THAD MATTA was finished with coaching. It was April 2022, and the 54-year-old former coach was vacationing on Florida’s Marco Island—literally on the beach—while the NCAA Final Four was going on in New Orleans. Not that the college basketball calendar mattered much to him anymore.
He was five years removed from an unceremonious split with Ohio State University, where, over 13 seasons as head basketball coach, he had won five conference titles, made nine NCAA tournament appearances and two Final Fours, won Big Ten Coach of the Year three times, and amassed a school-record 337 wins. The divorce was abrupt and complicated: The student-athletes had suddenly stopped responding, five top-rated recruits left the program, and for the first time since Matta’s first season, the Buckeyes had missed postseason play. But underlying all of that was the fact that Matta’s own body had simply betrayed him.
For years he’d suffered through back discomfort. But in 2007, a botched surgery to alleviate that pain left him permanently disabled, his right foot dragging when he walked. He was unable to put on or take off his own shoes and socks, useless to follow his daughters at cross-country meets, confined to a special chair when coaching his players. He had gritted through a decade of bus rides, recruiting flights, and long days and nights in the film room, his office, and on the bench only to be cut loose. If Ohio State was done with him—or basketball in general, for that matter—so be it. “It was time,” he says. “It was just time.”
It took four years after his firing for Matta to even get close to basketball again, when in March 2021, he accepted a job as associate athletic director for Indiana University. But as far as returning to coaching and limping up and down the sideline, Matta was less than enthusiastic.
Then his phone rang.
On the other end of the line was Barry Collier, Matta’s former coach and boss as a fledgling assistant at Butler. Collier was now longtime athletic director for the Bulldogs, and he wanted to know if Matta thought it was time to come home.
GREG ODEN was in Columbus, Ohio, when he heard that his former coach had accepted the position of head coach of Butler men’s basketball. For Oden, the announcement came “out of the blue.”
He was surprised because, as a student manager for Matta’s 2016-17 Ohio State team, Oden had had a courtside seat for his mentor’s demise. He witnessed what had once seemed destined to be a Hall of Fame coaching career gradually diminish over the course of a season before burning out. He saw the mental and physical toll it took on his friend. And perhaps more than anyone,
