The slide of the Ohio State men’s basketball program from perennial NCAA Tournament lock to eventually missing the postseason entirely was a gradual one. In his June news conference addressing the firing of coach Thad Matta after the most-successful 13-year stretch in school history, athletic director Gene Smith essentially said that the direction of the program required him to make a change even at such an awkward time in the calendar.

At the heart of it all, though, was the fact that the program’s ability to recruit and retain top-notch players was waning. In an attempt to process how that happened, The Dispatch acquired the official recruiting logs for the men’s basketball program for the final five seasons of Matta’s tenure leading into the 2016-17 season, as well as performance reviews for each member of the staff during Matta’s entire contract. Every time a member of the coaching staff takes a trip and spends university money for recruiting, he must submit a log of the trip indicating where he went, what he spent money on and how much was spent.

After the analysis of hundreds of pages of data starting with the 2011-12 school year and concluding with 2015-16, a trend emerges. Although resources and budget were never in issue, Ohio State was putting in fewer hours on the recruiting trail while consistently missing out on prospects that could have injected life into the program.

“I obviously know some of the people who we were trying to recruit, so I was seeing that we were not being as successful selling our program as we had been,” Smith told The Dispatch in an interview for this story. “We had enjoyed tremendous success for maybe an eight-year run, where I know guys we were after and we were getting our fair share of who we were after. And then that began to wane over time. We would literally talk about candidates and prospects we were trying to recruit, and we weren’t getting them.

“That’s really what I was speaking to (at the news conference), that we needed to have more success in convincing the talented people that we needed to recruit to come here. That was beginning to wane. We were losing the battles.”

Recruiting does not solely come down to dollars and cents. In years where Ohio State succeeded at recruiting locally, for example, it would obviously have had to spend less money. In addition, the recruiting logs only show locations, dates and dollars spent, and they do not take into account phone calls, text messages or recruits visiting campus themselves.

Here is what the data shows.

Visits were decreasing

In the 2011-12 school year, Matta made 32 recruiting trips to 18 different cities. Those numbers climbed to 38 and 23, respectively, in 2012-13, as Ohio State signed the No. 39 recruiting class in 2013 according to the 247Sports.com composite rankings.

Those visit numbers drop in each of the next three years, though. Matta made 27 trips to 18 different cities in 2013-14, 14 trips to nine cities in 2014-15 and visited 13 cities once each in 2015-16. During that latter year, Matta made only two trips outside of the April and July evaluation periods.

Infogram

Both of those trips came in September 2015. Matta took a chartered jet to Chatham, Virginia, and also drove to Cleveland. Both were day trips.

The trend remains the same for Matta’s assistants, although they were busier. Ohio State’s busiest recruiter during the time period was associate coach Dave Dickerson, and after making a staff-high 53 visits in the 2012-13 season he remained atop the leaderboard for the next two seasons even while making fewer trips. Dickerson made 45 recruiting trips in 2013-14, 35 the following year and 27 in 2015-16. That latter year, the busiest recruiter was Greg Paulus, who made 31 trips.

Spending dipped

With fewer trips being made, the Buckeyes were spending less money on the recruiting trail. Ohio State officially spent $204,548.23 on recruiting in 2011-12, more than double any other year during this stretch. Of that money, $28,402.72 was spent recruiting New York, which received five visits: three from Jeff Boals and one each from Matta and Dickerson.

Both the total travel tab for 2011-12 and that for trips to New York appear to have been impacted significantly by including the cost of private flights. In subsequent years, the cost of such flights often was not listed, meaning those trips were taken on donor or booster private planes.

In 2012-13, Ohio State spent $79,740.52 on recruiting. That climbed slightly to $81,038.76 the next year, before dipping to $72,577.44 in 2014-15 and to a low of $66,938.11 in 2015-16.

Smith made it clear that resources were never an issue and that private options for travel were available “above and beyond what was needed on occasions.”

“Nothing changed (budget-wise),” he said. “Operational dollars were always there.”

State of the state

The inability to keep top prospects located within state lines from going elsewhere became a growing source of frustration for Ohio State fans, whether it was Nigel Hayes (Toledo) to Wisconsin, Luke Kennard (Franklin) to Duke or Nick Ward (Gahanna) to Michigan State.

During that five-year stretch, Ohio State coaches made 81 recruiting trips to locations within the state. Georgia was the second-most visited state by OSU coaches with 59, and Texas was third with 50.

Ohio wasn’t the most-visited state in the final two years of the data, however. Michigan received a year-high nine visits in 2014-15 and Georgia had 14 in 2015-16.

Performance reviews

In what would be his final review, Matta’s 2016 self-evaluation portion stated that his “performance meets expectations” in recruiting, and he listed recruiting as one-third of his job alongside coaching and building the culture of the program. In that latter category, Matta checked the box indicating that there was need for improvement.

Also that year, Dickerson wrote in his self-evaluation that he would “refocus efforts to more accurately identify recruits who best fit the program on the court as well as off the court” and “recruit high quality student athletes who have a full appreciation for The Ohio State University.” In Paulus’ evaluation conducted by Matta, he listed under key areas or priorities for growth/improvement/focus for the upcoming year: “Continue to recruit the highest level student-athletes that fit The Ohio State University and our program.”

But throughout Matta’s tenure, the need to kick recruiting into a higher gear or simply to start doing better was never stated in any way in any yearly evaluation, each of which was done by Smith. In listing Matta’s strengths in 2013, Smith wrote that he “recruits athletes capable of academic and athletic success at OSU.”

Matta was fired before his 2016-17 performance review was scheduled to take place. Smith said his job has been to empower his coaches to recruit elite players, but that’s where it stops.

“There is a lot of stuff we give our coaches, so whenever they’re in the living room or wherever they are, they have the pitch,” Smith said. “We do that a lot, but I never say, ‘You need to go recruit Georgia.’ I do say that, bottom line, we need to make sure that we’re recruiting the best and the brightest and get after them, find them, prospect them. From a tactical point of view, I don’t do that. That’s their jobs. That’s what I pay them to do. They’re my experts.”

Decent classes, poor retention

Ohio State’s class of 2012 consisted of just one player: Amedeo Della Valle, who left to play professionally in Italy after his sophomore season. The class of 2013 brought Marc Loving and Kam Williams to campus and was rated 39th nationally by 247Sports, but the following class was ranked sixth nationally thanks to the signature of five-star prospect D’Angelo Russell. He headlined the four-man class and left for the NBA after one year. Keita Bates-Diop and Jae’Sean Tate are still on the roster and David Bell transferred out of the program this past spring to be closer to his pregnant girlfriend.

That class was followed by the infamous five-man class of 2015, all of whom — Daniel Giddens, Austin Grandstaff, A.J. Harris, JaQuan Lyle and Mickey Mitchell — left the program, and only Lyle remained beyond his freshman season. That class was ranked fifth nationally.

The final full class signed by Matta’s staff, in 2016, was ranked 42nd nationally. Micah Potter, Andre Wesson and C.J. Jackson remain; Derek Funderburk does not, after failing to remain academically eligible while redshirting.

From those five recruiting classes, the Buckeyes signed 16 players. Nine of them left early, and only one — Russell — went to the NBA. Starting with the 2012-13 year, the APR for the men’s basketball team dipped each year from 977 to 975 in 2013-14, 967 in 2014-15 and 950 in 2015-16. The ranking for Matta’s last year has not yet been released but is expected to slip again.

Conclusion

None of these numbers gives a solitary reason why Ohio State found itself in the situation it did leading to Matta’s ouster. What they do show is that fewer resources were being utilized as the program continually missed on top prospects, both within the state and elsewhere, and eventually found itself unable to retain commitments in future classes.

How much Matta’s declining health contributed is a matter of conjecture, but it is a fact that his trips were declining right alongside the program’s level of on-court success. Smith declined to comment on the effort level being put forth by coaches in the previous regime, but the lack of recruiting success ultimately led to the coaching change.

ajardy@dispatch.com

@AdamJardy