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Men's Basketball
Comeback at Purdue Fueled Big Ten Title Run
By Brandon Castel

For Thad Matta, winning championships never gets old.

Thad Matta brandishes the net like a prize of battle following OSU's win over Illinois to claim their third Big Ten championship in six years.
Photo by Dan Harker

Ohio State’s 42-year old head coach has won 12 rings in 15 years, but he cut down the net Tuesday at Value City Arena and hoisted it high in the air like general raising his sword after his first major victory.

“I explained to them that there are 19 battles and the war will not be decided until March. To be sitting here tonight and say the war is over and you won, is a tremendous feat,” said Matta, who won his third title in six years at Ohio State.

While it’s winning the war that matters most, each of those 19 battles told a story of its own, a tail of sweat, hard work and determination.

“I don’t think anybody could ever completely understand what goes in to winning championships. Not here at Ohio State, but just across the board…NBA, NFL,” Matta said.

“You can point back to situations and stories and things that happened along the way it just makes you smile.”

It’s not often, however, that regular season championships can be traced back to one event; one point in time where the course of the entire season shifted on its axis.

And yet it’s hard not to look at where the Buckeyes are now without thinking back to that fateful night in January when Ohio State pulled off the upset at Purdue. After a 1-3 start to conference play, the Buckeyes trailed the sixth-ranked Boilermakers by 13 points late in the second half before Evan Turner put on a scoring display that let the nation know he was officially back from the back injury that cost him a month of the season.

“I felt like we got rolling from that game. It was a tremendous comeback against a tremendous basketball team,” Matta said recalling the 70-66 win.

Despite playing in front of a hostile crowd at Mackey Arena in West Lafayette, the Buckeyes closed out the game on an incredible 25-8 run behind 23 second-half points from Turner. Playing in just his third game back after missing a month of the season with two fractured vertebrae, Turner scored 14 straight points for Ohio State at one point as he finished with a career-high 32 points.

It was exactly the kind of jumpstart these Buckeyes needed. The win led to nine straight wins in conference play and 13 out of 14 overall down the stretch as the Buckeyes came from three games back of Michigan State in January to tie the Spartans for the Big Ten title.

“I think these guys have played with confidence in the system, with confidence in each other, which is what we always ask them to do, but that game definitely got us rolling to the point of (winning) 13 out of 14,” Matta said.

It was so improbable, that after the game Tuesday – a 73-57 win over Illinois to close out the regular season – Matta told his team they weren’t supposed to be here.

Teams that start conference play 1-3 don’t go on to win championships. That’s just the nature of the game, especially when four losses was going to be the bench mark. The Boilermakers did get their revenge in Columbus later in the season to hand OSU its fourth and final loss in conference play, but the Buckeyes would have been sitting at four losses after just five games had they failed to pull of the comeback in West Lafayette.

It’s scary to think how much different the season might have looked.

“That day at Purdue we were sitting at 1-3, I was on the eighth floor and I had a balcony. I stood out there for about 20 minutes and I thought about jumping, but with my luck it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do,” Matta said tongue-in-cheek.

Surely no one was jumping the railing over a basketball season, but it shows the kind of emotional roller coaster Matta had to ride the last two years. He lost team leader David Lighty to a season ending foot injury last December and it looked like déjà vu a year later when Turner crashed hard to the court with what turned out to be broken vertebrae in his back this year.

The Buckeyes lost three of the six games Turner missed, but the team never quit. With their backs against the wall, they rallied from 13 down at Purdue to pull off one of the more improbable Big Ten title runs in recent history.

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