Ode(n) To The Buckeyes

A quiet little news item out of Columbus, Ohio, today. No, nothing about the undefeated Ohio State football team and which of the two remaining one-loss teams will face the Buckeyes in the Fiesta Bowl for the college football National Championship. Not even anything at all about the fascist Bowl Championship Series, that embattled method of using as many obscure computer statistics and quality matrixes as possible to determine which two teams most deserve to play for the National Championship - although that might come up later.

No, this news item has to do with the college basketball debut of one Greg Oden, the freshman starting center for the men’s college basketball team at Ohio State. If you follow basketball at all, you’ve heard of him. He’s the guy from Lawrence North High School who led his team to three consecutive state titles and won the Indiana Mr. Basketball award last year. Year before that, as a junior, he won the Gatorade National Player of the Year award. Only one other junior has ever done that. You might have heard of him, too. He plays in the NBA, for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and they call him LeBron James.

Oden played in his first game for Ohio State tonight, having not participated with the Buckeyes as yet because of surgery over the summer to repair a torn wrist ligament. He scored 14 ponts and pulled down 10 boards - in only 23 minutes of play. Mike Conley, another highly-touted Ohio State freshman, who played with Oden at Lawrence North, had seven points and seven assists.

Oden might have gone straight to the Association if not for the new rule that forbids players from jumping directly from high school to the professional draft. He might also just as soon have gone to school, though, since Conley was going to Ohio State regardless of what happened to Oden, and it was widely accepted that Oden, at least a little bit, wanted to play at least one season of college ball with his high school teammate.

I’m all for the new NBA rule, since it should help college basketball, which I enjoy far more than pro basketball, which I am starting to think of more and more as the Dunking Thugs League. I would have preferred that Oden go to Indiana, of course, but for that to have happened former Indiana head coach Mike Davis (motto: What, me recruit? I can barely coach!) would have had to recruit him, and Davis spent way too much of last season trying to figure out a way to get himself out of the job at Indiana without getting fired. He would have been fired if he had not gotten the Hoosiers back to the NCAA tournament, a goal they had failed to achieve in each of the previous two years.

But Oden went to Ohio State, and that’s fine. Indiana is in transition right now - and has been since Myles Brand (former President of Indiana University, now President of the NCAA, and whose exploitation of Bob Knight to advance his career is analagous to President Bush’s exploitation of 9/11 to advance - or rather, keep alive - his own) fired Knight in 2000.

We get at least one year to watch Greg Oden and the Ohio State Buckeyes run riot through the rest of the teams in the NCAA. If - no, when - Ohio State wins the National Championship next April, Oden will likely announce that he is going pro, where he will be drafted first and likely go on to have the kind of career few in the NBA have ever had.

Have you seen this guy play? He’s listed at 7’0”, which I suspect is being conservative - he may go a bit taller than that. And he might be a touch on the lean side to be able to play rough in the low post with some of the bigger centers in the Association. But that might not matter, because Oden can move like a shooting guard - he has a fluid way of moving with the ball that more than belies his size. He may not have the innate skill of a David Robinson or Tim Duncan, but he is far more mobile. He sort of reminds me of Hakeem Olajuwon in the days before he added the H to his name, except a lot faster. It would have been interesting to see Oden play against Shaquille O’Neal in the latter’s prime - if you can call it a prime; O’Neal, who has always gotten by on size rather than skill(z), would likely have found it impossible, even on his best day, to defend Oden. Oden might not have been able to keep O’Neal out of the low post, but he would have been able to swat most of his junk back toward the stands.

Barring injury, he is likely to become one of the most electrifying players to grace the Assocation since Michael Jordan - but he is not yet a complete player. He has a unique opportunity to - maybe - change the way kids approach basketball; he has to get used to playing against players his own size, or at least closer to it than the kids he played against in high school. He also needs to put on some weight in order to bang against the kind of players he will post up against in the Association. By staying in school, he could learn those things and set an example by showing younger kids that even the most talented of players can make their game better by going to school. Oden is a smart kid, unlike the Glenn Robinsons and Kevin Garnetts of the world, who could not have graduated college if they had roomed with Stephen Hawking; he might be able to resist the temptation of the pro draft - in part because there is no question that he goes as the first pick, regardless of when he goes - in order to play a year or two more with Conley and maybe set some NCAA records, as well as win a few Big Ten titles and National Championships.

Regardless of what happens in the future, Greg Oden is in college for at least a year. And today, December 2, 2006, is the day he arrived on the scene.