Ohio State-Purdue: Victory Keeps Buckeyes' NCAA Hopes Alive

Attention Buckeye fans: Don't buy your NIT tickets just yet. 

After Ohio State' s surprising 80-77 overtime victory over No. 15 Purdue Tuesday night, the Buckeyes are still alive for a possible NCAA Tournament bid.

Although I am not ready to proclaim this year's team worthy of a ticket to the Big Dance, Tuesday's upset win at least gives Buckeye hoops fans a reason to watch Sunday's home game against No. 18 Michigan State.  

If Coach Thad Matta's squad wins again on Sunday, things could get very interesting.

Going into Tuesday's game, most experts agreed that Matta's squad still had no "signature" wins to help make its case for one of the 34 at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament.  Ohio State had also lost four games in a row—and six of their last eight—including an embarrassing 71-57 setback at Minnesota last Saturday, and had gone from a solid NCAA tournament prospect a few weeks ago to one of the last eight teams left out of Joe Lunardi's most recent ESPN brackets.

Now the Buckeyes have their signature win to go with a strength of schedule ranking that hovers around 30 and an RPI that should improve from 55 after the Tuesday's victory.

It seems resonable to predict that Ohio State is back in the race for one of the last at-large bids.  Notice I am still talking about an at-large bid because I have no illusions that this year's team can play well enough over a three or four game stretch to win the Big Ten Tournament.

If the Buckeyes can double their pleasure by beating Coach Tom Izzo's Michigan State Spartans this weekend, their record would move to 19-12 overall (10-8 in Big Ten play).  This would lock the Buckeyes into the No. 5 seed in the conference tournament and likely pit them against No. 4 seed Michigan State in a quarterfinal game on Friday, March 14. 

In my opinion, a second straight win against the Spartans would make it very difficult to keep a 20-win Ohio State out of the NCAA Tournament regardless of the outcome of their semifinal game the next day.

 A guy can dream can't he?