Ohio State Basketball releases full schedule for 2024-25 season

We are inside 50 days away from the start of the College Basketball season, and Jake Diebler's first official season as head coach of the Ohio State basketball team. There's a lot of excitement and anticipation around the Buckeye basketball roster that Diebler has put together, and we now know what their full schedule will look like. Let's take a deep dive into their schedule and how it shapes out.

The Big Ten released the full conference schedule for each time late Thursday afternoon, and the first thing that pops out to me for the Ohio State basketball team is travel. For starters, each conference team plays two conference games in December.

The Buckeyes will play the first of ten conference road games to start off Big Ten play at Maryland on December 4th. Then return home to take on Rutgers and their 4th-ranked recruiting class on December 7th in the Schottenstein Center.

When the month of January rolled around, we all knew the buckle up because the January slides were coming for the basketball team under Chris Holtmann. Hopefully, there are no more January scaries with Jake Diebler at the helm, but the January schedule I think favors the Ohio State basketball team despite every other game being a road game.

Drawing Michigan State and Oregon at home, and at Minnesota in the first three Big Ten games in the month of January will be good feel-out games as those three will all be figuring out where they stand in the conference. Then the Buckeyes play at Wisconsin, Indiana at home, and at Purdue in what will likely be the toughest stretch of the conference schedule.

February consists of four road games, featuring the Ohio State basketball team's lone West Coast trip on the season to take on UCLA and USC at the end of the month. The Big Ten has a rule that all Eastern and Central time schools will only make one trip to play the newly acquired West Coast programs by cramming it all into one week instead of multiple times in the season to save on travel. That's why there is no away trip to Oregon or Washington this season.

The month of February also contains the Ohio State basketball team's only matchup with Michigan. The Buckeyes get TTUN on February 16th in the middle of a three-game home stretch bookended by Washington and Northwestern.

In March, the Buckeyes will play two games. One being their final home game and Senior Day on March 4th against Nebraska, and then their second meeting with Indiana in Assembly Hall to finish out the regular season. Indiana is one of three schools the Buckeyes will face twice both home and away, along with Maryland and Nebraska.

It's going to be an interesting year for the Ohio State basketball team with a new head coach, new roster, the expanded conference, and lots of travel. Every game always has some kind of meaning to it, but with now just the top 15 teams in the conference make the Big Ten Tournament, every game matters now. The loaded non-conference schedule should help the Buckeyes get ready for the gauntlet that is the Big Ten.

Football season may just be getting underway, but the basketball season is right around the corner. In less than a month the Ohio State basketball team will square off with Cincinnati in the charity exhibition game. It's only a matter of time until the ball is tipped for real, and I can't wait.