There’s a simple reason why Indiana was eliminated from the 2016 NCAA Tournament by top-seeded North Carolina Friday night in Philadelphia at the Wells Fargo Center.
The Hoosiers lost to the better team.
You can flip this one any way you choose, but in the end that should be your conclusion. In 18 years covering IU basketball, I've seen a lot of seasons end where you were convinced that wasn't the case. Friday night, that's exactly what happened though: IU lost to a better team.
This wasn’t 2013 when Indiana was a No. 1 seed and lost to a No. 4 in Syracuse because it couldn’t solve the zone defense.
This wasn't a team that lost to Cleveland State or Richmond or Kent State or a host of other opponents where IU was heavily favored.
This was a No. 5 seeded Indiana team that beat a good Kentucky team to make it to the Sweet Sixteen and then simply went up against a red hot North Carolina team. A North Carolina team that when it reached the Sweet Sixteen was considered a co-favorite with Kansas to take home the national title.
Indiana didn’t play poorly Friday night. North Carolina just played better.
Sure, we all would have liked to have seen a contribution from Nick Zeisloft.
We all would have liked to have seen Troy Williams play in the first half like he did in the second.
We all would have liked to have seen what Indiana could have done had Robert Johnson been cleared to play.
We would have liked to have seen what would have happened if North Carolina wasn't in the bonus in the second half before the first media timeout.
We all would have liked to have seen Indiana come charging out of the second half locker room and quickly get the deficit into single digits and get back into the game.
But none of that was to be because North Carolina is a really good basketball team. If the Tar Heels play the way they did Friday night against IU, I think they win the national championship.
They were that good Friday night.
What I don’t get is the people I’ve encountered in message board threads and Twitter today who are taking Tom Crean to task for the way the season ended. They somehow want to place all the blame there for the fact that North Carolina couldn’t miss from the field and was too much for IU inside.
A buddy of mine sent me a text after Indiana beat Kentucky and asked me if I thought that victory would silence the Crean haters at least for this season?
I gave him my standard, canned answer on that topic: I told him it would silence the critics until Indiana’s next loss. That’s simply the nature of the beast with IU basketball fans.
But here’s my take there: I think this was Tom Crean’s best coaching job at Indiana. Hands down. If we go back to the way this team looked through the first eight games, how it played in Maui and how it looked against Duke in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge, and then fast forward to IU winning the outright Big Ten title by two full games, I don’t know how you could reach any other conclusion.
This wasn't a GREAT Indiana basketball team. It was a good Indiana team that played its roles really well. And Crean and his staff are responsible for getting players to accept those roles.
Crean got people to buy in. Players did a great job in embracing their roles. And they days of IU playing a turnstile type of defense came to an end. And because of that, this was a fun team to watch. A team that never gave up and had three wins in games where it trailed by 10 points or more.
It was a team that got IU fans excited about Indiana basketball again. A few hours before the game, I was across the street from the Wells Fargo Center and saw a crowd of more than 1,000 IU fans packed to a sports bar called McFadden's for the Big Red Warmup. It was a madhouse. People were excited. People believed that IU could do the improbable and knock off the No. 1 seed in the East. They believed in Indiana basketball and that was fun to see.
But I think that's because Crean and his staff got this team to a place that few would have expected them to be, especially after that 5-3 start to the season. It was a team filled with the kinds of kids you wanted wearing the IU basketball uniform. It was the kind of team that you truly felt had a chance to win every game they played.
That’s also why Friday night was disappointing. Because you got the feeling that Indiana was playing its best basketball at the absolute best possible time. You didn’t feel like the team had run out of gas like you did in the last few years with Bob Knight at the helm, or more recently, perhaps how you felt in 2013.
This team had confidence, energy, focus and a cast of characters that you wanted to root for. Players like O.G. Anunoby, Thomas Bryant, Juwan Morgan, Collin Hartman, Yogi Ferrell, Max Bielfeldt, Nick Zeisloft, Robert Johnson and Troy Williams were players who endeared themselves to IU fans everywhere.
In the end, however, the Hoosiers went up against a better team.
And that’s the reality, plain and simple, coming out of Friday night’s 101-86 loss to North Carolina.
Indiana lost to the better team.
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