THE ESSENTIALS
WHAT |
#119 Michigan (8-21, 3-15 B10)
at #57 Ohio St (17-12, 7-11 B10) |
[Patrick Barron]
|
WHERE |
42-27, 45-23, 30-24 Arena
Columbus, OH |
WHEN |
4PM Sunday |
THE LINE |
Kenpom: OSU-9
Torvik: OSU-9 |
TELEVISION |
CBS (streaming link) |
THE OVERVIEW
The recent history of athletic directorship at Michigan and Ohio State is a study in reactivity versus proactivity. Representing the latter, and without going into the conspiracy section of this history, soon-retiring OSU AD Gene Smith was the most powerful voice in American university athletics administration for the last few decades, and used those positions to direct every NCAA and Big Ten institution from the basketball tournament to the current response to NIL.
Recently Smith voluntarily reported a suite of violations to the NCAA, along with measures taken. All were more consequential than anything Michigan's been accused of in more notorious cases--including tampering and lying to the NCAA about it to acquire the top player in the portal--but Smith knows the system he helped create, and how much it weighs whether a violation was reported by one's self to one's friends, versus by one's rival's to one's vindictive enemies.
Smith also recently, proactively, fired his heretofore pretty good basketball coach Chris Holtmann following a stretch where Holtmann's team lost 9/10 games, including one to hated, abysmal Michigan. That game was arguably an anomaly--Ohio State had better looks and possession metrics, while Michigan shot 20 points better than their average on a high volume of threes. One could say the same of some of the post-Holtmann wins.
But ADs and coaches are rarely graded on what their results should have been. In the realm of what is, Holtmann's team was well out of the Tournament, while interim basketball coach Jake Diebler already has an upset over #2 Purdue, followed a week later by an upset *AT* #21 MSU. Diebler's reinvigorated squad is coming off another authoritative win versus Nebraska despite playing Keisei Tominaga without the Buckeyes' own star point guard. They're currently the 12th team out to Heartbreak City, but it's a volatile bubble this year, with little to separate OSU from several Big East teams hanging on the 10-11 line.
Likewise, there's no way the extremely deliberative, reactionary Warde Manuel could have predicted his basketball team would have two wins since December 19th. Except to the perpetually negative, precipitory events like chasing G-League-bound "5-stars" who were mediocre one-and-dones in college (including the coach's defense-repellent son), banking on transfers who didn't have their degrees, and other warning signs about roster construction and program culture issues are only manifest in hindsight.
That's the trick with being an AD: small sample sizes don't make for any kind of surety. It could be Diebler's 3-1 start is fool's gold, that Michigan's fifth-year, first-time coach's mistakes are all behind him, and that Manuel's patient lethargy will be rewarded when Juwan Howard is the greatest coach in basketball by 2027-'28. Did we judge George Washington from his first command? Nay! It could be that the patient man will prove the more prescient, and that in the years to come Gene Smith's aggressiveness—for example in selecting TV man Tony Petitti to maximize the B10's TV revenue and playoff exposure at the cost of everything else—will come back to haunt his legacy. For the moment, Ohio State hasn't beaten Michigan in football or basketball in its last three tries. So who's to say?
[Hit THE JUMP: How did we beat these guys? Oh right.]
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