Ohio State put a fitting cap on the wildest weekend of the 2017-18 college basketball season to date with an 80-64 upset of No. 1 Michigan State Sunday evening in Columbus.
Ohio State rolls over No. 1 Michigan State, 80-64
It’s only right that the wildest weekend of the college basketball season featured the top-ranked team getting stomped.
The dominant victory moved the Buckeyes to a surprising 4-0 start in Big Ten play. OSU was picked to finish No. 11 in the conference before the start of the season. The loss was the Spartans’ first since an 88-81 defeat at the hands of Duke on Nov. 14 at the Champions Classic in Chicago.
The decisive loss by the nation’s top-ranked team wraps up a wild week in which 12 of the top 17 teams in the current AP poll were beaten at least once. Eleven top-25 teams suffered defeats on Saturday and Sunday alone.
Villanova, which figures to retain its status as the No. 1 team in the country following a one-week hiatus, was the only top-five squad that made it through the weekend unscathed. Three of those four losses by top five teams came at the hands of an unranked foe.
The star of stars for Ohio State on Sunday was junior forward Keita Bates-Diop, who might get more of the country to start paying attention to him after dropping 32 points and seven rebounds on the Spartans. The performance was not an outlier for Bates-Diop, who came into the contest averaging 19.3 points and 8.9 boards. He has scored 16 points or more in all but one of his team’s 17 games this season.
After a back-and-forth start, Ohio State seized control of the game with a 12-0 run to end the first half. The game was tied at 27 with 2:02 to play in the opening frame, but the Buckeyes carried both a 41-29 lead and all the momentum in the world with them into the locker room following an Andrew Dakich buzzer-beater from about 35 feet.
The rout rolled on after the break, as Ohio State scored eight of the first 10 points of the second half. The Spartans never got closer than 14 points again.
The loss snapped Michigan State’s 14-game winning streak, which had been tied for the longest in the country. That honor now belongs solely to West Virginia, which won its 14th in a row Saturday night with an 89-76 triumph over No. 7 Oklahoma.
At 4-0, Ohio State joins Purdue as the only Big Ten teams without a conference loss.
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