A few relevant statistics about Chris Holtmann and his relatively brief head coaching career: in six years, he's managed to lose fewer games than the previous year in every year except one, in which he lost 11 games in consecutive seasons. In his first year at Gardner-Webb, he only won 11 games, and two years later he wrapped up a 21-win season. At Butler, he always won at least 20 games, and this past season notched a career-high 25 victories against a career-low nine losses.
You probably already know a lot of this; more than anything, those wins and losses are the overall criteria with which we judge a coach, particularly a new one that we don't know a ton about. Thad Matta could've had horrific recruiting classes for years, but as long as the dude managed to make the NCAA tournament year in and year out, he'd still be around.
But he didn't, and isn't, and now it's up to Chris Holtmann to meet a set of expectations that didn't exist before Thad Matta set them. What I find interesting is that Holtmann has spent three years at each of his previous stops before coming to Ohio State, because that's roughly how long he'll have to establish himself in Columbus (and, judging by the flurry of recruiting activity that the men's basketball team is already involved in, it seems that he knows this). He may have a contract that will last him well into the era of Skynet and those three shells from Demolition Man, but that only guarantees that he'll be paid, not that he'll be coaching.
Because unfortunately, the problem for Holtmann is threefold. Two of the big ones you already know. First, the Ohio State men's basketball team is probably going to suck out loud next year. Gregg Popovich could walk in as an unpaid intern and you'd still be looking at a 15-17 win season.
Second, the specter of Thad looms large. In three years (there's that number again) at Xavier before he came to Ohio State, Matta won 26 games every season and the Atlantic 10 conference tournament in his last. In his first three years on the job in Columbus, Matta won 20, 26, and 35 games. That is not going to happen for Chris Holtmann unless he's a literal witch.
Third, and this is the larger point that I want to get at, it's important to understand what the norm is when it comes to new hires in the Big Ten. Thad Matta winning 81 games in his first three seasons as a new head coach isn't just amazing, it's an obscenely huge outlier among B1G coaches as a whole.
| TEAM | CURRENT (OR MOST RECENT) TENURED COACH | NUMBER OF WINS IN FIRST 3 YEARS |
|---|---|---|
| PURDUE | Matt Painter | 56 |
| PENN STATE | Patrick Chambers | 38 |
| MICHIGAN | John Beilein | 46 |
| MICHIGAN STATE | Tom Izzo | 55 |
| INDIANA | Tom Crean | 28 |
| WISCONSIN | Bo Ryan | 68 |
| IOWA | Fran McCaffery | 54 |
| ILLINOIS | John Groce | 62 |
| MINNESOTA | Richard Pitino | 51 |
| MARYLAND | Mark Turgeon | 59 |
| RUTGERS | Eddie Jordan | 29 |
| NORTHWESTERN | Chris Collins | 49 |
| NEBRASKA | Tim Miles | 47 |
A few things about the above table: Obviously, several of these coaches are no longer with the schools that they represent. Since their replacements have not yet reached three seasons with their teams, the likes of Bo Ryan and Tom Crean and others stay on the table.
But more importantly, combined these coaches averaged about 49 wins over their initial three years with their new teams. That's a shade over 16 wins per season, per team.
Chris Collins of Northwestern falls exactly in that range. In his first year at Northwestern, the Wildcats lost 19 games and finished tied for 10th in the Big Ten. Second year, 17 losses, tied for 10th in the Big Ten. It wasn't until his third year that the Wildcats had a winning season, and even then still finished ninth in the Big Ten.
Of course, Chris Collins is considered one of the rising young stars of college basketball coaching, in no small part due to the fact that in his fourth year he led the Wildcats to their first NCAA berth ever, along with winning 24 games. But to get to that point, Northwestern fans and administration had to have both patience and faith in Collins for three long seasons in which a more results-driven school might've fired him.
The question that I put to you is this: do you think Ohio State is that results-driven school? How much patience should Gene Smith show Chris Holtmann? History shows that not even Tom Izzo, the coaching dean of the entire conference, could come anywhere close to the kind of success that Thad Matta found in his first three seasons, and it's much more likely that given the difficulties that Chris Holtmann faces, he'll end up producing an amount of wins much closer to the rule than the exception.
My hope is that Holtmann is given an opportunity to field garbage teams for a few years. And not the "well they made it to the NCAAs but lost in the first round" kind of garbage, but straight, unmitigated basketball trash that struggles to win 15 games. I don't think that's what we'll see (the year after next, anyway), but three years is a long, long time for a fanbase and an administration that wants to win big and wants to win now.
Thad Matta's legacy was cemented in three years due to some really great coaching and some really insane luck. Chris Holtmann is required to produce the former, but those watching how he develops a team need to understand that the latter can't be coached, and need to have enough patience to give him time to find it.
We'll see if three years is too long to wait.
