BREAKING NEWS: Ohio State Showing Newfound Unbreakable Will Under Jake Diebler in Big Ten Play. READ MORE BELOW 👇🏽 👇🏽 
against Ohio State on Thursday felt like the entrance of Ivan Drago before his climactic fight with Rocky Balboa in “Rocky IV.”
Drago had been built throughout that movie as more robot than human. He killed Rocky’s rival-turned-mentor, Apollo Creed, in the second round of an exhibition bout. As Creed lay bleeding and breathless in the ring, Drago stated five words devoid of emotion into a microphone and television cameras, “If he dies, he dies.” The movie’s famed training montage contrasted Rocky running up mountains and chopping wood with Drago having steroids injected into his thigh and a surrounding of machinery for every run, punch and weightlifting rep.
Drago walked into the arena before rowdy home fans stoic before the pair’s fight, and as expected from a Hollywood script, he beat Rocky to a pulp in the first round, knocking him down. Still, Rocky walked back out for the same round that killed Creed and after surviving another barrage, cut the Russian beneath his left eye with a massive right hook. The movie then flipped the machine motif on its head.
“He’s not human,” Drago said in his corner after the round. “He’s like a piece of iron.”
No. 18 Maryland entered Value City Arena on Thursday with an 83-59 evisceration of Ohio State at home in its back pocket. Like Drago towering above Rocky, the Terrapins held an imposing size advantage over the Buckeyes in the frontcourt, as OSU power forward Devin Royal (6-6, 220) matched up with Julian Reese (6-9, 252) and center Sean Stewart (6-9, 220) with Derik Queen (6-10, 246).
The Buckeyes weathered their own barrage of punches, Maryland opening on a 15-2 run and holding a 17-point advantage at one stage in the first half. But Ohio State’s comeback for a 73-70 win flexed the unbreakable will Diebler’s team has shown as his first full Big Ten slate has worn on.
“I just want you to understand how connected and tough this group is,” Diebler said after the game. “I thought that was on full display tonight. Maybe we lacked a little bit of that early, but it took everything we had from a toughness and a togetherness (standpoint) to come back, win this game against this team who’s arguably playing some of the best basketball in the league right now.”
As counterintuitive as it may seem from a 24-point loss, one of the earliest examples of Ohio State demonstrating its toughness this season was in its first matchup with Maryland.
The Buckeyes played one of their worst halves of basketball in the first 20 minutes against the Terrapins on Dec. 4 and entered halftime trailing 50-17. That lead ballooned to 55-17 at the start of the second period, but Ohio State outscored Maryland by 14 points from there. It was an ultimately meaningless gesture considering the game in its totality, but at the very least, Diebler’s team didn’t quit.
Fast forward to Jan. 21 and Ohio State had every reason to get down off a three-game losing streak of one-score games and facing a 13-point halftime deficit at No. 11 Purdue, which had not lost a home game in nearly 700 days. Instead, the Buckeyes rallied to launch a massive run out of halftime and capture a 73-70 win to start a stretch of what is now four victories in five games.
“This group is connected,” Diebler said. “I don’t mean for that to sound cliché, and it may be hard to see something intangible like that at times, but it really is about our toughness and how connected we are. And we’re playing with better attention to detail, we’re playing with more smarter possessions and we’ve been doing that consistently. We talk, we’ve been doing it for most of the season, about growing. I always felt like this team had the ability to grow throughout the course of the season.”
Diebler’s crew rallying in such fashions is a breath of fresh air from what happened the last two seasons in conference play under Chris Holtmann. Ohio State won one game after the calendar turned to January 2023 then proceeded to lose 14 of its next 15 contests in a 16-19 campaign. A similar pattern followed in January 2024 when the Buckeyes beat Rutgers then lost nine of 11 games before Holtmann was fired and Diebler hired as interim, then made full-time head coach.
Those tribulations pained no man more than star point guard Bruce Thornton, a leader with an insatiable hunger for victory since he arrived on campus who started in his very first game as a freshman. The now-junior and three-time captain is overjoyed to see his team in a position to make the NCAA Tournament with a solid close to the season.
“It’s just a blessing,” Thornton said. “I just keep doing what I do, just keep putting in work and putting God first. I just knew, eventually, we keep trusting in God and keep putting him first, something good was gonna happen eventually. That definitely was tough. A lot of crying, a lot of frustration, but I just need to keep putting my head down and keep my faith first and just keep putting in work, including my teammates and coaching staff, and good things are happening.”
Thornton, more than anyone, willed Ohio State to a win over Maryland. Playing all 40 minutes, he racked up 31 points, 21 of them in the second half, and hit a game-winning 3-pointer.
“We needed to just win,” Thornton said. “Got a ranked opponent in the house, we came up short a couple times. I just told our guys, ‘Keep shooting wide open shots, keep making plays.’ We have a lot of games on our team. They made big-time plays over and over again, even though we had mistakes. Just move on to the next play.”
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