Big Ten title hope still there for Ohio State basketball

After beating Minnesota with a stellar second-half performance, the Ohio State basketball team still has a chance to win the Big Ten title. In fact, their chances increased after some of the other results that happened around the league were finalized.

In the game televised right before the Ohio State game, Penn State took down Michigan State. That dropped Michigan State one game below the Buckeyes in the Big Ten standings. That would give the Buckeyes a double-bye in the Big Ten Tournament if it started today.

That leaves only Illinois, Purdue, and Wisconsin ahead of the Buckeyes in the standings. Indiana almost gave the Ohio State basketball team a great deal of help last night, but they blew their game against the Badgers. Ohio State remains a half-game behind them, as well as Purdue.

The good news for Chris Holtmann and his squad is that they control their own destiny. They have 7 games left in a short amount of time, but they can win the conference title if they play those games right. They play the team leading the Big Ten in Illinois still.

If the Buckeyes were to win the rest of their games, they would win the Big Ten title because they would hold the tiebreaker over the Illini because of the head-to-head victory over them. While winning the next 7 games is going to be hard, it’s not impossible.

In that 7-game stretch, the Buckeyes only play two ranked teams. They take on the aforementioned Illinois squad and they also take on Michigan State. Everyone else is an unranked foe below them in the standings. They are more talented than everyone else.

If the Buckeyes somehow come back and win the conference, that changes my outlook of how good this team can be in March. Doing that would make me think they could actually make the Elite Eight or better. That’s how much I respect this conference and what winning it means.

We’ll see what this team can do down the stretch. Their next game is at home against Iowa on Saturday in a rescheduled matchup.