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I mean, if you’re going to listen to that guy….. ;)

He’d make a great advisor to a coach trying to learn the ins & outs of B1G basketball. (I’ll see myself out…)

Not nearly as high on Sisley as the rest of the board but it would sure suck to have a freshmen from Indiana who grew up a fan of IU get poached by Dusty. Not doing everything we could to sign May will probably end up on the Mount Rushmore of IU athletics failures.

Penny fires basically his entire staff, including Mike Davis, at Memphis. ‘Cause clearly they’re the problem.

Nolan Smith was hired in July when the previous coach joined the Grizzlies staff. He didn't have to build a staff to hit the portal, the roster was already mostly in place. DDV should've had his staff in place on day 1 and been able to hit the portal hard. The fact he wasn't in March Madness last year was used as a reason for optimism that we'd be ahead of the game for the portal. We were not. And we didn't get the most out of the group we did land. He was hired a year ago on March 18. His first year definitely gets a D from me. Not much reason for optimism at this point other than drinking the crimson and cream kool aid, but I will still hope to be proven wrong. We'd best see some quick commits in the portal this year.

If I had a kid come and tell me that in the middle of the year, I would just throw him off the team. We don't want to have our program be in the spot where in conference rivals are poaching kids we want to keep here from us. I hope this rumor is false.

Pretty unreal. Literally just win one more game and we'd be in. -Losing @ Minnesota -Blowing a 7 point halftime lead @ UK -Blowing 13 point lead vs Nebraska at home (most egregious single game IMO) -Dominated at home by an Iowa team we absolutely had the talent to beat -Let USC get away from us when we were hot -Shat the bed losing 6 of 7 down the stretch, including Northwestern twice The 8 point win against Incarnate Word seriously triggered PTSD for me and I'm sure many others. But it was still early enough we mostly didn't want to give up hope yet on the team or coach. If we won that by 20+, I wonder if that would've made any meaningful difference metrics wise given how soft the bubble this year was... I'd doubt it because the only metric that really matters is winning and we flat out didn't do enough of it. Beating Purdue was the highlight. Gutted out a win at UCLA. Stole one against Wisconsin. Not all bad but the moments of "good" or "great" were too few and far between. Overall I am trying to remind myself the margins are really thin in college basketball. Sometimes things don't bounce your way and sometimes coaches need to learn, grow, and get better at their craft. Sometimes both. Hopefully next year is better. I will probably follow the portal closely but unless we crush it won't start watching much until after football season. Which will hopefully again be in mid / late January.

Please land an 7’2 Serbian dude that looks like he already works 2 jobs

Still don’t know why it took 43 days to round out a staff

We knew this thing was going to be rough when we didn't have anyone on our staff with any real recruiting connections. Moikobu and Murphy would've created a completely different situation for us and I still believe that was what DD thought he had. Adams was going to serve a short term purpose of acclimating DD to the state and connecting him to the aau circuit in-state. But it all fell apart and Drew Adams and Nic Norton built our roster. That did force early conversations with Carr and I think there will be an NBA approach to building this roster. Did Adams make any in roads in Europe? That's the only reason to keep him. Kenny serves zero purpose. Geoff Alexander is the guy forthr FIBA circuit and Chin Coleman is an established recruiter of national perimeter talent. That's where it needs to start and someone that can hold their own in-state.... DD can coach.

At least Lamar and Sam set some records while they were here

Probably wouldn’t have needed to beat Northwestern if they hadn’t crapped the bed vs Nebraska

Looked at the Maryland and WVU staffs and Buzz and Hodge brought virtually their full staffs from their previous jobs while DDV brought almost no one with him. Will be interesting to see what, if any, staff turnover there is.

So since IU will not be participating in any more games, the 2025-26 IUBB Prediction League season is over. Your champion is @Josh joining the list of champions like that guy...and that guy...heck I think I won once before I starting running the show. Well, this season was largely un-memorable so you get a pic of Jamari Sharpe cinching the national title. Thanks to everyone for playing especially during the various site issues that plagued us in the non-conference and hopefully the site and the team can run smoothly next season and we can have some March basketball we can be proud of.

Bruce Pearl on the Dan Patrick Show: "People say you got your son the job. No, I didn't get my son the job. My son played for me. My son was an assistant for me for 11 years. He was the associate head coach. He was the defensive coordinator." In other words: YOU GOT HIM THE JOB!

Mike Wiemuth (X’s & Joes Pod) @MikeWiemuth In the last portal period, 66% of the top-50 portal players were off the board by the day IU made their 2nd assistant hire (April 11th). By the time you get past the 2nd week of April, you're operating in a talent pool that has been substantially drained.

What happens in Vegas...please stay there.

Failure to Affix a Tax Stamp? That bastard.

Hello folks, it's been a while! I've been checking in from time to time on here but have been busy with our own season over here. I must say, I haven't watched a lot of Indiana Basketball this year, the times I did, it was pretty "meh". It was hard to feel a connection to the program this year with a completely new roster and new coaching staff, which was much needed. It's hard to win, it's very hard to win in the B1G, and it's especially hard to win when you have a completely new roster. Making the tournament would be a true accomplishment with that much turnover, being the first four out is honestly impressive in my eyes. With this new "GM" coming in and a year under his belt, I'm confident DD will get this going. Indiana prints money, we're now a football school that has a little basketball here and there. I'm not worried about Indiana Basketball, I don't think anyone should be. The ball was dropped by Dolson by not firing Woodson a year earlier and hiring May, but that's over and we're national champions in football!

Quoting this because I'm surprised it didn't generate more discussion. I'm about the same age as the guy who wrote this and it definitely resonates with me. The way our season ended and where we find ourselves now has me seriously questioning my hobbies next winter. The program is just in a rough spot. We need to win now, but we don't seem to have the infrastructure to do it. If we want a program that's built to last, it will take time, but in today's world, fans don't have time anymore.

Hell, after the Darius Miles thing selling drugs seems positively quaint.

I've been telling y'all - there's a tangible reason that Sisley got pretty much zero run during our end of season losing streak. With unrestricted free agency, someone give me a good reason why an Indiana kid that's being recruited by Dusty May wouldn't be very, very interested. Occam's Razor; the most likely explanation is usually the correct one. And in this instance Occam would conclude that he's never getting game time because his family has already expressed that IU is not his future, and that Michigan would be a more attractive program than IU.

I honestly don't even think it was because QB wasn't convinced Dusty would be a good coach. I think QB helped install his buddy Woody and when the prospect of him being removed came up, he threw his weight around to defend his pal. IUBB was not even a real consideration. Archie got 4, so Mike got 4.

Maybe it's time to abandon basketball and start a men's volleyball team? Asking for a friend.

Despite the title of this thread, no idea if we'll have any interest or not, but it is a significant player that is available. 4-star Kayden Allen has received his release from Cincinnati and will reopen his recruitment, he told @Rivals. 

The 6-5 shooting guard is a top-50 overall recruit in the 2026 class.

Thankfully someone was there to help Rabjohns out. However you want to spread the buyout money out determines if IU is first or like 3rd on the list. I’m sure people think it doesn’t matter, but money is finite. Devries tried to poach a couple high profile assistants and couldn’t outbid their current schools. The budget numbers matter in that context and in other ways too. The flip side is football where the expanding bottom line allowed them to not only keep Cig but two very highly paid coordinators.

I suppose it would’ve been too much to ask Rabjohns to do actual reporting and relay a yearly average to us.

Thanks for the info. Too bad the Bloomington horse farms suck.

I’m in the same boat. But assuming this rumor is true the problem would be two-fold. 1) He’s one of our very few returning “building blocks.” The type of player that’s supposed to make it easier to build rosters going forward. 2) If we’re just ok again and Michigan is good while Dusty coaxes out some pretty good production from Sisley, DDV is going to find most of his new hire goodwill used up. Luckily, this is likely just a rumor and most of the guys that transfer out of here stink at other places too.

Yea, it's always messy with this stuff. Even looking something as basic as athletic dept revenue gets tricky because sometimes one-time loans from IU are in there and large donations can be recognized over time etc. As for why IUBB's opex is so high, it could be Woody's buyout like you said -- we paid that five days after he left. Or it could be how IU allocates athletic dept overhead, my money would be on this being part of it. I have no way of knowing, but something is up. Obviously, you can do a lot with accounting... But yea, the end result is spend to results that makes one cringe. It's pretty stunning, I mean we changed out the whole program this past year -- players/staff/offensive-defensive styles. Cost $6.5M to get rid of Woody, $6.3M to WVU for CDD, $10M for players, and our all new staff is large and expensive... yet the same result. Insane.

Brad Stevens is coming home!!

Yea. The conference even sees the reality of tampering.

No question we spend a lot, but it looks like there are differences in accounting and reporting (such as classifying certain expenses to bball or one-time expenses). For example, our bball operating expenses are not 50% higher than UK. Or MSU. But, the point stands. I’m pretty sure our normalized operating budget (excluding players) is top-10 and we obviously get a crap ROI. Same for our spend on players (which is around #15 or whatever in the country). Anyways, I’m not trying to be pedantic I just think there is more to these numbers than this dude on twitter is able to present.

This is why Bruce is perfect for politics. An ability to spin talk.

They don’t actually. I was listening to a Michigan podcast after we hired Carr and they said the top 4 teams at that time had a GM and the rest of the top 25 did not or only a ceremonial one. Evidently Duke has had one for years. Michigan, Florida, and Arizona were the other 4. So IU is aligning with the elite of college basketball in terms of structure and modernizing that aspect of the program while also overhauling the play style.

Thank you to whoever leaked the bracket the year they tried to make it a 2 hour spectacular. Keeping the bracket secret till the last minute may be why the committee actually had contingencies for the Sunday results.

Actually, if you do the math, IUs average record over the last 20 years is 19-14. So this season was an average season for IU bball. Pretty sad stuff.

The one that gets to me is the 16 point second half lead that IU blew to Nebrasks. That's a Q1 win we left out to dry.

Beat NW once and they are probably in

Had an IU offer when he was at Montverde and the previous staff was offering everybody there. Never felt like it went anywhere, though it may have been a function of being the year they went all in on the portal. Apparently had a Tennessee offer so Clark may have been involved with him.

FWIW

It would have been fun though to watch IU beat NC State and see USPS get arrested for a one-man court storm.

After Dusty saw Trent drain that shot from the balcony above Five Guys during Hoosier Hoops on Kirkwood, he started tampering...