Ohio State women’s basketball repeating as Big Ten champions is an unreasonable expectation

From now until the start of preseason camp in August, Land-Grant Holy Land will write articles on a different theme each week. This week is all about our unreasonable expectations. You can catch up on everything Content of the Theme Week here and all our Unreasonable expectations here.

Ohio State women’s basketball looked like a team on the rocks after the 2023-2024 season ended. The team’s strong veteran base left, players transferred and the three-year run that included two conference titles and deep NCAA tournament runs felt like it was drifting further into the rearview mirror. The Buckeyes responded in a big way, but it’s unreasonable to expect the program to repeat such conference success.

Last season, the Buckeyes had momentum to spare in the second half of the year. After winning the first 14 games in 2024, the Scarlet and Gray defeated bitter rivals in the Michigan Wolverines to secure an outright Big Ten regular season championship. Then things changed.

Head coach Kevin McGuff’s team lost three of its next four games, which isn’t a great thing to do in the postseason. It started with an upset loss to the Maryland Terrapins, the first time a McGuff-led Ohio State squad had lost its first game of the tournament when it entered as the No. 1 seed, an 82-61 defeat that saw the Terps dominate on the plates. .

After beating the Maine Black Bears in the first round of the NCAA tournament, Ohio State squandered a double-digit lead in the second quarter, losing 75-63 to the No. 7 Duke Blue Devils.

That loss ended the careers of three Buckeye starters. Guards Jacy Sheldon and Celeste Taylor, along with forward Rebeka Mikulasikova, are all saying goodbye to Columbus, Ohio. Joining them was forward Taiyier Parks, who came off the bench for the presence of paint in her lone season playing for McGuff.

In the portal, guards Diana Collins, Emma Shumate, and Rikki Harris all left. Most painful for Buckeye fans was Harris, who played four seasons in scarlet and gray and joined Sheldon and Mikulasikova at the university. Additionally, Shumate and Harris’ potential to fill in for the lost experience disappeared, leaving fans wondering what’s next for the program.

Then McGuff traded his coaching hat for his general manager hat.

To say the Buckeyes have been replenished is an understatement. Ohio State was an early winner of the transfer portal nationally. McGuff added two Power Five Conference players who brought game-changing impacts to their previous schools.

Guard Chance Gray traded Oregon Duck green for Buckeyes scarlet and gray. The sophomore started all but one game for the Ducks in her first two NCAA seasons. A few days later, it was 6-foot-4 forward Ajae Petty who withdrew from the Kentucky Wildcats program. Petty averaged 14.2 points and 10.6 rebounds for a struggling Kentucky squad in her lone season as a starter.

They joined a top 10 ranked 2024 freshman recruiting class headlined by point guard Jaloni Cambridge, fresh off a National Championship appearance, with it being Cambridge who provided the spark for Montverde Academy.

A total of five recruits are entering Ohio State this fall. Of those, three fall among ESPN’s top 100 recruits in the country. Cambridge, the No. 2 recruit overall, joins guard Ava Watson and forward Ella Hobbs on that list. Plus: forward Seini Hicks and center Elsa Lemmila.

Add all that to a returning core group, including forwards Cotie McMahon, Taylor Thierry and guard Madison Greene, and it doesn’t really feel like a rebuild.

Ohio State won’t miss repeating as conference champions because of a lack of talent, but it will because the other teams around it have a significant advantage in chemistry and familiarity.

Look no further than the new Big Ten teams from the West. The UCLA Bruins and USC Trojans join the conference to not only expand the B1G from coast to coast, but also to move the power of the conference’s women’s basketball teams into another stratosphere.

USC won the final Pac-12 Tournament, upsetting the regular-season winning Stanford Cardinals, then followed it up with a run to the Elite Eight before falling to the UConn Huskies. Led by freshman Juju Watkins, a star who forced the professional basketball ranks to reconsider whether underclassmen should be allowed into the WNBA Draft.

As a freshman, Watkins was a First Team AP All-American, Ann Meyers-Drysdale Award winner and averaged 27.1 points and 7.3 rebounds per game.

Then there are the Bruins, with 6-foot-4 center Lauren Betts and a team with only two upperclassmen who advanced to the Sweet Sixteen after spending much of the season in the top 5.

Ohio State faced both teams last season and lost. To the Buckeyes’ credit, the Trojans were the first game of the season when no one had college tape on Watkins; although that may not have changed the final outcome much.

These two sides are favorites to win the Big Ten in their first seasons out of the Pac-12. For the reasons stated above and more, it makes all the sense in the world.

Additionally, existing Big Ten teams like the Maryland Terrapins and Indiana Hoosiers lost players but made up for it in the portal. Head coach Brenda Frese added seven transfers to the Terps. Including former Rutgers Scarlet Knight standout Kaylene Smikle, who earned Second Team All-Big Ten honors as a freshman. Plus the Atlantic-10 Player of the Year, two former UConn recruits and the Big East Co-Defensive Player of the Year.

All that on a team that Frese is always in the conversation surrounding the postseason.

If the Buckeyes want to compete with other teams at the top of the conference, they need to get on the same page quickly. If it’s February and Ohio State is still figuring things out, it will be a tough road to a strong postseason.

Something that will help is a lighter non-conference schedule. Facing the Trojans, UCLA Bruins and Tennessee Volunteers before the Big Ten calendar last year made sense, as the Buckeyes were stronger on paper than they have been since before the pandemic. Avoiding some of those big matchups, as the Buckeyes did in the 2021-2022 season, gives a new group time to find itself.

The sooner the Scarlet and Gray put the pieces together, the better chance Ohio State has of alerting the conference.