It’s difficult to look at the Buckeye’s record and declare the season anything but a success.  Difficult but not impossible. 

Despite their sterling record, Jim Foster’s team underachieved in the sense that they never appeared quite as good as they should have been.  They also underachieved big time when they lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament. 

Ohio State was clearly the best team in the Big 10.  But they had higher aspirations.  It is hard to say how they stacked up against the nation’s best.  Foster played a creampuff non-conference schedule and the team lost to the first good team they faced in the NCAA’s.  The Buckeyes split their only two non-conference games against top opponents, beating Oklahoma and losing convincingly to LSU.  While they were the conference’s best, their performance gives them no claim to be among the nation’s elite.  The talent on the team should have put them in that group, thus it is reasonable to say that they underachieved. 

Anchoring her team’s success was center Jessica Davenport.  She had an excellent season and deserved the All-American accolades she received.   If anything her 18.7 points and 8.9 rebounds a game understate her contribution to the Buckeyes.  When she is on the floor, everything revolves around her.  The Buckeyes offense runs through her and she is an incredibly disruptive force on defense. 

She was surrounded with enough talent to make OSU one of the nation’s top teams and it that talent that did not produce enough.  There certainly was enough raw talent to propel the Buckeyes to the top.  But the remainder of the players seemed less than the sum of their talents. 

Power forward Debbie Merrill was perhaps the exception.  In her one season at Ohio State, she stepped provided an effective compliment to Davenport in the post.  Brandie Hoskins had a very good year, but as was the case with the team as a whole, she had the potential to be better.  In watching the Buckeyes, it appeared that is wasn’t as much that the individual players weren’t playing up to their potential as it was that the system didn’t allow them to.  Foster’s system is deliberate and patterned.  He has assembled a team of excellent athletes, but they don’t put their athleticism to its best use. 

Foster has won a lot of games playing his style, but it just doesn’t appear that he maximizing his players’ talents.  Ohio State did not play as many difficult teams during the year as they should have.  This was a veteran team.  It’s not clear how a non-conference schedule that included Eastern Kentucky, Nichols State, Western Illinois, Dayton, Sacred Heart, Canisius and Wright State helped prepare the team for the NCAA tournament. 

The Buckeyes were supposed to win the Big 10 and they did.  They were supposed to play deep into the NCAA tournament and they fell way short.  The latter will be the lasting impression of the 2005-06 Buckeyes.

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