Hoop Fan Lament
It’s hard, or at least a bit weird, being an OSU basketball fan right now. See, OSU is a football school. Don’t get me wrong we all love the hoop team — but football is different and will always remain King of Columbus. And that’s fine.
OSU fans are not used to landing players like Oden and Conley. The last NBA quality players to come out of OSU are Michael Redd (who turned into a star in the NBA…he wasn’t THAT good at OSU) and Scoonie Penn (who is in Europe). That was seven years ago. Yes, we still contend and win Big 10 titles — people forget that OSU won the Big 10 last year, too, but this is different. We’re used to our basketball players staying at the very least three years (Redd, Jim Jackson) and usually all four.
Now we have Oden and Conley, both of whom are projected as lottery picks and Oden going #1 overall (yes, over Durant). This is all very foreign to us. How can anyone possibly tell these kids to stay in school when they have millions of dollars on the table? I sure can’t. I went to school. I have a degree. And here I sit talking to you bozos about video and board games. Granted, there is something to the notion of being the Big Men on campus at the age of 19-20. That would be kinda cool. Still…that’s just a crazy amount of money.
Oden’s a smart kid who loves college; he’s an honor roll student who wanted to be an accountant before basketball took over his life. He’s the kind of kid who is extremely easy to root for because he typifies what we want our college players to be: great players and great representatives of the school.
Still, with football — we all know we have them for at least three years. When I first saw Teddy Ginn run past fast players like they had a piano strapped to their back, I was giddy — I’d see him in the Shoe for two more years. This is complete selfishness on my part…I just want to see them play for my school.
With basketball, you just never know. It has to be exceptionally hard for an elite level college basketball coach to keep any level of stability. OSU coach Thad Matta knew what was coming (and Oden and Conley have not made anything official, this is just me speculating); Matta’s next two recruiting classes are filled to the brim with 4 and 5 star talent including a 7 foot Dirk clone who shoots 3’s and can take players off the dribble and a 6′5 shooting guard who just broke the Ohio HS scoring record. OSU isn’t leaving the national radar anytime soon.
But when you play with this kind of HS talent, you need to continually bring in top notch classes — just one off recruiting year and you’re program can be set back a year or two (see UConn).
As an OSU man — this is going to take some getting used to.