In a span of hours, the Cavaliers won and the Buckeyes lost. Neither is something we have been accustomed to seeing during the 10-11 season.

Thad Matta's excellent, well-balanced team had none of the specialness of the 90-91 UNLV team that nearly went undefeated, so a loss was bound to happen at some point in this season regardless of whether they win the national championship.

Close games during the Big Ten portion of Ohio State's schedule has been a common occurrence, but they had managed to pull it out each previous occasion.

When teams are upset, it frequently happens on cold shooting nights, but Ohio State shot 54.3% from the field and 87.5% from the line. Ohio State shot 59.5% in their two-point attempts, as William Buford and Jon Diebler combined to shoot 1-for-7 from beyond the arc (3-for-9 as a team).

We were expecting Ohio State's first loss to come in a game where Jared Sullinger was either a no-show, or shrewdly negated, but neither happened in this game. Sullinger had a FIC40 of 18.8, slightly above his season average of 17.4, scoring 19 points (7-for-12 from the floor and 4-for-4 from the line) and grabbing 12 rebounds. This wasn't a dominant performance as we saw against Illinois a few weeks ago, but he was every bit as good as they needed him to be.

Wisconsin was simply the better team offensively and hit 12 of their 24 three-point attempts. When a team scores just over half of their points on 50% shooting from beyond the arc, there is very little a team can do overcome it. Jordan Taylor was simply too much in the second half, scoring 27 points on 13 shots from the field in the game and was 5-of-8 on three-point attempts.

Ohio State is a strong defensive team as a whole, but they can be exploited by quality perimeter shooting teams. This has typically been where opponents who have experienced success this season have looked to attack the Buckeyes.

In their one-point win at Northwestern on January 29th, the Wildcats made nine of their 30 attempts from distance.

On January 22nd, Illinois was 4-for-17 (23.5%) from beyond the arc in Ohio State's five-point win.

When Penn State lost by just three in Columbus on January 15th, they shot 55.6% from the floor and 92.3% on 13 attempts at the line.

On January 12th, Michigan hit 11 of their 24 attempts from distance and also limited Sullinger to just six attempts from the field.

Minnesota shot just 2-for-14 from beyond the arc on January 9th, but stuck around to make it a three-point final by making 24 of their 27 free throw attempts.

Iowa shot 46.7% from beyond the arc in Ohio State's five-point win on January 4th.

Returning back from Madison with their first loss, they will take on a perpetually reeling Michigan State team on Tuesday in what was originally going to be the Big Ten game of the year. Tom Izzo's top-three scorers (Kalin Lucas, Durrell Summers and Draymond Green) are all shooting better than 40% from three-point territory, so they will unquestionably be challenged in the same way as they look to avoid their first two-game losing streak of the season and first as a program since consecutive losses to Wisconsin and Michigan before and after New Year's 2010.