Ohio State postgame notes

ATLANTA - Some odds and ends after the championship game about Ohio State, where at least the basketball players can be consoled by the football players, who know what it feels like to finish in second place to Florida:

• Ohio State coach Thad Matta was asked after Florida's 84-75 title-game win whether he thought Buckeye star freshman center Greg Oden would be returning for his sophomore season. Matta said he couldn’t put a percentage on whether Oden would stay or go, but that the two would talk about it after returning to campus.
• Oden afterward said of his 25-point, 12-rebound performance: "It really doesn’t matter." Oden, for once, was very good at staying out of foul trouble Monday night and played a team-high 38 minutes.
  "We had guys come in fighting and hitting shots," Oden said, "but they had an answer for everything."
• Ohio State is now 1-4 in NCAA championship basketball games. The only win? 1960.
• Ohio State had trouble the entire tournament defending the three-point shot. In six NCAA tournament games, including Florida’s 10-for-18 performance on treys Monday, the Buckeyes allowed opponents to shoot 43.3 percent from beyond the arc.
• Brick city: The Buckeyes’ 4-for-23 three-point shooting performance Monday night was the worst by a team in the NCAA final since Michigan shot 1-for-11 in its 1992 title-game loss to Duke.
• The last word, from Ohio State coach Thad Matta: "I thought we fought about as hard as we could. We just couldn’t turn the corner on them, which is what teams like that do to you…. They [Florida] have really got everything, you know…. We made some major, major mistakes defensively, and great teams make you pay." -- Scott Fowler