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Listened to the Rabjohns podcast with, as a wise poster has nicknamed them ... "the Dorks." Some informative takeaways: Rabby has spoken with "12-15 coaches" that he says have no motivation to lie about Devries. To a man, each and every one says that he makes players better, is very good at establishing roles for players, and that his teams always overperform expectations. Practices have been, without exception, very organized, relatively short, and purposeful. Cignetti-like. Speaking of expectations, Rabby was fairly convinced that the Rothstein early "IU 15thin the B1G" projection was a product of: It's summer when it's hard to get clicks. Only about five fanbases stay engaged for July college bball content, and we're one of them. Projecting IUBB 8-12th this year does not prompt discussion or clicks; only projecting them unnaturally high or low will do that. Now the good stuff: Rabby currently sees three guaranteed starters: Tucker, Wilkerson, and Conerway. Tucker apparently is our best player in practice, and is going full contact five on five. Lots of good stuff about Conerway as a disruptive defensive guard. Enright is a top eight rotation player and the backup point guard. Not a starter. The other two starters are likely to come from the foursome of Bailey (the most likely), Alexis, Harris, and Miles. Dorn is still recovering from a last season foot injury, and has not been able to go at all. He is not looking like a rotation player any time soon. Drake will likely play some as the current ninth player. Sisley is confident and hyper-competitive; he could play some and would slot as the tenth most likely used player currently. Ritisic is not athletic. Not at all. He was described as good catch and shoot kid with a good attitude who will need a year or two before he adjusts to the speed of college hoops. Developmental only. Someday maybe Matt Roth, or maybe Grant Gelon.

To say that this interview and article reads "promising" would be a vast understatement: https://www.thedailyhoosier.com/iu-basketball-recruiting-qa-latrell-allmond-recaps-indiana-visit-next-steps/ D-Rock, KJ, and Prince AM getting to work.

I’ll say this — we have every reason to expect actual modern bball, and FUN basketball— sets for outside shooting, proven high output outside shooters, outlet passing and transition D, high energy players— looking forward to the season!

He is just a college basketball coach that has been successful where ever he has been. He will either win enough that everyone jumps on board or he doesn’t and people can say see I told you he sucked and IU fans can have another 4 years of clamoring for a coach that isn’t coming. Who knows if he will work out or not however I’m excited as heck to find out. Can’t wait to see how the season unfolds.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, it's a matter of Having a generally competitive budget, Creating budgetary value as a product of relationships and the staff's ability to develop, and then Spending the budget wisely.

Imo IUBB’s NIL is not an issue. We just spent #10 or so money. If our fans get excited more money will flow in. That’s enough to win big. USPS makes a good point that the difference in spending among the top-15 or so schools isn’t that much. Probably within 20-25% of each other aside from a few outlier schools that may change from year to year (like Duke or BYU). Buying a title in CBB looks pretty hard to do, and IU is never gonna spend $20M on a roster to try. If IUBB is going to be as good as we want it to be, we don’t need more money. We need CDD and his staff to be really good. That sounds obvious, but it’s that simple. You either recruit the right kids and get the most from them as a collective unit or you don’t. And that’s a good thing for CBB — of course a program needs table stakes money, but it takes a lot more than that to win big. I think this staff could be really good. We’ll see.

Maybe. The sell here for a ‘26 PG is so strong. IU exposure/NIL. No returning PG. DDV taking Javon Small from a nice portal get to all-Big 12 and getting him drafted in 1 year. The system puts so much on the PG’s plate. They can basically promise a kid the keys without actually having to promise him. This is 1case where I would be pretty shocked if they don’t lock down a top kid at the position.

I’m not sure what leads you to believe that? Roster retention is still an absolute necessity in today’s game and roster retention starts with…recruiting freshman. Recruit your core roster and then supplement your needs in the portal.

It’s July. The hype right now is for the start of football season…where it should be this time of year.

Visiting homecoming weekend

In a paywalled article yesterday, Joe Tipton at On3 pretty much said IU was the team to beat here.

9-4 against the spread (oddly enough one of our ATS losses was FIU) and led the country in both ATS +/- and margin of victory over the spread. There was good moolah to be made on IUFB last year.

Yeah I don’t disagree with you. I don’t even think we overspent really.

Seems like a great guy. And of course our guy Prince is all over it.

If anybody is worried about our NIL not being up to snuff, good news! You can directly help with that. Fill up the coffers boys! https://www.inforindiana.com/

They (Adam Rittenberg) landed on btownbanners.com and saw my post in this thread. LOL!!

Yeah Rabby has been throwing around some pretty strong hints. I’ll only begin to get worried when/if he starts taking other visits.

Thanks for sharing, nice to have some more substance to discuss in the long offseason. I wonder if Dorn has a redshirt year, not that it would necessarily make sense to use this year. And interesting Bailey is not penciled in as a starter apparently yet. Think that bodes well for what we can expect from Harris / Alexis, which makes me feel better about front court depth if they’re really competing that closely. Little disappointed with the Ritisic description but that’s probably all you can expect for the 12th roster spot. Deuce Drake is a real wildcard to me this year, very curious to see his role and how well he does in it at this level. Not too much longer before we get a preview in PR thankfully.

So it was a money/NIL issue, not a negligent, unprepared from day one issue? In a perfect world, Moibuko and Murphy accept on the spot, but that’s life and the way this industry works. Rod Clark is a better recruiter than Moibuko and pushing the same tier as Murphy.

Coach Cig wasn't wrong. He did kick someone's @$$ that game, in that stadium. I was there. It was awesome. That game was when I knew we had something special brewing in Bloomington. I'm looking forward to this season. We're about to make a solid point to all the doubters. Hide and watch.

He didn't even mention Cig's UCLA trash talk: https://uclawire.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/ucla/football/2024/07/31/indiana-head-coach-curt-cignetti-starting-early-trash-talk-with-ucla-bruins/74620503007/

I checked out the thread this morning, and then was just doing some surfing on ESPNs website keeping an eye on the tennis match this morning when I saw that article. I was wondering if they took the inspiration from that post. LOL

Couldn't agree more with the above. It's not a money issue, enough money is there, how we do will depend on coaching, the right mix of recruited and portaled players, and player health.

https://x.com/IndianaMBB/status/1943339439608205799/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1943339439608205799&currentTweetUser=IndianaMBB Coach Clark mic’d up.

Is it reasonable to say that this visit also puts pressure on Kinney? The two of them have been battling each other and both are strongly considering IU and Kensucky. Feels almost like two dominoes that could fall, one to each of the two schools.

Yea this would be a great guy to land -- very talented, but also likely not a one and done, so he can be a multi-year foundational piece for the program. Let's get that commitment Kenny!!!

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/45689028/way-too-early-top-25-archvillains Here is a story about the potential "archvillains" for each of the top 25 teams. Indiana is mentioned with an interesting opponent.

Drake was not an especially 'cut above' player at Drexel and there's no reason to think he'll ever be a key piece if we're a tournament team. More like one of those garden variety guards that Minnesota has filled their roster with. And that's okay - he'll be an experienced, playable back bench guy.

This current landscape just produced a National Champion that was projected to finish 7th in their conference featuring a bunch of mid-major transfers at guard and 2-3* recruits in the front court. Talk about unheralded.

I think it’s more the cat and mouse with Murphy/Moibuko that slowed us down. But also the market. We thought 10 million would put us head and shoulders above the competition, but some of schools put up 15-20. Studs were going for 1 million the previous season. That went to 2-3. Sent from my iPad using BtownBanners mobile app

Barnett took a HC job elsewhere and there wasn’t a chance in hell Chester Frazier was coming here. That leaves you with Tom Ostrom as the remaining guy who sat on his bench last year…yeah that Tom Ostrom. We didn’t lose a year because DeVries didn’t panic. Pure nonsense.

This isn't mine. It belongs to Jamie Jordan. He does a fantastic job of all things IUFB. He just partnered with Hoosier Huddle. I highly recommend following him on X.

Not because of Hoosier Hysteria, but I love the phrase “earned enthusiasm.”

Lol was typing on my phone and too lazy. Updated with paragraphs for everyone’s reading pleasure

Yeah don't understand the issue. I would have held out till August if it meant hiring Rod Clark. To most, this is marathon, not a sprint. Getting the right staff in place no matter the timeline is much more paramount to long term success although I understand you can't please everyone.

An indicator folks might consider is Rod Clark, our last senior staff hire. UT MBB has a lot of money and is coming off two Elite 8's. Rod got to take a very close look -- 1,000x closer than any talking head who posts preseason rankings for clicks -- at our new staff, roster, and overall program. He was comfortable enough to leave a wealthy top program and join IU. That seems to be a good sign. I don't really follow the roster angst. We have the 10th ranked portal class. Last year UK was 5th and UL was 27th -- we seem to be within range of the two total portal rebuild schools that had decent first years with their new coach. If Goode gets his waiver Torvik has us around #30-35, which seems to be a fine starting spot. I don't see IU transitioning from basketball. Our roster payroll is #10-15 in the country, but don't forget our staff/program budget (all the non-player stuff) is top-5. IU still pumps a lot into hoops. And I'm definitely not worried about our fans. Frankly, they like basketball too much. The support this program gets after stinking up the joint for a quarter century is quite honestly absurd. I'm way more worried about how much we can ramp up support for football. At the end of the day CDD inherited basically nothing useable from Woody and had to rebuild from scratch. Turning around anything (programs/businesses/organizations/whatever) takes time. We're just over three months in. So far things look okay and it's way too early to know how this will go.

You are clearly upset with his “staff handling.” Why and what does that mean? I am not sure.

We know

If the past 2 decades of IU basketball message board fandom have taught me anything, whenever our fans have doubts about an opposing coach's abilities, they're usually wrong. I actually wish we had gotten McCollum instead of DeVries, but that's another discussion.

100% positive this staff wasn't the plan. I find it negligent and disrespectful to not be better prepared for day one on the job as IU Mens Basketball Coach. Atleast have someone that sit on a bench last year with you. I understand Murphy and Moikobu are friends and they jammed him, but tough shi7 that's on him. Someone that could pick up the phone and have connections to players would've been great to go into the portal. He had Frazier and Barnett build last years team. That's what your staff does. To not have one cost us a year. Moving forward, we'll compete on the recruiting trail.