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‘OU, I love it. That’s a part of me’: Alabama’s Mark Sears hasn’t forgotten time at Ohio

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‘OU, I love it. That’s a part of me’: Alabama’s Mark Sears hasn’t forgotten time at Ohio


CLEVELAND — Alabama coach Nate Oats was listening Thursday as his star point guard Mark Sears was talking about spending his first two years at Ohio University. It brought Oats back to his own time when he was head coach at the University at Buffalo.

For Oats specifically, he thought about his successes playing inside Rocket Arena, where his Crimson Tide team will open the NCAA tournament against Robert Morris Friday. However, he was reminded about Sears’ own Cleveland successes.

“After you brought it up, I looked on my phone,” Oats said Thursday. “Mark is 4-1 here in Cleveland, so he’s got an 80% winning percentage here. It’s pretty good. I thought I was good, where I’m 9-1, but he’s right there with me. So between the two of us, we’ve won a few games down here in the arena we’re going to play in.”

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Sears hasn’t just won a lot of games in Cleveland. Long before he was an All-America point guard in the Southeastern Conference, he was learning the ropes of college basketball in Southeastern Ohio while playing from 2020-22 at Ohio.

“When I was at Ohio, I spent a lot of time developing, and they did a great job helping me be the player I am today,” Sears said Thursday. “Just like you said, I have some experience coming to Cleveland because we’ve been the past two times. One of those times, we had won it all here and the other time we fell short. OU, I love it. That’s a part of me.”

The 6-foot-1, 195-pound Sears was raised in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but spent an extra season in prep school at Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia. From there, he ended up in Athens, where he appeared in 59 games over two seasons, with 40 starts, including all 35 in his last year with the Bobcats.

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In Sears’ first season at Ohio, he averaged 8.5 points in 19.6 minutes per game. The Bobcats won the MAC Tournament in Cleveland to qualify for a COVID-impacted NCAA tournament, where they upset No. 4-seeded Virginia in the first round before losing in the second round to Creighton.

The next season, Sears was a full-time starter averaging 19.7 points in 35.7 minutes over 35 games. The Bobcats, though, lost to Kent State in the MAC semifinals and did not return to the NCAA Tournament.

After that season, Sears went into the transfer portal, which took him directly back to his sweet home Alabama.

With the amount of work he puts in his game outside of practice on his own in the offseason, and when he came to Alabama, he didn’t even go home. He went straight from Athens right to Tuscaloosa because he wanted to get a head start. He just got himself an apartment for a month and just went to work.

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Robert Morris coach Andrew Toole’s team is tasked with trying to slow the high-octane Crimson Tide offense that scores national-best 91.1 points a game. That offense starts with Sears, who’s averaging 18.7 points while looking for his second All-American recognition in as many seasons.

Toole, though, has some institutional knowledge himself of Sears from his Ohio days.

“We actually scrimmaged him his freshman year when he was at Ohio U, and we were like, man, this guy is pretty good,” Toole said. “Next year, obviously, he’s at Alabama. He’s just so capable at any time of making a deep perimeter 3. He puts so much pressure on your defense with his ability to get to the rim and get fouled.”

Sears returns to Cleveland a highly decorated basketball player. He plays for one of the top teams in the entire sport.

Yet, Sears is coming into his final NCAA tournament much like he did while he was toiling as a freshman at Ohio.

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“Still having that chip on their shoulder to want to get back,” Sears said. “At the mid-major level, you have to win the tournament to go to the championship, and at the high-major level, you’ve still got to win games to get a good seeding. When you get in that tournament, you just want to have that competitiveness to make it farther than you did last year.”

Chris Easterling can be reached at ceasterling@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on X at @ceasterlingABJ



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Ohio State Men’s Hockey Falls Just Short in Double-Overtime Battle with No. 1 Seed Michigan State in Big Ten Tournament Championship Game

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March 23, 2025

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Ohio State Men’s Hockey Falls Just Short in Double-Overtime Battle with No. 1 Seed Michigan State in Big Ten Tournament Championship Game


Ohio State men’s hockey fell just short of winning its first Big Ten Tournament championship.

The Buckeyes came back from a 3-1 deficit in the third period and forced double overtime against No. 1 seed Michigan State on its home ice, but suffered a 4-3 defeat to the Spartans in the end.

It appeared as though Michigan State would win comfortably for most of regulation. The Spartans took a 2-0 lead in the first period on power-play goals from Karsen Dorwart and Isaac Howard. Ohio State’s Joe Dunlap cut the lead to one with an even-strength goal late in the first period, but after a scoreless second period, Michigan State took a 3-1 lead in the first minute of the third period on a goal from Tanner Kelly.

In the final eight minutes of regulation, however, Damien Carfagna and Gunnarwolfe Fontaine each scored goals for the Buckeyes to even the score.

It took more than 35 minutes of overtime for either team to score the game-winning goal as Ohio State’s Logan Terness made 20 saves between the two overtime periods while Michigan State’s Trey Augustine stopped several close chances by the Buckeyes. In the end, however, Howard slipped a shot around Terness with 4:51 remaining in double overtime to score the game-winner for the Spartans.

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Despite the loss, Ohio State is still in line to make this year’s NCAA Tournament. They’ll find out their seed on Sunday at 3 p.m., when the 16-team tournament bracket will be announced on ESPNU.





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Ohio State's College Football Playoff Run Led By First-Quarter Dominance, Second and Third Quarter Control

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12 hours ago

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March 22, 2025

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Ohio State's College Football Playoff Run Led By First-Quarter Dominance, Second and Third Quarter Control


Given some of the slow starts that set the Buckeyes back in games against Nebraska, Penn State and Michigan in the second half of the regular season, fast starts were an emphasis for Ohio State entering the College Football Playoff.

That emphasis yielded dividends. As Eleven Warriors dove into Ohio State’s quarter-by-quarter and half-by-half splits during the 2024-25 CFP, the first quarter stood out as the biggest period of Buckeye dominance.

Ohio State held significant edges in the second and third quarters, too, while holding level in the fourth.

Ohio State College Football Playoff Splits
SPLIT POINTS OPP POINTS SCORING MARGIN YARDS OPP YARDS YARDS PER PLAY OYPP
FIRST QUARTER 42 7 +35 622 199 9.4 3.5
SECOND QUARTER 48 25 +23 531 357 8.2 4.6
FIRST HALF 90 32 +58 1153 556 8.8 4.1
THIRD QUARTER 31 22 +9 326 264 6.3 4.1
FOURTH QUARTER 24 21 +3 299 361 5.2 5.4
SECOND HALF 55 43 +12 625 625 5.7 4.7

The Buckeyes outscored Tennessee, Oregon, Texas and Notre Dame by a combined 42-7 in the first quarter, tripling their four opponents’ offensive outputs with 622 yards of offense against just 199 yards allowed. The yards-per-play numbers are perhaps the most staggering: Ohio State picked up 9.4 yards per play in the first quarter during the CFP while opponents managed a meager 3.5 yards per play.

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Fast starts fueled the Buckeyes most in the first two rounds of the CFP against the Ducks and Volunteers. Ohio State outscored Tennessee and Oregon by a combined 35-0 and outgained them by a combined 438 to 53 in the first quarter. That’s more than eight times the yardage output in 30 total minutes, which is mind-blowing even when considering the Buckeyes received the football to start both games.

Starting with the football also doesn’t impact yards per play, and Ohio State picked up 11.2 yards per down to Tennessee and Oregon’s two in the pair of opening frames.

“We’ve always wanted to have fast starts,” Ryan Day said before the Texas game. “You want to set the tone for the game as an individual but also as a team. In both games, we started off with the ball and have gone right down and scored. … Execution fuels emotion. That certainly has a big part of it. They go together. We’ve executed well on those first couple of drives. The defense has gotten some three-and-outs early in the game. We’ve been able to jump on the last two opponents.”

Ohio State jumped on Oregon in particular, as most readers probably remember. The Buckeyes got out to a 34-0 lead against the No. 1 seed and only undefeated team in the CFP, held a 34-8 edge at halftime and closed with a 41-21 victory.

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The first half holistically was a dominant phase for Ohio State, who held a halftime lead of at least seven points in each of its four CFP games en route to a +58 scoring margin in the opening 30 minutes. The Buckeyes picked up 8.8 yards per play in CFP first halves while allowing just 4.1.

Halftime adjustments were also a strength of Ohio State’s, even if the margins aren’t as gaudy as their first-quarter or first-half splits. It’s true that the Buckeyes only outscored their opponents by nine points across the four playoff third quarters, but they iced out Tennessee with a 14-0 penultimate frame after kicking off to start the second half and finished a string of 31 unanswered points vs. Notre Dame with 10 to start the third quarter.

Plus, thanks to the ferocity of their first halves, many of the second halves during Ohio State’s title run were spent running out the clock to ice games. That’s the main reason why the fourth quarter is the only split where the Buckeyes didn’t show clear control across their four-game run. Third-stringers saw action in the fourth quarter against the Volunteers and there were multi-score leads to protect in the final 15 minutes against the Ducks and Fighting Irish. 

That goes to explain why CFP opponents outgained the Buckeyes 361 to 299 in total yards and 5.4 to 5.2 in yards per play in the fourth quarter. In the lone fourth quarter where Ohio State needed to outperform its foe – the Texas game where it entered the final frame tied 14-14 with the Longhorns – it did so.

After sputtering on offense for much of the second and third quarters, the Buckeyes amassed a 13-play, 88-yard scoring drive to go ahead 21-14 before assembling what might now be the most legendary goal-line stand in team history to seal a 28-14 victory.

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Notre Dame came charging back from its 31-7 hole and 31-15 deficit entering the fourth quarter with a Jaden Greathouse touchdown to slice the lead to 31-23, outgaining Ohio State 147 to 109 in the final frame as the Buckeyes ran a few conservative plays to drain the clock. But there was nothing conservative about the since-dubbed “3rd-and-Jeremiah” throw to seal a national championship.

That’s the story of Ohio State’s CFP splits: A team that dominated both sides of the ball out of the gates of games, then made the plays it needed in the second half to ensure those starts didn’t go to waste. And it hoisted the CFP national championship trophy as a result.





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Joy Dunne’s third-period goals help lift Ohio State past Cornell in Women’s Frozen Four

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23 hours ago

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March 22, 2025

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Joy Dunne’s third-period goals help lift Ohio State past Cornell in Women’s Frozen Four


Joy Dunne scored two third-period goals and the Ohio State women’s hockey team advanced to its fourth consecutive national championship game with a 4-2 victory over Cornell in Friday’s first Frozen Four semifinal at Ridder Arena.

Ohio State (29-7-3) will play Wisconsin in Sunday’s championship game, the third year in a row the rivals will meet for the title. The Buckeyes are 12-3 in NCAA tournament play under ninth-year coach Nadine Muzerall, a former Gophers player and assistant coach.

Dunne’s first goal broke a 2-2 tie at the 16:23 mark of the third, and she made it a two-goal lead just over four minutes later. She leads the Buckeyes with 28 goals this season and has scored in nine consecutive games.

The Buckeyes led 2-0 on first-period goals from Makenna Webster and Brooke Disher, but the Big Red (25-5-5) tied it with second-period goals 1:08 apart from Lily Delianedis and Kaitlin Jockims.

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For the game, Ohio State had 42 shots, with Dunne having nine of those, while Cornell had 29. Both teams were 0-for-3 on the power play.

Ohio State’s Amanda Thiele made 27 saves and improved to 7-1 in NCAA tournament play in her career. Annelies Bergmann stopped 35 shots for Cornell.



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