conley do Matta has taken recruiting in a direction not seen for some time. Not only have we garnered the interest of the very top echelon of players, but names are lined up behind them that exceed our efforts of recent years.
The question is whether this is a temporary resurgence due to Matta himself – one that will disappear shortly after he does – or the awakening of a sleeping giant. I will argue that it is the later and try to support my argument by putting the program in a broader historical context than is commonly done on these boards.
My first recollection of the OSU program was in 1959 as a 10 year old watching Jerry Lucas play. Damn was I lucky. Fred Taylor was the coach then, just beginning his career. It was also the very beginning of the existence of OSU basketball in any meaningful context.
Sure, we had some success before that, even a few Big Ten championships. But who cared? We were a football school. This was not just an empty accusation back then – it was a verifiable fact.
No more evidence is needed to support this claim than to consider the circumstances under which Taylor coached his first couple of varsity games. He was actually the Freshman coach at the time. The varsity Coach – Floyd Stahl – was asked by the AD to take on a temporary assignment. The assignment? To travel with the football team to the Rose Bowl and handle travel arrangements. (I am not making this up.)
When Stahl left it was time to find a new coach and OSU made a great decision. They picked Fred Taylor. He proved over time to be a great man and a great coach. But was that selection the result of an intense coaching search? Midnight flights by the AD to secretly court top names from marquee programs? Or was it just dumb luck?
When Fred Taylor was initially selected as Freshman coach at OSU he was playing professional ball. Professional baseball that is - in the Senators organization. No surprise there, baseball was his passion. He originally came to OSU on a baseball scholarship. Yes, he did end up playing on an OSU Big Ten basketball championship team, but that was as a walk on. You see he didn’t play basketball in HS. Such was the state of college basketball – and in particular Big Ten basketball - in the late 1940s.
When the head coaching job opened up Taylor’s main competition came from HS coaches. There was absolutely no reason to have any level of confidence that he would become, or had the talent to become, a great – or even mediocre – college coach. But he did OK.
Near the end of his career things changed. Some argue the game was passing him by. I would argue it had a lot to do with a loss of heart following the brawl in Minnesota. He also began to have difficulty recruiting, largely – I believe – because he was not ready to deal with the type of ego that was being generated by the rising interest in college basketball.
In any case Fred retired and it was time to conduct the first ever OSU coaching search in the era where it mattered. An era where there was big time money and big time interest.
And OSU made a mistake. For that mistake I place a large share of the blame on Woody Hayes. Not directly of course - I would never do that to Woody. But throughout his career Woody did one thing that hurt other OSU programs while he was there and hurt the football program immediately after he left. He worked for low pay.
You see, hiring coaches is about ADs. And the AD at OSU had been conditioned to pay low salaries. So when OSU went looking for coaches they may have spoken to a few of those marquee names, but they would never have gotten very far. Instead they hired a fellow from Western Michigan named Eldon Miller – cheap.
So what did Eldon do? He proved that OSU was a sleeping giant. He went out and recruited an awesome class. Herb Williams, Carter Scott, Jim Smith, Marcus Miller, Todd Penn – every premier player from the state. Plus a kid from NY named Ken Page who was one of four from that class to eventually be drafted into the NBA (although Page had transferred by then).
Imagine, four future NBA players in the same recruiting class!
There was only one problem. Miller couldn’t coach. He was great at the MAC level. But he wasn’t able to handle the egos and he wasn’t able to mold his game to the talent he had. The best that group could muster was a 2nd place finish in the Big Ten – losing 44 games in four years and making one NCAA tourney. (Oh, and did I mention that Kelvin Ransey followed him from Western Michigan? Or that in 1980 that entire group was joined by a kid named Clark Kellogg?)
But despite being able to recruit Miller never did better than that 2nd place. And so it was that by the mid 80’s even his ability to recruit was gone and we were looking at twin towers like the infamous “Rich and Pletke”. (For those who don’t remember this duo think Matt Marinchak without the quickness and ball handling ability.)
Finally Miller was gone and another search was underway.
This time we picked a winner - Gary Williams, an up and comer out of Boston College. I am one of those who felt Williams was the right man for the job and had the program on the right track even before he left. (But it is worth noting that the evidence didn’t strongly support that conclusion. In his brief 3 years OSU Williams never finished higher than 6th in the Big Ten.)
I am sure the ACC fans would offer Williams departure as proof OSU is a stepping-stone program. After all, he voluntary left for Maryland didn’t he? Those who were around at the time may recall that it was a bit messier than that. Not only was Maryland his alma-mater, but there were some nasty rumors of marital infidelity involving the wife of an OSU administrator. Rumors that suggested his departure may not have been as voluntary as it seemed. (Rumors of course, but strong at the time and supported somewhat by subsequent divorces involving the principals.)
In any case, it was time to once again begin the search. It is during this stretch that the strongest case against OSU as a top tier program can be made. First the departure of Williams. Then the hiring of his assistant. Not immediately, mind you. That would have been fine. But only after an exhaustive search during which several “name” coaches interviewed – and declined.
Why? You can make lots of arguments, but I will return to my point about ADs. Rick Bay was one of my favorites, and he is the man who hired Gary Williams. But Bay quit when OSU (not Bay himself) fired Earl Bruce (one year after Bay had talked him out of leaving OSU for a job at one of the Arizona schools). Jim Jones (selected by the same men who fired Bruce) replaced Bay and was the man in charge when Ayers was hired. Jim Jones was anything but one of my favorites - for many reasons. I don’t know if he wasn’t offering the right salary or just couldn’t sell the program. That coaching search was an embarrassment – pure and simple.
But Ayers it was.
This is where – much like Woody and his low salary – I place much of the blame for what happened next in the lap of Gary Williams. Williams had assembled one fine basketball team. Jim Jackson, Perry Carter, Chris Jent, Jamall Brown, Treg Lee – all were in place when Ayers took over. And so it was that Ayers won the Big Ten in his second and third seasons at the helm. No matter how bad a coach you were you could live off that legacy for years. Five years to be exact.
Without Jim Jackson Ayers never finished higher than 7th. He recruited felons and car thieves. Kids whose questionable character was well known long before the reached the OSU campus. And when they got here he couldn’t control them on or off the court.
After the 1997 season he was gone and the search was on again. Jim O’Brien was the new choice of a very fine AD named Andy Geiger.
It will be along time before I sort out what happened with Obie. I will always believe that he was one of the best floor coaches in the game. His teams came ready to play and if he had the talent he could make adjustments with the best of them. But he never took recruiting to the level of Gary Williams or Eldon Miller. In particular he never connected with kids from Ohio. (His roster from 2000-2001 did not include one player from the state of Ohio who started a single game during their career. Even Ayers did much better than that).
And recruit from Ohio is all you really have to do. Land half of the top kids from in-state and you will be competitive in the Big Ten. Do better than that or bring in a couple of studs from out of state and the sky is the limit. But here was Obie chasing around in Outer-Mongolia while Mr. Basketball from the State of Ohio was going any where but Columbus.
Regardless of what you may think of him, and largely due to issues off the court, Obie was gone and Andy Geiger was given one last chance to add to his legacy.
Some will argue that Thad Matta – with so few years under his belt does not have a ”proven track record”. Truth is that Matta has won 24 or more games each of the four seasons he has coached. (Obie never won more than 23 in any of the 15 years he coached prior to OSU and won more than 20 only two times in that span.)
Matta is a stud. The buzz coming from the recruits he talks to is intoxicating. He plays the style of ball today’s kids want to be part of (another strike against Obie for those keeping score). He is young (sorry Obie), energetic, highly motivated and goal oriented. OSU has the facilities and (despite the trash the media is spinning) the Big Ten is a nice conference to play in. Everything is in place to do just fine without stooping to any of the tricks broken-hearted Wake fans may want to accuse him of.
Matta is the man to take this program to the top level, and it is starting to happen.
But my original question was whether it was all about Matta or if OSU can sustain a program when he leaves. The point of this lengthy post is to suggest that in the 46 years since Fred Taylor was hired (the 46 years during which modern basketball has evolved) OSU has had five opportunities to hire the right guy.
Twice they failed miserably (Miller and Ayers). Once they got close to the mark (Obie - who may have been the right man for the wrong job) and once before they got it right but lost out before the program could get back on its feet (Williams).
This is no longer a football only school. Sure, that will always be #1 at OSU. But the fan base - and certainly the financial base - are there to support Basketball right along with major programs all over the country.
Reestablish a winning tradition, keep Ohio players in state, move away from the penury of days past, maintain top notch facilities – that is the formula for a successful program at OSU. Do those things and when – 20 or so years from now – it is time to replace Thad Matta another candidate just like him will be anxious to take over the reigns.
The sleeping giant is awakening.
The question is whether this is a temporary resurgence due to Matta himself – one that will disappear shortly after he does – or the awakening of a sleeping giant. I will argue that it is the later and try to support my argument by putting the program in a broader historical context than is commonly done on these boards.
My first recollection of the OSU program was in 1959 as a 10 year old watching Jerry Lucas play. Damn was I lucky. Fred Taylor was the coach then, just beginning his career. It was also the very beginning of the existence of OSU basketball in any meaningful context.
Sure, we had some success before that, even a few Big Ten championships. But who cared? We were a football school. This was not just an empty accusation back then – it was a verifiable fact.
No more evidence is needed to support this claim than to consider the circumstances under which Taylor coached his first couple of varsity games. He was actually the Freshman coach at the time. The varsity Coach – Floyd Stahl – was asked by the AD to take on a temporary assignment. The assignment? To travel with the football team to the Rose Bowl and handle travel arrangements. (I am not making this up.)
When Stahl left it was time to find a new coach and OSU made a great decision. They picked Fred Taylor. He proved over time to be a great man and a great coach. But was that selection the result of an intense coaching search? Midnight flights by the AD to secretly court top names from marquee programs? Or was it just dumb luck?
When Fred Taylor was initially selected as Freshman coach at OSU he was playing professional ball. Professional baseball that is - in the Senators organization. No surprise there, baseball was his passion. He originally came to OSU on a baseball scholarship. Yes, he did end up playing on an OSU Big Ten basketball championship team, but that was as a walk on. You see he didn’t play basketball in HS. Such was the state of college basketball – and in particular Big Ten basketball - in the late 1940s.
When the head coaching job opened up Taylor’s main competition came from HS coaches. There was absolutely no reason to have any level of confidence that he would become, or had the talent to become, a great – or even mediocre – college coach. But he did OK.
Near the end of his career things changed. Some argue the game was passing him by. I would argue it had a lot to do with a loss of heart following the brawl in Minnesota. He also began to have difficulty recruiting, largely – I believe – because he was not ready to deal with the type of ego that was being generated by the rising interest in college basketball.
In any case Fred retired and it was time to conduct the first ever OSU coaching search in the era where it mattered. An era where there was big time money and big time interest.
And OSU made a mistake. For that mistake I place a large share of the blame on Woody Hayes. Not directly of course - I would never do that to Woody. But throughout his career Woody did one thing that hurt other OSU programs while he was there and hurt the football program immediately after he left. He worked for low pay.
You see, hiring coaches is about ADs. And the AD at OSU had been conditioned to pay low salaries. So when OSU went looking for coaches they may have spoken to a few of those marquee names, but they would never have gotten very far. Instead they hired a fellow from Western Michigan named Eldon Miller – cheap.
So what did Eldon do? He proved that OSU was a sleeping giant. He went out and recruited an awesome class. Herb Williams, Carter Scott, Jim Smith, Marcus Miller, Todd Penn – every premier player from the state. Plus a kid from NY named Ken Page who was one of four from that class to eventually be drafted into the NBA (although Page had transferred by then).
Imagine, four future NBA players in the same recruiting class!
There was only one problem. Miller couldn’t coach. He was great at the MAC level. But he wasn’t able to handle the egos and he wasn’t able to mold his game to the talent he had. The best that group could muster was a 2nd place finish in the Big Ten – losing 44 games in four years and making one NCAA tourney. (Oh, and did I mention that Kelvin Ransey followed him from Western Michigan? Or that in 1980 that entire group was joined by a kid named Clark Kellogg?)
But despite being able to recruit Miller never did better than that 2nd place. And so it was that by the mid 80’s even his ability to recruit was gone and we were looking at twin towers like the infamous “Rich and Pletke”. (For those who don’t remember this duo think Matt Marinchak without the quickness and ball handling ability.)
Finally Miller was gone and another search was underway.
This time we picked a winner - Gary Williams, an up and comer out of Boston College. I am one of those who felt Williams was the right man for the job and had the program on the right track even before he left. (But it is worth noting that the evidence didn’t strongly support that conclusion. In his brief 3 years OSU Williams never finished higher than 6th in the Big Ten.)
I am sure the ACC fans would offer Williams departure as proof OSU is a stepping-stone program. After all, he voluntary left for Maryland didn’t he? Those who were around at the time may recall that it was a bit messier than that. Not only was Maryland his alma-mater, but there were some nasty rumors of marital infidelity involving the wife of an OSU administrator. Rumors that suggested his departure may not have been as voluntary as it seemed. (Rumors of course, but strong at the time and supported somewhat by subsequent divorces involving the principals.)
In any case, it was time to once again begin the search. It is during this stretch that the strongest case against OSU as a top tier program can be made. First the departure of Williams. Then the hiring of his assistant. Not immediately, mind you. That would have been fine. But only after an exhaustive search during which several “name” coaches interviewed – and declined.
Why? You can make lots of arguments, but I will return to my point about ADs. Rick Bay was one of my favorites, and he is the man who hired Gary Williams. But Bay quit when OSU (not Bay himself) fired Earl Bruce (one year after Bay had talked him out of leaving OSU for a job at one of the Arizona schools). Jim Jones (selected by the same men who fired Bruce) replaced Bay and was the man in charge when Ayers was hired. Jim Jones was anything but one of my favorites - for many reasons. I don’t know if he wasn’t offering the right salary or just couldn’t sell the program. That coaching search was an embarrassment – pure and simple.
But Ayers it was.
This is where – much like Woody and his low salary – I place much of the blame for what happened next in the lap of Gary Williams. Williams had assembled one fine basketball team. Jim Jackson, Perry Carter, Chris Jent, Jamall Brown, Treg Lee – all were in place when Ayers took over. And so it was that Ayers won the Big Ten in his second and third seasons at the helm. No matter how bad a coach you were you could live off that legacy for years. Five years to be exact.
Without Jim Jackson Ayers never finished higher than 7th. He recruited felons and car thieves. Kids whose questionable character was well known long before the reached the OSU campus. And when they got here he couldn’t control them on or off the court.
After the 1997 season he was gone and the search was on again. Jim O’Brien was the new choice of a very fine AD named Andy Geiger.
It will be along time before I sort out what happened with Obie. I will always believe that he was one of the best floor coaches in the game. His teams came ready to play and if he had the talent he could make adjustments with the best of them. But he never took recruiting to the level of Gary Williams or Eldon Miller. In particular he never connected with kids from Ohio. (His roster from 2000-2001 did not include one player from the state of Ohio who started a single game during their career. Even Ayers did much better than that).
And recruit from Ohio is all you really have to do. Land half of the top kids from in-state and you will be competitive in the Big Ten. Do better than that or bring in a couple of studs from out of state and the sky is the limit. But here was Obie chasing around in Outer-Mongolia while Mr. Basketball from the State of Ohio was going any where but Columbus.
Regardless of what you may think of him, and largely due to issues off the court, Obie was gone and Andy Geiger was given one last chance to add to his legacy.
Some will argue that Thad Matta – with so few years under his belt does not have a ”proven track record”. Truth is that Matta has won 24 or more games each of the four seasons he has coached. (Obie never won more than 23 in any of the 15 years he coached prior to OSU and won more than 20 only two times in that span.)
Matta is a stud. The buzz coming from the recruits he talks to is intoxicating. He plays the style of ball today’s kids want to be part of (another strike against Obie for those keeping score). He is young (sorry Obie), energetic, highly motivated and goal oriented. OSU has the facilities and (despite the trash the media is spinning) the Big Ten is a nice conference to play in. Everything is in place to do just fine without stooping to any of the tricks broken-hearted Wake fans may want to accuse him of.
Matta is the man to take this program to the top level, and it is starting to happen.
But my original question was whether it was all about Matta or if OSU can sustain a program when he leaves. The point of this lengthy post is to suggest that in the 46 years since Fred Taylor was hired (the 46 years during which modern basketball has evolved) OSU has had five opportunities to hire the right guy.
Twice they failed miserably (Miller and Ayers). Once they got close to the mark (Obie - who may have been the right man for the wrong job) and once before they got it right but lost out before the program could get back on its feet (Williams).
This is no longer a football only school. Sure, that will always be #1 at OSU. But the fan base - and certainly the financial base - are there to support Basketball right along with major programs all over the country.
Reestablish a winning tradition, keep Ohio players in state, move away from the penury of days past, maintain top notch facilities – that is the formula for a successful program at OSU. Do those things and when – 20 or so years from now – it is time to replace Thad Matta another candidate just like him will be anxious to take over the reigns.
The sleeping giant is awakening.
