Wisconsin thumps Ohio State, and Thad Matta and the Buckeyes have problems

The last time Thad Matta and Ohio State had an offense that wasn’t led by a future NBA lottery pick and wasn’t floundering on the fringes of the top 100 in Division I college basketball, DeShaun Thomas put together an All-American year out of nowhere, bolted for the NBA after his junior season, and set the Buckeye program off down a hill toward mediocrity.

It’s been four years since that Elite Eight run led by Thomas and Aaron Craft. Four years of decline in Columbus interrupted only D’Angelo Russell. And it’s led to this, an 0-4 Big Ten start and a second-straight disappointing season.

The Buckeyes were dismantled by Wisconsin Thursday night in Madison, 89-66. Ohio State’s first-half performance gave the game away by halftime. Only four Buckeyes scored before the break. As a team, they put up just .844 points per possession. Their defense throughout the game was similarly lackluster. The Badgers did what they wanted to, when they wanted to.

The loss leaves Ohio State at 10-7 overall, and well on the periphery of the NCAA tournament picture. A team that was ranked 13th in the preseason by Ken Pomeroy is outside the KenPom top 50 and falling fast. A second-consecutive NIT bid, or worse, looks probable.

Even more worrying is the stinging sense that this season, just like last season, is anything but an anomaly.

Matta built his Ohio State program on the recruiting trail. He began with the Greg Oden-Mike Conley-Daequan Cook class of 2006. It continued with Kosta Koufos and Evan Turner the following year, B.J. Mullens and Will Buford the year after that, and then Jared Sullinger, Thomas, and so on.

And then somewhere along the trail, Matta took a wrong turn. Since 2011, he has reeled in just one five-star recruit, Russell, and just one more top-40 prospect, Keita Bates-Diop. He has missed on talented Ohio prospects — Devin Williams, Nigel Hayes, Luke Kennard, Carlton Bragg, Nick Ward — and come up short on five-star guys like Kobi Simmons this past year.

Things aren’t looking up either. This year’s class featured just one top-200 player. Next year’s class currently has two commitments, one from four-star center Kaleb Wesson, the other from three-star point guard Braxton Beverly. It’s a far cry from the previous decade, and both a symptom and a cause of the program’s decline.

Matta signed some great athletes in the past six years. That 2011 class included Sam Thompson, Shannon Scott and LaQuinton Ross. More recently there have been signees like Daniel Giddens and Derek Funderburk. But the past four rosters have been alarmingly devoid of offensive skill. The result has been this, via kenpom.com:

There has been rotten luck along the way. Only one player (Jaquan Lyle) from a five-man 2015 class is still at Ohio State. The other four transferred after one year, leaving the current roster thin, and unable to account for the loss of Bates-Diop to a season-ending injury.

But this year’s Buckeye team actually plays the second-most efficient offense of the four squads since Thomas left Columbus. And it doesn’t play efficient offense.

This is a trend — a bad one, and one Matta and Ohio State must reverse, especially with the balance of the college game swinging back toward offense. Matta hasn’t found good enough offensive players out of high school. He hasn’t developed the players he has signed into top-tier Big Ten players on that end of the floor. And he hasn’t fit them into a system that can make up for their deficiencies.

Perhaps Matta is a victim of his own talent-spotting and talent-wooing success. Comparing a coach to a previous version of himself can be dangerous. But, whether it’s a case of failing to adapt to the current college basketball climate, a recruiting pitch gone stale, overperformance that has naturally regressed, or something entirely different, Ohio State is headed in the wrong direction.

This year’s team could still improve, and it has suffered from some poor close game luck. It lost to Virginia and Purdue, two top-20 teams, but a combined three points. And even in a weak Big Ten, it has résumé-building opportunities over the next two weeks.

But after Thursday’s beatdown in Madison, it’s tough to feel comfortable wagering on a Buckeye turnaround. It’s especially difficult in the short term; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to feel confident in the program’s long-term prospects as well.