College Basketball: Digital Big Ten Preview, #9 Ohio State

Let's continue our digital minded journey through the Big Ten Conference, from less best to best. We know these programs are out there, waiting for potential recruits to click in. And we'll see who gets it and who doesn't. Thus far, our tour has shown us #11 Northwestern and #10 Michigan.

Here we go.

#9: Ohio State

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Every coach is on Twitter, the first time I've come across this!

Weaknesses: There's no way to connect with the program from the athletics site at all.

Full Scouting Report:

Ohio State has had some athletes the past few years, and some squads to go with it. Seeing Greg Oden lead the Buckeyes to the 2007 Final had me pretty excited. The fact that Ohio State had been to the dance 21 times added fuel to the fire.

So I clicked on to the Ohio State Buckeyes Athletics site, link here, and as expected saw a pretty football-heavy message. No surprise there given the time of the year and the prestige of the program. So let's explore a little.

If you scrolled down just below that main window, you'll see the following tout for Buckeye Vision. Hundreds of Videos and Games just a click away? I can do that. Click.

I love Buckeye Vision. It is a pretty good mix of highlights, live games, and press conferences, naturally covering all sports. From what I could tell there is no way to access this information outside of the site, or take it with you to your own site/YouTube.

I went back to the home page and, sadly, couldn't find anything else in the form of original content. Nothing to see on the home page? Weird.

So I went on to the Men's Basketball home page, shown below or clickable here. There were the standard things you'd see on any site - rosters, schedules, and a couple news articles. But nothing else. Weird.


I saw the button on the far right, +More, and thought... Maybe here? History of the program was revealed. Cool. I clicked in.

Here's what I saw.

Now that would qualify as a letdown. So I clicked out, and scrolled down the page. Looking for something. This is THE Ohio State University. There has to be something, right?

Well I did find a link to get their media guide (shown below). But that's it.

So there's no way to follow the program, nothing special really outside of the Buckeye Vision. How in the world is OSU ranked as high (assuming you find spot #9 to be high)? Well see below. A bit of a tour on Twitter shows you that the entire coaching staff is up and going on Twitter. Head Coach Thad Matta's updates are protected. But you can check out Assistant Coaches Brandon Miller, Alan Major, and Jeff Boals. All 3 have between 200 and 500 followers, and all 3 do a solid job of showing off personality, engaging, and telling a bit about what makes them tick. I enjoyed looking at their pages (shown below).

So, more than any school thus far, the Ohio State has potential. They have an entire staff on Twitter and engaging with it. I expect they will learn from this, not just about how people use technology, but on how to communicate what they as a program stand for. And that will lead OSU up the ratings. But for now, I just have to hope they can get these sites linked into the basketball page!

Click back tomorrow as our Big Ten tour continues.

Andy