With the 2024-25 men’s college basketball season less than one month away, head coaches across the country are beginning to gain a better understanding of how their teams will shape up once they take the floor for their respective season openers.
For Ohio State head coach Jake Diebler, he is starting to realize that one of his team’s biggest strengths this season is their overall depth, which should play right into the fast-paced style they want to come out with starting Nov. 3 against Texas.
“Depth is a real strength for this team,” Diebler said during Ohio State’s team media day held at the Buckeyes’ practice court at Value City Arena on Tuesday. “It provides us with a great deal of versatility. We can play a lot of different types of lineups, whether it’s size, speed, (there are) interchangeable parts, and that’s valuable for us.”
Diebler said during his over 30-minute media day press conference that he feels his team does not have a starting five right now, but rather a “starting seven or eight,” each of whom he and his staff thinks can serve as successful starters during the season.
He also indicated that he sees the team running 10 or 11 players deep during the beginning of the regular season, meaning the majority of their 14-man active roster — not counting sophomore guard Taison Chatman, who is out for the season with a torn ACL — could all see time on the court in some capacity early on in the year.
Despite the team seemingly having a lot of viable options up and down the lineup, Diebler said one downside of this development is that he and his staff will have to soon determine who will see the floor in critical end-of-game situations. He said choosing the right guys to take the floor during the end of games will be especially important when they enter the gauntlet of conference play.
“The biggest challenge for me is figuring out how we’re going to end games,” he said. “Because we know this league is the deepest league in the country, and you’re going to have to be really good late…That’s something we’re working on daily and evaluating.”
Regardless of who gets the nod at the end of tightly-contested Big Ten games, Diebler said that having several players vying for significant playing time this season has created an ultra-competitive locker room who go at each other in practice every day, a development that he hopes stays with this program for years to come.
“It’s going to certainly present some challenges as far as finalizing the rotation, but the one thing that we do have is some healthy competition, and that’ll be valuable for us,” Diebler said. “There will be a time here soon where we’re going to have to define roles more specifically, but right now we’re giving guys an opportunity to grow and to some degree fail a little bit, figure out what fits them right now.
“I want this to be a program built on development where guys can continue to grow their game.”
