Becoming A Better Buckeye Basketball Fan, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Jared Sullinger

Let me start this post off with a confession. I cannot truthfully say that at any point in my life, I have considered the success of the Ohio State basketball team pivotal to my overall happiness. The closest I had ever come before this year was watching Oden and Mike Conley's squad fight for a national championship against an unreal Florida team in March 2007. I think the degree to which I cared had more to do with the amount of shit I knew I was going to get the next day at school, from people who knew what a huge OSU fan I was in general. Sure, they lost, but was I going to cry myself to sleep the way I was prepping myself for during the 1997 Rose Bowl when Jake the Snake Plummer almost broke my heart? Or the way I may or may not actually have after consecutive national championship losses in the '06 and '07 seasons? No.

Like many people, Buckeye football had been far and away my main college sports focus for my whole life. Not to mention the added problem of (note: another confession coming) my upbringing in Syracuse leading me to believe that the Big East put forth a much better brand of basketball than the Big Ten could ever hope to. I have never been as excited for a basketball game in my life than I was for Syracuse's title game against Kansas in April of 2003. That was one of those tournaments where, like the  '04 Red Sox World Series, I can remember where I was for every big moment, and as sports fans know, those kinds of games are few and far between in a lifetime- as they should be.

But it is my sincere hope that all of that will change for me this year as someone who has a newfound love for the Ohio State basketball team. As the minutes wound down in the OSU-Penn State game last night, I began experiencing a feeling I had previously reserved for OSU Football--simultaneous nervousness about the game's outcome, and pessimistic self-assurance that they would blow it and lose potential number 1 status. Sound familiar?

However, Jared Sullinger proved me wrong by taking over the game singlehandedly in the last 90 seconds, including an impressive 3-point play that proved to me that no one else is even on the radar for the best freshman in the country. In a college basketball year starved for true big men with a refined low-post game (called the most valuable commodity in college basketball by South Carolina coach Darrin Horn), JSully has averaged 17.6 points and 9.9 rebounds per game, an average that impresses even more when one considers that the Big Ten is a league in which teams win scoring 65, not 105. I'm trying to savor this season as much as I can, before Sullinger becomes an easy lottery pick and Lighty and Lauderdale graduate. As the game's closing seconds wound down, I experienced another strange feeling: actual happiness and relief at the outcome, and the pride in a team that I usually reserve for the one that plays in the Horseshoe.