The world of Ohio State basketball was thrown into upheaval last March when Randy Ayers was shown the door.After an exhaustive search, the Buckeyes found their man: Former St. Bonaventure and Boston College head coach Jim O’Brien.The choice was met with an almost collective “Who?” to fans in the Midwest, but the Buckeyes new head coach quickly endeared himself to his fans with his straight-shooting style and no-nonsense attitude. O’Brien knew coming in that getting through this campaign would not be an easy task.”Going into the season, we understood that this was going to be a tough year for us and we felt the most significant thing that we could do was two things. We needed to set a foundation and we needed to set a tone for how we wanted our program to be,” O’Brien said. “It was important for us to try and get our players to try and play as near to their potential as possible, and I think in those instances we were able to do that.”O’Brien, coming off an 11-year career at Boston College in which he had compiled a record of 168-166, stated the problems he ran into in the early going.”Whenever you come into a new situation, it would be virtually impossible for any coach to adjust to 12 or 13 different personalities,” he said. “I think that I was pleased with their attention and I was pleased with how they responded to our coaching and I think that they are a very coachable group of guys. For the most part, I think that they tried to do whatever we asked them to do.”The Bucks head coach said to watch for a different look next year, due in part to the addition of personnel.”This year we played for the most part six, maybe seven guys and I think that next year we’ll have a lot of depth at a lot of positions,” O’Brien said. “When you play more guys you can play a little faster and you can play a little more full court, both offensively and defensively. Without question we’re going to play a lot more man-to-man defense than we played this year.”O’Brien also addressed the impact the Buckeyes’ struggles may have had on future recruits.”I’m sure it has in some circles, and I think that some people would take a look at our program and say ‘how good is that program?’ and shy away from it,” O’Brien said. “I’m not concerned about that as much as I’m concerned about the kids that decided to come with us and that’s why I’ve made a very, very big commitment to these kids. They are throwing their hat into our ring, they want to be at Ohio State.”During the season, O’Brien encountered every coach’s nightmare, a losing streak that reached epic proportions as the Buckeyes would drop a school-record 17 in a row. O’Brien said as a coach he emphasized a “forget about the past, let’s look towards the future philosophy.”In general we just tried to be very, very positive about things,” O’Brien said. “Our motto was, ‘let’s try to win the next game, let’s come back, let’s put this game behind us.'”We always talked about what went wrong in the games we lost, we tried to learn from things, correct what mistakes we made, but we would spend some of next practice talking about what went wrong.”After the Buckeyes dissected what went wrong, it was forgotten as they focused on their next opponent.”Then it was always to the next game, not being overly concerned with what happened yesterday, but being prepared and trying to plan for what’s going to happen tomorrow,” he said.O’Brien gave credit to his players for keeping their heads up throughout the skid, even when times seemed grim.”I have to give the guys credit because they always came back and it would have been easy in a lot of situations, when we got rocked by Michigan State here and when we got rocked by Purdue here, we had two very, very embarrassing losses. It would have been easy to say ‘to hell with it’, but they always came back and played hard and practiced hard.””The thing that I will always remember is that this group of players, for the most part, played as hard as often as they possibly could and I think that’s something that, as a coach, you have to be very, very happy with,” he said. “Even though it wasn’t reflected in the (number of) games that we won, I thought there were a lot of good things to come out of this season ‹ if you can look past winning only eight games.”O’Brien was impressed by and appreciative of the support that both he and the team have received, despite their losing record.”The passion here is second to none,” he said. “I always thought that the people in Boston were very kind and supportive of me. But it’s at a different level here, when you consider the crowds and support we got here in view of going 1-15 in the conference. It’s just mind-blowing how people are here.”I’ve really grown to appreciate the situation here because everybody here was very supportive during a very difficult season. This is a special place and I’m very happy to be at Ohio State regardless of how our season went this year. This is clearly where I’m happy to be here right now.”And after his first run as OSU’s coach, does O’Brien finally feel like a true Buckeye?”Yeah. I do now, my heart is into Ohio State, and it hasn’t been that easy. I left the school I was an alumnus at and I was there for 11 years. But I think that having gone through the season, it probably didn’t just happen, you don’t become one just taking the job, and just because I’m coaching at Ohio State. In all honesty, it wasn’t there for me right away, but I think it’s taken a very difficult season to go through.”We feel very happy to be here, and we are all about Ohio State Buckeyes right now and trying to sell the program. We talk in terms of the program being our team, and our state, and we take a lot of pride in that right now. We have every intention of working as hard as we can to get this thing back to where we all would like it to be.”