Chris Holtmann shares how late-season rally impacts Ohio State's future

Following Ohio State’s upset win over Maryland, head coach Chris Holtmann shared how the late-season rally for the Buckeyes impacted the team’s future.

The two wins in a row improved Ohio State’s record to 13-17, although still a down year for the team. Holtmann acknowledged a lot of different and difficult conversations about the future of the team.

He spoke about that and more following the win over the Terrapins.

“Just a lot of conversations,” Holtmann said. “I think they’ve got to know you care about them as a person. If they don’t feel like that, they’re not going to be willing to have those kinds of conversations and hopefully our guys do.”

Holtmann was asked about what went wrong this season and why the team was under .500. He saved that answer for another day.

“I think all those things do,” Holtmann said. “I think all those things do. Those will be thoughts I have in the offseason. Right now, I’m focused on the work and continuing to play. Yeah, those are all things I’ll think about. We have practiced pretty well for the better part of multiple weeks and I think it’s progressively gotten better. Even when we went through that long losing streak, our coaches walked out of practice and said, ‘man, we’re practicing pretty well.’ I will tell you that we’ve had in the last month that we’ve had way more good practices than bad practices.”

But as far as self belief, Holtmann said there was plenty of it with few games remaining on the current schedule.

“I think they have to have a belief that we will see some results even though we were getting run out of games. you’ve got two options there — you can say I’m going to do my own thing and become independent or I’m going to lean in together, be a part of a team and be highly coachable. It really has been about focusing on the work and the work in front of us each and every day.

“We’ve tried to communicate to them if we do that enough, you have to trust we will see the results. We’ve said that for three weeks and I’m glad we’re seeing some.”

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Ohio State concludes the regular season on the road Saturday at Michigan State.