Can Ohio State basketball make a run in the NCAA Tournament?

Buckeye Talk: Ohio State podcast by cleveland.com

cleveland.com

Sports, Football

4.5 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ohio State basketball is back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2022. The Buckeyes earn a No. 8 seed and will play No. 9-seeded TCU on Friday. On this episode of Buckeye Talk, Stephen Means and Stefan Krajisnik break down the importance of OSU's return to the big dance and whether it's capable of making a run. Thanks for listening to Buckeye Talk and sign up to get text messages from experts Stephen Means, Stefan Krajisnik and Andrew Gillis at 614-350-3315. Get the insider analysis, have your voice heard on the Buckeye Talk podcast and connect with the best Buckeye community out there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, hey, where you've been?
0:17.7	Bucket talk is about to begin.
0:21.1	Hey, hey, hey, come on, man.
0:31.8	Welcome back to Buckeye Talk.
0:33.1	I'm Stephen Means, and that is Stefan Christnick.
0:35.1	And the drought is officially over.
0:38.5	The Ohio State basketball team is back in the NCAA tournament. They are in eight seat and they are 31st
0:43.7	overall of the 68 teams in the tournament. They will play on Thursday. They are favored by two and a
0:49.7	half points against TCU at the time that we're recording this Sunday evening.
0:56.5	Stefan was on as Jake Debler talked.
1:00.3	I mean, but seriously, before we get into like the nitty gritty stuff here, this is officially a successful season for our house day, right?
1:03.5	Just like simply getting into the NCAA tournament when you haven't been in since
1:08.3	20, 23.
1:09.1	That is success.
1:10.2	Correct.
1:10.5	And we're not even, we're not talking
1:12.6	about you made it to Dayton or you're, you squeaked in as one of the, you know, last four buys or
1:18.0	however they categorized. You just mentioned right before we started recording, they're,
1:22.3	they're kind of like number 31 overall as an eight seed. Like that's where they landed. Like that's,
1:27.4	that's really good. Like this is a team that, you know, had they gotten hot maybe a week earlier, right? If they had shown up better at Iowa or, you know, sneaked out a win at Michigan State or something like that, like a team that would have been getting some top 25 votes. Like this is a team that was it a, has it been a perfect season to this point? Absolutely not, right? There was a time probably about a month ago where we wondered if this team was going to make it into March Madness at all. And now they're at a point where they're playing their best basketball at the most important time of the year. And you've earned yourself an eight seed. And here you are dancing for the first time in four years. So they go 21 and 12, 12 and 8 in conference play and Jake Deber's second
2:03.6	official season. Like, what do we think of their path? Let's start there. Let's start with some
2:09.1	past stuff. I'll play obviously TCU on Thursday. And if they win, they'll get the Saturday.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from cleveland.com, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of cleveland.com and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.