The Program

THAD MATTA entered coaching to emulate his father, a bench boss at a small high school. But it's hard to imagine that Jim Matta's job much resembled the one his son holds. Shortly after a road loss to Wisconsin last month, for example, Matta watched game video and worked aboard a team charter flight. The plane landed at 2 a.m., and when Matta arrived home, he returned voice mails, e-mails and text messages. (Pointedly, he avoided the chat rooms, blogs and message boards that critique everything from his playing rotation to his choice of ties.) When he finally went to bed, it was 7 a.m. "And I don't brag about that," Matta says. "I like to sleep."

Bleary-eyed though he may be, Matta has helped restore honor to the program. He arrived in Columbus from Xavier in 2004 and was handed broom-and-dustpan duty after predecessor Jim O'Brien was fired for having given money to a recruit. ( O'Brien filed a wrongful-termination suit and won a $2.4 million judgment, which the school is appealing.) At week's end, Ohio State had gone 72--21 under Matta, and the program appears to have made academic progress: Last spring, for the first time since the mid-1980s, four basketball players graduated.

Typical for a college coach these days, the 39-year-old Matta spends only a fraction of his day on the court. Even in-season, recruiting chews up blocks of time. (Earlier this year Matta took a private plane provided by a booster to watch a potential recruit play a night game in California and was back in Columbus by morning.) Then there are the fund-raisers, the speeches, the interviews, his weekly TV and radio shows. "When I came here, I had no idea of the power and magnitude of the Ohio State University ," he says, adhering to a universitywide branding directive to refer to the school with the word the.

Matta is, of course, handsomely compensated. His contract, which runs through the 2014--15 season, pays him $1.89 million this year. (The figure includes a base salary, endorsements, radio and TV deals, annuity contributions and payments for running a basketball camp.) He is the highest-paid OSU coach after football's Jim Tressel , who earned nearly $2.5 million last season, including a $200,000 bonus for getting his team to the BCS title game. (University president Karen Holbrook, by comparison, is making $600,527 this year.)

Coaching in Columbus pays off in other ways that coaches in smaller programs can only dream of. "It allows you to be more of a risk-taker in recruiting," says Matta. "With OSU 's name, I can go and recruit kids I couldn't when I was at Xavier or Butler. 'Xavier? Where is Xavier?' 'Butler? Where are you located?'" He happily would have continued speaking on this topic, but he had another function to attend. He slipped out the back of the $116 million basketball arena and peeled off in a BMW . Naturally, it was gray with a maroon interior.

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THE WHIFF of sports commerce is strong on basketball game days. The name of a department store--Value City--is splayed on the court at the Schottenstein Center. Marquees for 22 other arena sponsors ring the perimeter. On the concourse, players' images are featured on billboards for Donato's pizza. During timeouts, the scoreboard displays SCORES FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY SPONSORED BY GREAT CLIPS, a chain of hair salons.