Chris Holtmann's psychic abilities, video games and the secret behind Ohio State basketball's succes

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- It started with a secret meeting, a strategic real estate purchase and a trip to Best Buy.

That's how Chris Holtmann got Ohio State basketball off to a 9-0 Big Ten start in his first season with the Buckeyes.

Truthfully, it's much more than that. Some of it obvious, some of it below the surface level. There's a secret to this start that goes beyond these two truths:

* 1: That Keita Bates-Diop, finally healthy, is playing at a level that might get him selected in the first round of this year's NBA Draft.

* 2: That the Big Ten is still tough, but not nearly as strong as anticipated before the season, and the Buckeyes are taking advantage of that.

So a team picked to finish 11th in the league, and tagged as a rebuilding project before anyone saw it play a game is instead 18-4 and unbeaten in the Big Ten at the halfway point of conference play. How? Here's the secret:

"There's a connection between this group and our coaching staff that's happened a whole lot quicker than I've expected," Holtmann said. "A whole lot quicker. A lot of that speaks to their ability to be open to what we're trying to do."

He said that after Ohio State beat Nebraska on Monday night, explaining something senior forward Jae'Sean Tate said. If you're looking for one universal reason for why the Buckeyes have been such a surprising upstart this year, maybe it's this:

"I think Coach Holtmann, I don't know if he can see the future, I don't know what it is," Tate said. "Every game we go into, he knows exactly how the game is gonna go ... He has done a great job of preparing us with the mindset we need going into games."

This is a coaching staff -- Holtmann, plus assistants Ryan Pedon, Terry Johnson and Mike Schrage -- totally in sync with a group of players. It's far from a perfect relationship. Every team will hit its bumps during a season, and the Buckeyes certainly had some at the beginning of this one. More could be coming. It's a long season. But 13 wins in the last 14 games suggests an alignment that's been absent here over the last few years.

You'd need extra fingers and toes to count up the times Thad Matta came into a postgame news conference completely dumbfounded by the effort his team had just put out. How'd we lose that game? That's an unavoidable feeling when you're coaching teenagers and young men. Every team has letdowns. But it started happening here at a problematic rate, one that suggested a disconnect between players and coaches.

Matta did a lot of great things in his 13 years in Columbus, and should be revered accordingly, but toward the end it was clear that he didn't have his finger on the pulse of his team. Through 22 games this season, it's clear that Holtmann does. He has a plan. The players trust it. They were strangers nine months ago. Now they work in cohesion like a group that's been together for years. Holtmann made a point to expedite that process upon arriving in Columbus.

First it was the secret Friday meeting, Holtmann sneaking over to the Ohio State basketball facility three days before he was officially introduced to fans and the media in a news conference on Monday, June 12. That short get-together, which included a group meal in the locker room, was the first step toward what's happening now.

It was just Holtmann and his players. No mandates then. Just introductions, and listening. One team source told cleveland.com that it in some ways felt like a healing process for a confused group of players. They finally felt like they had the right mix of players to have a good season, and then they lost their head coach on the first day of summer session classes in a surprise move made because of recruiting issues and a general lack of momentum for the program.

"(That meeting) was big so you can see the type of person (Holtmann) is, where he's coming from," junior guard C.J. Jackson said. "Once he came over and talked to us before, it showed that he cared and wasn't in it for himself."

Then Holtmann had to buy a house. He's always tried to keep his home near campus. He did it at Gardner-Webb, and then at Butler (after losing the interim tag and getting a bump from assistant coach to head coach money) he made sure his home in Indianapolis had ample space for players to visit whenever they want, and for recruits to stop by when they're on official visits.

Holtmann and his family picked a home Upper Arlington when he got to Ohio State, situated close enough to campus that any member of the team can get to his home in less than 10 minutes. On the checklist of things he was looking for, being close enough for his team to easily get to his house was first.

They've been there a lot, seven or eight times as a large group since June. Those were big recruiting weekends. Ohio State had plenty of those in the fall as the staff raced to put together the 2018 recruiting class in a tight window. They came over to watch Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor boxing match in August. They had a team gift-wrapping party for families adopted by the coaching staff around the holidays.

Holtmann wanted his home to be an extension of the players lounge in the basketball facility. He gave video coordinator Kyle Davis his credit card and tasked him with purchasing a PS4 gaming console and three video games -- NBA 2K, FIFA soccer and Madden NFL -- from a local Best Buy to stock the basement. The Holtmanns made sure that basement was built to host a basketball team. A ping pong table might be next.

Having players over at his home is nothing new for Holtmann. But this team has probably been over more than any of this teams at Gardner-Webb and Butler, he said.

"It's something we feel like is important," Holtmann said. "We want them to be around our kids, our families, we want to see how they interact, and we want them to feel -- while they're away from their families -- a part of something."

It's obviously more than video games and chicken wings at Coach's house. But those moments foster trust and camaraderie. There's a different connection with this team, one that's obviously been helped along by all of this unforeseen success, but also one that was becoming noticeable for those around on both sides of the coaching transition even before the Buckeyes got off to a 9-0 Big Ten start.

"They hang around practice for an hour afterwards, watching TV, watching a game," a source told cleveland.com. "Last year, guys would bolt. I think because our group is so much closer, the staff gets a chance to connect."

That's they key. These are all just avenues for a coaching staff to get through to a new group of players. So when Holtmann showed up and laid out his vision for the program -- effort, relentless defense, connectivity and nothing above the team -- it was easier for players to absorb that because they found out early that this was a group of coaches willing to invest in them.

"When I first stepped on campus, and started having individual workouts with Coach Pedon, you could just see how much they cared," senior transfer guard Andrew Dakich said. "How much they appreciate you being there. That's what had me buy in, and I could see the work ethic that everyone else had. In open gyms you could tell that this was a competitive group ... That's when it hit me that this team could have something."

Dakich was the first one to say out loud that he thought this team could surprise people. He told his dad, former coach and current Indianapolis radio personality and ESPN college basketball analyst Dan Dakich, who took it a step further by predicting that Ohio State would reach the Final Four this year.

The Buckeyes are currently ranked No. 13 in the country, and that notion seems slightly less crazy than it did in November.

Dakich had more insight that just his son being on the team. He knows Holtmann, who was a frequent guest on and listener to Dakich's radio show when he was coaching at Butler. So maybe Dakich knew that Holtmann would make this kind of quick connection with his players, and that the key players would buy in.

Jae'Sean Tate, the heart and soul of this team for three years, seemed to jump on board immediately. He swallowed his ego and has been playing a different kind of position on the wing while Bates-Diop has been starring as a stretch forward. Tate's also logged some point guard minutes. Whatever the coaches need.

"If JT was a knucklehead, it wouldn't be the same," Holtmann said. "Not only is he a really good player, he's been receptive. The winning had helped in terms of embracing it. But I always felt, even when we had some rough patches, that they might have questioned it a little bit early, but they've embraced how we've done things."

This is the first time in his career that his teammates seem to be feeding off the energy he's always brought.

Tate's joke about Holtmann seeing the future was funny. It's not clairvoyance. It's understanding his team. It doesn't take a genius to know that Ohio State's game against Nebraska was the Buckeyes' fifth in 11 days, that they'd likely be tired against a more rested team, and that it would come down to the wire.

That anticipation and vibe for your team is important. It allowed Holtmann to push the right buttons. It's that this team trusted the planning, took heed of Holtmann's warnings, and then dug deep to make the plays to get a win that was the real revelation.

Maybe this was going to happen anyway.

There was some sentiment even before the coaching change that Ohio State had cleansed the locker room of some toxic personalities. The problems under the previous staff stretched beyond that, but finally having a group of players all pointed in the right direction can cure a lot of ills.

But there clearly needed to be a change in who was giving that direction. And there's no confusion as to what Holtmann wants. He delivers the plan, and he's hands on in making sure that it gets across in practice. He's got a group of assistants who carry out his vision, and fill in the gaps when needed.

There's a clear connection between the coaches that's trickled down to the players. It's created the winning atmosphere that's been absent from this program for too long.

"It's not happened everywhere," Holtmann said. "My time at Butler, it happened pretty quickly, but I had been there a year as an assistant coach, so it was easier. But I did not expect this group to be so connected to us so quickly."