Don, agreed.....I don't think most people outside of Columbus really appreciate how young this team truly is.....of our first 7 off the bench, 6 of them are freshman or sophomores. Tonite will be a good test for them....
Looking forward to watching and I hope we show up this year and at least make a game out of it....which we did not do last year. Also....Patric Young needs to get a lot of minutes because he is the only real force we have inside that can possibly slow down Sullinger.
One thing about College Basketball, 1 superior player can trump all and young guys can be big time contributors. Youth doesn't hurt nearly as much in college basketball as it does in college football. I think it's mainly due to the AAU competition that most of these guys go through on top of their High School games, they've just played so much more actual games than High School football players have when they arrive at college.
I agree to a point TOK, but let's also not kid ourselves, we will sorely miss the leadership and big game experience that our seniors provided......they too played alot of AAU ball but also have learned a new skill in college that they don't get in AAU ball which is to play defense and have the experience playing in Madison Square Garden, Mackey, Kohl, Breslin and the Dean Dome against the titans of the game with few friendly faces in sight....there are few players on our team (not named Sullinger) that I wouldn't give up to have David Lighty or Jon Diebler back, fwiw
It will be fun watching all the kids play and work hard this CBB season...but in the end, there can be only one Champion...
I hear you with regards to Seniors, there are always teams who make the NCAA tournament and have a good run with players who have been together for 3 or 4 years and in themselves have no future beyond college basketball. Teams like Notre Dame which had excellent Sr. leadership last year do well down the stretch in their conferences and conference tournaments, Pitt is another team that usually has a fair number of upper classmen. I believe Wisconsin typically is that way as well. On the opposite side at Texas we seem to annually have very young teams due to defections to the NBA. Good solid seniors is a good thing, sprinkle in a hot shot freshman who isn't under pressure to be the leader of the team and good things can happen. I do believe though that the presence of Sully even on a young team is going to result in a lot of wins.
Pretty close and evenly matched squads this evening. Gators started out red hot on the treys but eventually cooled off. Balanced scoring for the Buckeyes and Matta played this one close to the vest and only used seven players for the most part. Difference in the game was the number of turnovers by the Gators. Winning against a top ten team in our second game not too bad. We definitely miss David Lighty on the defensive end and Diebler and his treys.
Congratulations. Like you said, Gators hot early, and very late for that matter, but OSU owned the game between those time frames. Both teams are going to do very well this season.
Once OSU implemented that physical, pressing style on the perimeter they completely disarmed UF's guards.....especially Walker. Good game Bucs..
Good game to have against a quality opponent early in the season.....Gators came out on fire ready to play and hung tough at the end when many teams would have packed it in - credit to Donovan, his staff and kids. Defensively Craft and Smith were superb and I think overall we played excellent team defense. Offensively we're going to have to develop or evidence a more meaningful perimeter threat - Buford, Sibert - to go with the post game of Sully and Thomas. I wasn't happy with the way they closed the game out, but they are young, well coached and they will continue to improve. We miss Lighty's defense and leadership and Diebler's perimeter game and I don't think we have either of their equal on this team, but they have a chance to be pretty good.....
I suspect he's gonna have to get at least one more ready to play with the monster games they have coming up -v- Duke and Kansas....pretty nice non-conf schedule....Florida, Duke, Kansas, ouch! :shock:
Deshawn Thomas is still a little uncertain of himself. While his defense may have improved, I would like to see a little more patience on the offensive side of the ball. Shannon Scott is not developing as quickly as I had anticipated. If we get Ross back, prior to the Big Ten grind, it will help