Not everyone tests well.
I've been an educator for a long time, and one of the things that you figure out pretty quickly in my line of work is that everyone has certain strengths and weaknesses. The kids I've always felt particularly bad for are the ones that try really really really hard in class, turn in all of their homework, and study their asses off, but for whatever reason on test day just end up drawing a complete blank and bombing their quiz about robber barons or Adlai Stevenson or whatever.
It has nothing to do with their intelligence or ability, it's just that during crunch time they freeze up and... fail. More often than not. And as a teacher what's important is that you show that student at least a little bit of grace and make sure that they give you other opportunities to show their mastery of the material, as perfectly exemplified by this thirty year old clip from the documentary cartoon titled "The Simpsons."
But I've never paid a small child millions of dollars to take and then pass any of my tests. I've also never given a student four months to study for one, either, and I also haven't made the only stipulation for passing getting a better score than another student who also doesn't know what they're doing.
Chris Holtmann has failed March.
And not, like, this March. I mean, he has, so far, but we'll get to that. No, my point is that despite putting out some pretty fun teams featuring some very exciting players, for most of his career Chris Holtmann has performed poorly in conference tournaments and in the NCAA Tournament.
- Chris Holtmann has been the head coach for 28 conference/NCAA tournament games throughout his career, and his record is 11-17.
- Six of those 17 losses have come against lower-seeded teams.
- Four of those losses were in the first round of conference tournaments.
- In 11 seasons as a head coach, Holtmann has made it past the second round of the NCAA Tournament exactly once. He's won more than one game in a conference tournament also exactly once. This did not happen in the same season.
Eleven Warriors has spent an entire season cataloguing the extenuating factors that might make the 2021-22 Ohio State men's basketball team a less-than-ideal tournament team, but last night's loss against Penn State was a distillation of all the various frustrations about how the Buckeyes have looked for the past month. They collapsed in the second half of a critical game, and no amount of injuries in the short term makes up for a pattern in the long.
“I think we've went on runs, teams have went on runs. It's college basketball,” Chris Holtmann said after the game.
As Holtmann is fond of reminding us, yes, that is the sport. And at Ohio State in said sport of men's college basketball, the standard for March has got to be higher than what we've seen from this team and this coach.
There are two questions left to address, one for the immediate future and one for the slightly less immediate future. First, Ohio State will be playing in March Madness. They're still getting a 6/7 seed in some projections, which is dumb, because right now it feels like there's no way in hell this team gets past the first round. Nonetheless, the goal for this team is still to get past the first weekend, not because it's realistic, but because that was the standard that the team itself set in the far more optimistic early part of the season. If they don't get there 2021-22 is a disappointment.
The second question is what the expectation should be for next year. And: it's the same! Get to the Sweet Sixteen, for the first time since Holtmann took over the job in Columbus. There will again be mitigating factors, to be sure. A younger team, inevitable injuries, other unexpected crap. But if the Ohio State men's basketball team fails that test in a year, Buckeye fans (and, more importantly, Buckeye administration) needs to make a hard choice about how much grace they choose to show their multimillion dollar coach.
