Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith repeated a not-so-uncommon word Monday afternoon when he sat alongside Thad Matta at a table inside the practice facility at Value City Arena. It was a word that, Smith said, was ultimately the deciding factor in his decisions to part ways with Matta after an incredibly successful 13-year stint as Buckeyes head coach.
Recruiting.
“Recruiting is the lifeblood of the program,” Smith said on multiple occasions.
Smith said the word recruiting — or some form of it — nearly 10 times during Monday’s press conference. It was the first thing he brought up when asked about the odd timing of this decision.
“Once Thad and I sat down we had a good plan going into the summer. Recruiting was a major part of that plan,” Smith said. “We weren’t winning the battles in recruiting that I thought we might have a chance to win, as he did. As we started talking about that on Friday, which was three months or so after the [first] meeting we had, just the flow of the conversation brought us to the reality. ‘Thad, maybe it is time to make a leadership change.’”
And so it became abundantly clear: Whoever Smith decides to hire as Matta’s successor will be a proven recruiter. There will be no shortage of quality candidates, though the timing of Matta’s departure makes things a bit more challenging. But the bottom line is the next Ohio State head coach better be able to bring in high-quality talent year in and year out.
Let’s be clear here: It’s not like Matta couldn’t recruit. He landed plenty of top prospects throughout his tenure. From Greg Oden and Mike Conley in his first big class all the way to D’Angelo Russell just a couple of years ago, there were plenty of big-time players who came to Columbus.
“The next person we attract will have a major focus in Ohio and a 150- to 200-mile radius. That’s very important.”– Gene Smith
But there were plenty of misses, too, and the one that most notably led to Matta’s fall was his 2015 recruiting class. Ranked fifth nationally with four of five signees rated as top-100 prospects, Ohio State’s 2015 haul was thought to be the wave of talent needed to extend a period of battling for Big Ten supremacy.
It turned out to be anything but. Four of the five members of that recruiting class were gone after just one year and the final one, JaQuan Lyle, surprisingly left the team this offseason. All five members of a once highly-touted class gone after just two years. That’s hard for any coach to overcome.
But Matta is ultimately responsible for losing those players. He brought them to Ohio State, after all. He and the rest of his staff couldn’t replenish the talent in the cupboard quickly enough — the Buckeyes failed to land multiple top prospects late in the 2017 class — and a public decommitment — and bashing — from a 2018 recruit only made matters worse.
For a while, Ohio State appeared to try and take more of a national approach when it came to recruiting. Matta’s program, at its peak, contended annually on the court with the Dukes, North Carolinas and Kentuckys of the world. The Buckeyes tried to take the same approach to recruiting — to go nationally — but it didn’t work out as well. As a result, Ohio State missed on some of its homegrown talent.
Smith said the next coach of the Buckeyes must get back to that approach of recruiting Ohio.
“Thad and I have talked about the next two years in Ohio and frankly what you look at what he had transitioned to do was to kind of get back to Ohio and the Midwest, so he had started that process,” Smith said. “The next person we attract will have a major focus in Ohio and a 150- to 200-mile radius. That’s very important.”
You’ll hear a lot of familiar names when it comes to Ohio State’s next potential head coach. Chris Mack at Xavier, Chris Holtmann at Butler, Buzz Williams at Virginia Tech, Gregg Marshall at Wichita State. Hell, even Billy Donovan of the Oklahoma City Thunder has floated around. We outlined some potential candidates earlier this week here. And odds are, Smith already has a top target in mind.
Whoever it may be is going to have a strong recruiting background, though.
Because recruiting is the lifeblood of the program.
