Bucknutin' But Net

Buford is pretty much a choke artist against good teams. I don't have faith in Buford scoring against a good team. People constantly bitched about Jon Diebler on this board last year but I will take a Jon Diebler over William Buford any day out of the year. Buford had four years to score points at OSU. Lucas, Redd, Turner, Jackson had three years. Buford's shot versus UW was a fluke and nothing else. I will be glad when he is gone from Ohio State.

All good points but tell me please when as an osu basketball fan should I start to worry? when we lose in the round of 16 or sooner for the 4th straight year? I would like to think we will advance further than that I will be rooting for us to do so. However, we have not shown in the past few weeks any inkling of improving as a ball club. Are we regressing, I don't know....however, in a one and done environment once you've lost it's too late to be concerned isn't it?

I'm with you. Losing a tight game on the road against a ranked team.....who happens to be your rival that you've completely dominated for the past 3-4 years.....nothing to get worked up about. Buford is the only real question mark on this team.

The only answer is that Matta doesn't want to use a zone defense. He decided pre-season that they would be man-to-man the entire year, one style and no change of strategy regardless of circumstances. He apparently believes it's not worth trying.

To add to your point, I've said all year long that we should be running some full court press, it would be a great way to utilize the bench. We've got the depth to substitute fresh legs to give any opponent at least a few minutes of hell. In my opinion, guys like Thompson, Ravenel, Scott, and Weatherspoon are built to press, fast and athletic guys who can bring energy to set the pace of a game or to change the tempo of a game that's not going our way.

Matta's stubborness and refusal to try anything different or to use a guy like Ross for offense off the bench puts a cap on us.

Maybe we will get lucky and make it to the final four or better. It's possible, but only if Buford or Thomas can catch fire for several games in a row and our opponents are off target. It's almost a roll of the dice at this point. I think it's unfortunate that we must rely so much on chance considering we will probably never have as much talent relative to the competition than we have right now. Of course, if you are burying the talent on the bench and have not developed it during the season, you have neutralized this as a potential advantage.

the team needs to get someone else under the basket to take some of the pressure off sullinger who is looking slower and slower as each game goes by. why is sullinger still following his man out past the top of the key then getting burned when the guy blows right by him to the basket? do any of these guys call out picks to their teammates?? some one needs to step up and hit open jumpers on the first or second pass to start opening up the middle.
i have seen very few changes (if any) by matta to try to get this offense started again. as has been said all season, if you don't play your bench as much as you can in the early part of the season, by the late stages of the season when the starters are dead tired it will be too late to run in some body who can't play because his feet are asleep from sitting on the bench so much.
either this is a very talented team not playing up to their potential and not being well coached, or maybe these guys aren't as good as we have been led to believe. i am beginning to wonder.

I think you are painting a very broad stroke with your comment........sure, some fans will go over the top and think everything is terrible and we can do nothing right, comparing Matta to Cooper (eh, i am not buying that just yet) but I think we have enough things going on with this team to be very concerned and to openly provide opinions on it.

Sure, this was a tough game on the road....one we NEEDED to win and once again we were pretty much outplayed and the other team CLEARLY wanted it more than we did with their effort and team play.

I am not saying we suck becuase we are clearly a very good team that is has been playing VERY poorly as of late which is not the right directly to be heading into latter part of the season and the NCAA tourney.

We are getting outworked.....outcoached.....I am assuming you watched the game last night but take a look and really watch the body language of our team.....watch how they come off the court during timeouts etc. Guys are not encouraging each other....no one is picking each other up.....not even during the game!!!!

Bottom line is this team has lost confidence in themselves and need to find a way to get it back. When we solely depend on a perimeter shooting game from two guys that are STREAKY that is not good.....couple that with teams now can easily defend us out of a zone by putting light pressure on the perimeter and shading down on Sully.

Sully is hanging on to the ball too long in the post and allowing the defenders to get to him before finding the open man.......we have zero penetration from the perimeter. You can't tell me that scUM is one of the best defenses in the country......they flat out wanted it more than we did and it showed last night. Same as it did against sparty.

If they continue to play this way we will lose another 2-3 games in conference. I think we will bounce back against Illinois but going to Northwestern, Wisky at home, THEN away at SParty has at least 2 losses written all over it unless they can somehow pull together and find some confidence and team continuity.

Championship teams win on the road.......they typically start playing their best the last 1/3 of the season......and they players that step up and get it done when things get tough, home or away AND consistently. This team is going in the opposite direction......if you cannot see that from the last several games then you must be watching a different team.

exactly - when this team is clicking, we blow Michigan out at home - no issues, everyone loves the team, loves the coach. When Buford lights up Minnesota, clutch play, shows senior leadership and get 26 or whatever it was, no one is concerned, we love it.

That is what I'm talking about - outside of the Michigan State game, we win all our home games - and we've played Purdue, who had some guy go crazy on us - we lose to Indiana in a crowd that was incredible coming off a team that beat Kentucky at home, then we goto a Michigan team on the road that practically has the same win-lose and is a very good team - we want to fire our coach. We want to play our 12th guy on the bench with some illusion that he will come in just 'fix everything'.

This is the team we have. Matta has recruited talented 5 star recruits - guys that play under him are in the NBA - you can't say he can't coach - I've been watching this team, every game, every minute for many many many years - we've had a shot at a NC, we've had a NIT win (yes, I watched all those as well).

This is the team we have - when we played zone, we didn't have athletes we have today. We had issues with zone, this team rebounds well - it was a key component to beating Michigan, zone doesn't help in that at all. Just saying there are many variables, I personally prefer man to man if you have the talent. Yes, Thomas is a weaker link, but as a coach, you have a guy that knows how to score on a team that struggles to score, you have to continue with it.

But what I'm talking about here is the people that want to 'fire Matta' or whatever after a close game in a tough environment, refs weren't helping, etc... the same team that DESTROYED Michigan in the second half at home - the same team that DESTROYED Duke at home. But we lose a game by 2 and the world is ending. Is that being against constructive criticism - no. Do I just have rose colored glasses.. no - I said - we had issues, this team plays poorly on the road. Our big lose, only lose, at home was against a good team, which Craft said they played selfishly, and Sullinger was obviously getting pounded - (or course when we lose we get a video showing him flopping... hello people, this is a physical conference).

We have talent. We have matchup issues - we have a 6'9 guy playing the 5 spot show should be playing the 4 spot. We have a great defensive guard who struggles to hit a jump shot when his man double downs on the post player. We have a senior who is a great shooter, great stroke, but is streaky - he always has been - and trying to make him a great drive the lane guy isn't going to 'just happen'. We have a very young team of guys trying to show they can play - great highlights in a guy like Thompson - but who are not quite ready to really grab the bull by the horns.

If anything, Matta has his work cut out for him - and his focus on defense is very wise - it sets the foundation to show Williams, etc... that playing good 'D' is where it starts.

It's not all perfect, this isn't the land of Oz, but for crying out loud - enough with the attacks on the players - these guys are playing their hearts out and in a very very tough part of the schedule, we still have Michigan St on the road, and man oh man, do I want to see us beat them :)

While most of your points are good , you are not seeing the most important thing.
This team is just NOT that talented.
They have 8 players that can't shoot the basketball.
Regardless of how high you can jump(Thompson), how hard you play (Smith) , how good a ball handler (Craft), how good you can dunk (Weatherspoon), how tall you are(Williams)-the single most important thing in basketball is shooting.
These guys can't shoot and score.How can one team have so many putrid shooters?
When is the last time Shannon Scott actually made a basket?
I think he is like 1 for his last 15.He is horrible.
He couldn't make 2 foul shots the another night.

On top of that the chemistry and body language of the players-particulary Sullinger has been negative. One of the writers commented he thinks Sullinger realizes this team has no shot to make the Final 4 so he is justplaying out season waiting for theNBA.

ron, this is spot on. No reasonable person would ever ask for Matta's head. However, this team is over-valued by many. We have too many players that lack the most important offense skill in the game, which is putting the ball in the basket! We have 2 guys that can shoot the ball reasonably well and both (Buford and Thomas) are as streaky as you can get shooting the basketball. Craft, Smith, Spoon, Scott, Thompson, Siebert, etc cannot shoot the ball. Hell, sometimes I think Sully's our best outside shooter. Outside of Sully we are a jump-shooting team that can't make jump shots. Can we get hot at the right time? Certainly and as a fan I will be rooting hard for this to happen. But we are 27 games into the season and I think now is the time to get going. The close loss to Michigan was just not another loss...we fell out of a first place tie, lost control of our destiny and are now barely hanging on to a 2 seed. 5 losses is not terrible but the game against Michigan had a lot riding on it as did the game against Sparty and we dropped both. Any reasonable fan should be at least mildly concerned about where this team is heading right now.

Perfect?There is no such thing and I surely didn`t say anything about perfect.Now if you read that into my discription of the players faults,IMO of course,then that is on you.

I deffinately beg to differ with you about when he shoots well we beat anybody.If that were true,how pathetic is the rest of the team then?I just saw some stats that he averages something like 18 points a game against the bottom 8 teams and 8 against the top 4 so that kind of blows your sad logic right out of the water,laddy.

No,I usually day dream and stare at the tv while they are playing.