Ohio State basketball tries to keep it rolling vs. Indiana

The Ohio State basketball team will take on the Hoosiers today at noon and will try to win their sixth straight game.

With great ranking comes great responsibility. That responsibility for the Ohio State basketball team is to beat teams that they should beat. Given that they are ranked fourth in the country and IU is not ranked at all, winning today at noon on ESPN falls into that category.

That doesn’t mean the Hoosiers are a bad team and should be taken lightly. In fact, just the opposite should be true. IU is a frisky team that can’t be taken too lightly. This is a team that has beaten Iowa twice this season and has won a couple of games in a row.

Kyle Young will draw the assignment of guarding IU’s best player, Trayce Jackson-Davis. The center is IU’s leading scorer at 19.4 points per game. He also leads them in rebounds and blocks, at 9.4 and 1.7 respectively. The Buckeyes need to keep him under wraps.

Even though IU has beaten Iowa twice, they have lost to every other ranked team that they have faced. Ohio State clearly has more talent. They finally face a Big Ten team who doesn’t light it up from three. IU only shoots it at 34.6% from deep as a team.

The Buckeyes have been hot lately. Duane Washington in particular seems to have found a good balance between being aggressive and taking bad shots. Young is also coming off a game where he had a career-high in points. Both should be focal points of the offense in this one.

Game prediction: Ohio State 78 IU 65

The Buckeyes are clearly the more talented team and are playing the best of these two teams right now. If Ohio State doesn’t win this game by double digits I will be very surprised. Ohio State just has to stay focused throughout and play their game.

This is the only meeting between these two teams this year. In fact, a game between these two teams is the last basketball game I attended before the pandemic starting. Here’s hoping we can start attending games soon!