Email
PrintWhat's Thad Matta have to do?
He’s won four Big Ten regular championships, gone to a national title game and turned the Ohio State basketball team into a perennial power. yet, he rarely gets the attention he deserves.
Coach Thad Matta looks to his bench during an early November exhibition game at Value City Arena.
Neal C. Lauron
Thad Matta stands at center court with a cup of coffee in hand as he watches a practice for his Ohio State men’s basketball team. He’s trying to gauge the intensity of his players, especially Jared Sullinger, his superstar whose back and foot injuries became national topics for two weeks in December.
It appears that Sullinger and everyone else is in good working order the day before the Big Ten opener. Matta, though, moves to the sideline with a slight limp. It’s not a new ailment. In his eighth season as the OSU coach, he has been hobbled since undergoing back surgery several years ago—complications left him with limited mobility and damaged nerves that affect his right foot. That’s the reason for the brace strapped around a lower leg and a chair placed in front of the scorer’s table (in case he needs to rest).
In the limited time the media gets to watch this practice, Matta doesn’t take a break. He’s enthusiastic and energetic, maybe fueled by that cup of caffeine from Starbucks (with Sweet’N Low and one pump of vanilla). He confers with his assistants and converses with the players, constantly glancing at the baskets on each end of the floor. He’s counting shots and watching facial expressions and body language. If, for instance, guard Jordan Sibert is draining three-pointers, Matta will go into the next game confident in the sophomore’s shooting touch.
As the scrimmaging begins, Matta continues to scan the court. Had he gazed to the rafters, he would have seen a banner honoring the coach who is synonymous with success in the men’s basketball program:
Fred Taylor, Head Coach, 1959-1976, 7 Big Ten Titles, 4 Final Four Appearances, 1 National Championship.
Someday, Thad Matta, only 44, might find his own accomplishments listed on a banner alongside the only coach to lead the Buckeyes to an NCAA title—the 1960 team that included Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek and a reserve named Bobby Knight.
In fact, there’s an argument to make that Matta is on his way to becoming the best OSU basketball coach ever, if not already. Granted, aside from Taylor, the competition isn’t necessarily stiff. Oh, Eldon Miller, Gary Williams, Randy Ayers and Jim O’Brien had their big moments, but they either squandered potential (Miller), left early (Williams, after three seasons) or got in trouble (Ayers and O’Brien). Taylor, though, set the bar high.
But consider this comparison of Matta and Taylor after their first seven seasons.
From 1958 to 1965, the Buckeyes under Taylor went 137-41 (.769) overall—75-23 (.765) in the Big Ten. The national championship came in his second season and OSU lost in the title games the next two seasons to Cincinnati.
Since Matta’s debut at OSU in 2004 (not including this season), the Buckeyes have gone 190-57 (.769)—85-35 (.708) in the Big Ten—and finished first in the conference regular season four times and won the Big Ten tournament on three occasions, including the past two. In his third season, the freshmen class of Mike Conley Jr., Daequan Cook and Greg Oden helped the Buckeyes reach the 2007 NCAA title game before losing to Florida. OSU won the NIT the following year and has reached the NCAA tournament in all but two of Matta’s seasons (the school had a self-imposed ban in his first season because of rules violations under O’Brien. The Buckeyes were 20-12). And he has done so without any scandals—tattoos or otherwise.
Mel Nowell, who went from East High School to playing for the national championship team, says Matta is like his former coach in the way he gets the most of his players. “It shows how good Fred Taylor was because you have to use that talent in very capable ways,” Nowell says. “The coaching staff there now has done a very good job also. I thought we had very good chemistry, but they do also because they move the ball to each other real well and make passes that easily could be shots.”
“You see players on other teams, they want to take it all the way to the hoop even if someone is in front of them and dunk it themselves or score themselves,” he adds. “You will hardly see that at Ohio State. They will give it up. They will make the pass. It all comes from chemistry.”
Longtime WTVN basketball analyst Tony White says the lack of a national championship for Matta shouldn’t diminish his accomplishments so far. “You can’t compare them from the successes they’ve had because I think you have to recognize that college basketball is much more competitive now than when Fred Taylor started coaching,” he says. “All you have to do is look back and see that UConn and Butler played the national championship game last year to recognize there are a lot of teams that can beat other teams. It’s hard to consistently win in college basketball nowadays. The fact that Thad Matta has done that, not only at Ohio State, but wherever he’s been, shows what type of tremendous coach he is.”
He is on pace for another season of 20 or more wins at Ohio State—and the 12th consecutive in all, including one year at his alma mater, Butler University, and three at Xavier University before becoming the Buckeyes’ 13th head coach. To add to his résumé, he has won coach of the year honors five times (three times at OSU) in three conferences: Midwestern Collegiate, Atlantic 10 and Big Ten. He’s also coached a National Player of the Year (Evan Turner), a National Freshman of the Year (Sullinger) and seven NBA draft choices (six in the first round).
Taylor didn’t have to deal with the so-called one-and-dones who leave for the NBA after their freshmen year—as Matta has seen happen numerous times. Conley, Cook and Oden departed after their rookie seasons and became first-round picks. So was Kosta Koufos the next season and B.J. (now Byron) Mullens in 2009. Two years ago, Turner, a junior, was the second overall selection after winning that national player of the year award.
“The thing most people are impressed with nationally is the way [Matta] has handled early entries better than anybody else and his ability to handle college basketball the way it is right now by replacing a big gap in your lineup,” says Jim O’Connell, national basketball writer for the Associated Press. “He replaces any problem that arises. There’s no whining. He just gets another great player to go in there.”
“I don’t know what number you’re going to use, but if you’re picking a top 10, he’d better be on your list of top coaches in college basketball,” O’Connell adds.
One area where Matta can relate to Taylor—heck, every basketball coach at Ohio State—is that the sport always will play second fiddle to football. Taylor, who died in 2002 at the age of 77, was overshadowed by Woody Hayes. Matta had Jim Tressel, and even when scandals forced him out last year and the football team struggled to a mediocre 6-7 record, the talk around town now is all about new coach Urban Meyer. And even interim football coach Luke Fickell was the recipient of a full-page congratulatory ad in the Dispatch from a car dealership after losing to Michigan.
And all this when the basketball team is considered a top contender for the national title. What does Matta have to do to get more respect in this town? Imagine Matta’s standing if he were coaching at, say, North Carolina or Kentucky.
But, of course, he’s not. “When you’re a basketball player here at Ohio State, you learn very early in your career not to be insulted by the fact that no matter what happens in your program relative to the football program, football is going to be the No. 1 sport,” says White, the former Watkins Memorial High School star who played for the Buckeyes from 1986-’89. “I guarantee it doesn’t bother Thad and it doesn’t bother the players because players recognize that’s the way it is at Ohio State.”
And if it irritates Matta, he doesn’t let on. In fact, he says he prefers staying out of the spotlight. “Honestly, you’d like to just coach a basketball team in a cave and come out and play games and go back in it,” he says. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.”
Matta’s low-profile style repels attention. He doesn’t wear gaudy sports coats or spew out brash quotes. The most controversial thing to come out of his mouth was a piece of gum that fell to the Value City Arena floor as he coached the No. 2 Buckeyes to a 49-48 win against top-ranked Wisconsin in 2007. He invoked the five-second rule of fallen food, picked up the wad and began chewing again. The CBS footage, captured for YouTube, has been viewed more than 127,000 times.
It was an act that cemented his image as an everyday guy. Make that an intense, everyday guy. He doesn’t shy away from heatedly pointing out his team’s flaws during a timeout or blasting them after a bad loss, such as when OSU got rattled at Indiana on New Year’s Eve. “He wasn’t very polite,” Sullinger says about Matta’s address. (Matta can be subtle, too. On the day before facing Northwestern on Dec. 28, he pulled senior William Buford aside from an intense post-practice workout and encouraged him to carry over that focus into the game. Buford responded with career highs in points, 28, and three-pointers, five.)
That intensity also fuels his success as a relentless recruiter who relates well to young athletes. He has locked down most of the best players in Ohio, poached Indiana for five-star recruits such as Oden, Conley and current Buckeye Deshaun Thomas and extracted Turner from Illinois. Matta also reached beyond the Midwest to land freshman guard Shannon Scott, the 2011 Mr. Georgia Basketball.
Of course, keeping them around has been a problem as Matta annually faces significant roster changes while keeping the Buckeyes a Big Ten contender. “It’s amazing,” he says. “What you see in great programs is there’s a lot of continuity. Unfortunately, over time we haven’t had a ton of continuity. Even with last year’s team, you had three seniors, awesome leaders, but you had a ton of young guys. You look at this year’s team, we’re probably the youngest team in college basketball with one senior, one junior and freshmen and sophomores.”
So each year, it’s almost as if he’s starting over in trying to discover his team’s identity. Last season, OSU was lethal offensively with Sullinger dominating inside and sharpshooter Jon Diebler and others draining three-pointers. His current squad lacks the same long-range accuracy, depending more on inside play.
“As you go into an off-season, you look and go, ‘OK, what do we have? What do we think we have?’ and then, quite honestly, you go through the first three weeks of practice and say, ‘OK, this is the direction we probably should head in.’ In the eight years I’ve been at Ohio State, I’ve kind of become numb to it because it’s happened so often.”
While players come and go, Matta says the consistency he seeks starts with a core belief that winning is not a wish, but an expectation. “Over time, we’ve set out to create a culture of our program, an environment, if you will,” he says. “You try to operate by certain standards. That’s probably been the biggest lesson I’ve learned of just, ‘This is what we do, this is how we do it and we’re going to get it done.’ ”
One of those standards is overcoming adversity. He’s seen plenty of it at OSU. In December 2008, he lost David Lighty—a key holdover from the team that went to the national championship—for the season when he fractured his left foot. Twelve months later, Turner fractured his back and missed six games. Also, Oden missed the first seven games in his only season with the Buckeyes while recovering from wrist surgery. Matta credits his ability to persevere to his upbringing. It’s not a stretch to say he was born to follow his father’s footsteps into the coaching profession.
Matta grew up in Hoopeston, a town of about 6,000 on the central perimeter of Illinois near the Indiana border. His dad, Jim Matta, was a longtime basketball coach in the area and athletic director at Hoopeston-East Lynn High School when Matta and his older brother, Greg, were prep standouts. (Greg is a boys’ basketball coach at a high school in Georgia.) Thad guided the school team to the final eight as a junior and the state semifinals as a senior in 1985.
“He was a floor general. He was a leader,” says Doug Bean, the CBSSports.com reporter who covers OSU basketball. “He commanded the floor and directed everybody. He was a scorer, a ball handler, just a good all-around player. You could see the kids looking to him. He was directing traffic on the floor in communication with the coach. He was the kid who would take charge and take the big shots.”
Bean had opportunities to watch and interview a young Matta as a reporter for a local paper and came away impressed by a teenager wiser than his years. “He’d be sitting there at his locker after the game talking to the media and you’re thinking, ‘This kid is a lot different than any other kid I’ve been around.’ You could tell he had knowledge of the game—whether it was gleaned from his dad being a coach and being an A.D.—and just his knowledge of obviously what he had absorbed in the game, you could just tell that he stood out.”
Matta also gleaned how to work with reporters. Unlike, say, the typical press conference held by Tressel during his time as the OSU football coach, Matta actually has interesting things to say. And, to the relief of reporters, he makes stupid questions not sound, uh, stupid. He has a habit of starting his response with, “Yeah,” as if he’s in agreement with the questioner before giving an answer. “A lot of times they’ll ask questions and you’re saying to yourself, ‘I don’t know why he asked it,’ but he’s got a job to do, he’s just trying to find an angle or whatever,” Matta says. “Honestly, I don’t know how I am because I never read the paper or watch the news.”
(You also have to admire the good-natured manner in which Matta handled Mark Titus, the benchwarmer-turned-blogger star who graduated in 2010. Could you imagine Bob Knight—or Tressel, for that matter—allowing a player to express himself so candidly?)
Dealing with microphones stuck in his face may remind him of his high school days, but, unfortunately, he can’t replicate the jumper that helped him score a school record 45 points. A pair of back surgeries in the summer of 2007 essentially crippled his right foot, thus the brace. “It is what it is,” he says. “You come to the realization that, ‘OK, the right foot’s never going to work again,’ so you sort of deal with it. I try to get stronger every day. I do my muscle activation. I do my stretching, my physical therapy and all that stuff and you just hope in the end it holds strong.”
He doesn’t see the injury hampering his coaching career or the pursuit of that elusive national championship. Matta knows the Final Four appearance in 2007 seems like ancient history to the fans who want more than early exits from the tournament. But he’s not willing to concede that the past few seasons, including losses in the Sweet 16 the past two years, have been failures.
“Ultimately, the success we’ve had, I couldn’t be prouder,” he says. “We’ve competed for a national championship. Getting back there, yeah, that’s the goal. That’s what we’re trying to do, but I never want to shortchange our players on what they’ve accomplished throughout the season.”
O’Connell thinks Matta is underappreciated locally because he hasn’t brought home the big prize, but offers a different perspective from afar. “He wins a lot of basketball games,” he says. “The NCAA tournament is such a tough way to grade people because it’s one-and-done and it’s match-ups early on. It could be foul trouble. It could be a turned ankle, so it’s pretty tough to judge a guy strictly on the NCAA tournament.”
“You have to look at the whole picture and when you put it all together he’s definitely among the best there is,” he adds. “The rest of the country definitely views him as one of the guys in the small school bus on the way to the coaches’ hall of fame.”
That’s one place for sure where Matta could find a spot alongside Taylor, who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1986.
Craig Merz is a freelance writer.
