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Love this. It really is what this deal’s about. And made all the sweeter by happening at Wisky’s expense.

That’s always the excuse. It’s a good way to get a bad coach an extended stay too. Cig didn’t excel because of lack of pressure. That’s insane. Cig excelled because he’s confident, cocky, and capable. He had a plan and he executed it and it worked. He said, outright he was going to win. He brought pressure onto himself that he didn’t need to do nationally. (Sure he over performed likely his own expectations, but he never cowers) DeVries is not Cig in any form or fashion. Hiring someone with a similar confidence and a proven system would be a start. We HAVE never done this.

This is completely wrong. And fans that think this was will never get it. Crean was fired because he was NEVER going to win a championship. And if you can’t understand that, there’s not any point in having the discussion.

Ugh hope they don’t poach Darian DeVries from us,

Basketball has fallen way off. Nationally there are zero expectations at Indiana because we suck. Locally there is moderate pressure because we want to be good enough to be in the tournament again. And then build from there. But the Bar is set really low. DeVries didn’t get treated too bad this season at all. Locally or nationally. It was a meh season, and a meh reaction. Slight heat on the late season slide but at a real Blueblood with real expectations the fire would be burning up a coach’s @$$ with our results. Im not off the DeVries bus at all. But depending on how this portal goes and next season, I will have seen enough to make a decision. His personality is bland but kinda likeable in the Everyman sense. If he starts winning, I’ll love him. He seems from the outside looking in, a bit overwhelmed. Indiana fans are ready to rally behind a winner so hard. Produce a winner and the fans will be the wind beneath the wings. In general we were pretty tame considering how this year went. However he did little to help himself moving forward, and he’s lost me on his ability to scout the level of talent necessary to win. That’s what’s most concerning to me.

Put some respect on Curt Cignetti's name. There's no copying him or replicating that hire. The suggestion cannot seriously be "just copy the greatest hire in the history of college sports"

i ain’t reading all that i’m happy for you tho or sorry that happened

My biggest concern for DDV is his overall demeanor. I've always had the sense (post RMK) that a 'fiery' personality was going to work best at IU...to go along with "confident, cocky and capable" in implementing an unrelenting identity of what the program would be going forward.

Is there a Cliff's Notes version?

Schertz vs May in the round of 32. 2 really good friends battling it out for the sweet 16.

The current climate calls only for making the field of 68. Nobody is demanding a national title.

2 years ago he led ISU to the NIT championship game even though they should of went to the NCAA tourney but got screwed

Todd golden needs 6 more ounces of hair gel in his hair

Any day including a Kevin Willard loss is a good day.

As smug as they come. Thankfully your truth is yet again far from actual reality

Amazing, I wish Kentucky lost by a million but wow that was awesome

Wtf fid I just watch LOVE this stuff!!

Keeensucky down two to Santa Clara at the half. UK with major size and athleticism advantages... shoots 15 three balls in the first half ... makes four of them. And makes one free throw in the first halfThey look confused and sleepy. I will now show a graphic depicting Kentucky's currently signed freshman recruiting class for next season:

All of the comparisons our fans try to make between Cig and the basketball coach are ridiculous. Cig is a 1 of 1 and completed the greatest and fastest turn around in CFB history. He won big and he did it instantly. We say about IUBB all the time - Winning solves everything and thats exactly what Cig did. We can look back now at all the things cig said when he was hired, the expectations he set for the program, etc. but the main reason he is different is because he won. The idea that we should be able to hit a homerun hire for the basketball coach just because we hired Cig and should look for a guy with his same traits is insane. It sounds good in theory, and I agree a lot of his traits are the traits you would want in a head coach but if it was that easy Cig wouldnt be a 1 of 1.

Making the field of 68 is not a very lofty expectation and that's really all the fans have asked for over the past decade with just two postseason trips to show for it. The expectations are very fair for a program that spends like we do. We give all our coaches 4 year minimums. It's hardly a career defining risk. It's a great pay day and the last guy spent more time golfing than doing his job lol.

6-6 would have gotten him into the post season. I mean that is really the low bar we have at this point that we have missed or barely met for like a decade now. I don't think there is as much angst about the program if Devries really just handles Northwestern. I think there were other head scratches in there but the difference between that 6-6 Cignetti type of season was that the team appeared to throw in the towel a bit at the end and the end involved 2 games against a pretty bad Northwestern team. We were among the first 4 out, the bubble was extremely soft this year and we just tanked down the stretch. That said, I am fine with giving Devries time and lowering the expectations around the program, but if we are going to do that, the amount of money that is funneled into this now low expectation team has to be adjusted to match. Football is winning now, if we are saying we need 4 years to build a team the old way, fine, but this being in the Top 10 spend for 70+ place results has got to go.

You know about coach after two or three years. Giving Archie more time would not have worked, and that proved out even further once he left IU. Giving Woody more time would not have worked, I don't need to explain that one. Giving Tom more time? Maybe. But he went 15-57 in conference at UGA, so it's hard to make a case we just had to hold on to him. I'm not sure the standards here are ridiculous. All a coach needs to do here to get more time is show improvement. It doesn't even need to be drastic improvement. Archie didn't improve. Woody did for two years and people were happy, then he totally imploded on the court and behind the scenes. Tom did show improvement and... he ended up getting nine years! Anyways, the bummer is CDD didn't show improvement this year over last. Hope he does next season. I'm in the camp you need to keep trying hires until you get it right. Giving guys who can't improve the program over two or three years more time doesn't make sense to me. We'll eventually get the coach hire right. Maybe it's CDD. If it's not, it won't be a "top" coach in the game, they can't be hired, but there are good mid-level coaches out there ready to make the leap to P5 ball. Will we ever find the right one? Who knows.

All my buddies that are casual fans blowing up my phone asking who the dorky white boy on St Louis is. And having to explain Robbie has game lol

“Alex, I’ll take 1,800 word book reports on IUBB for $400.”

Sounds like targets identified. Hopefully they aim high enough.

I would ask everyone to remember last years timeline and compare it to what takes place in the next two months. This year will be different.

The year after Lewis and Clark went west of it.

He’s not good. Hes very Woodson-esque. UNC is still the sleeping giant that Indiana has been but at a higher level. Very similar situation for UNC as Indiana. They always get talent though. And usually it’s enough to stay somewhat afloat through mediocre coaching.

Watching Dusty and Michigan sickens me with what could have been, had Buckner not been a Richard and muck everything up because of his buddy, the Mediocre One.

Doesn't matter as long as UNC is going home.

You can't become a revolving door with the 3-4 year cycle because of the buyout money. The takeaway isn't to give mediocre or bad coaches a longer leash, it's to hire a good or great coach. 3 years is enough time to prove you're the man for the job. If you don't have momentum after 3 years at a place like IU you probably never will. Eventually you have to pick a guy you will ride through the ups and downs with, including a rare bad year here and there. But you gotta ride with the right guy otherwise you're stuck going in the wrong direction.

Devries faced no extra pressure and was allowed to bring in 2 Drake starters out of 5 total. By percentages Devries brought more of his guys than Cig. The idea that IU football pre-Cig was the easier program to win at than IU basketball is something I’m unlikely to be sold on.

As we embark on yet another NCAAT void of Indiana basketball, one where our team’s and fanbase’s absences will not be noticed, I’ll reiterate what I just said in the title - Indiana University’s basketball culture is dead. Whatever it was, however we used to describe it, the feeling it once gave us…it’s gone. When did it finally disappear? I don’t know, maybe around when we resorted to something as pathetic as putting five stars on our shorts to remind television viewers how great we used to be. I would love for a sixth banner to hang in Assembly Hall. I do not want to see a sixth star on our players’ shorts (or any stars on our uniforms for that matter). After the actual program’s success started to disappear, we began to get by on nostalgia - the nameless uniforms, imagery of heartland Americana fundamentals, the shadow of Bob Knight, the banners hanging in the background of every picture and television angle. It worked for a while, but now we actually need names on the uniforms to know who is even on our team these days, Bob Knight both finally returned to AH and passed away, and today’s student body wasn’t alive for 9/11, let alone would recognize any semblance of 1987 or the lingering pride that lasted for many years after. The nostalgic angle could only go on for so long, and I’m afraid we’ve finally reached IUBB apathy at critical mass. True, some of it is a reflection of the greater college basketball landscape. Between one-and-done/the G-League, the transfer portal, and conference realignment, college basketball as a whole is a shell of its former self. But what made Indiana basketball a selling point to recruits, prospective coaches, students, alumni, and the overall fan base is gone. Here’s why: Two things regarding recruits - (1) there are programs with a foothold on getting top players and it is not us; and (2) there remains a slightly “disturbing sense” (i.e., minor stink) around this program and what it means for a player’s development, the treatment from the fan base, and an inability for players to want to take pride in being an Indiana Hoosier not just as a player but for decades after graduating. How many players from the last 15 years do we expect to show up to IUBB games when they’re 45 years old and wave to receptive fans on the Jumbotron? And if they did, would the fans in attendance even recognize them? If we want to be a local recruiting power with an Indiana/midwestern identity that retains players for 3+ years then we need to become Purdue. If we want to be a national recruiting power then we need to become UNC and Duke. We’re currently neither despite spending more, and it’s not like those other programs are going anywhere anytime soon. We need to pick a lane. So what is it about this program that we can actually sell to players beyond money? It’s not like we’ve been killing it in recruiting recently anyway. We do not recruit anywhere near actual top programs, and of the guys we do get, they barely stick around…Since 2004 we have had 85 commitments come here (not including transfers). Granted, some of these commits were JUCOs with two years of eligibility, but of the 85 players, a total of 30 have stayed 3+ seasons with the program. They are: DJ White, AJ Ratliff, Verdell Jones, Matt Roth, Tom Pritchard, Jordan Hulls, Maurice Creek, Christian Watford, Derek Elston, Victor Oladipo, Will Sheehy, Yogi Ferrell, Hanner Mosquera-Perea, Collin Hartman, Troy Williams, James Blackmon, Robert Johnson, Tim Priller, Juwan Morgan, Devonte Green, De’Ron Davis, Justin Smith, Al Durham, Race Thompson, Rob Phinisee, Trayce Jackson-Davis, Jordan Geronimo, Trey Galloway, Anthony Leal, and Malik Reneau. I don’t know…how many of these names were guys you could really build a nationally competitive program around? Four or five over 20 years? On prospective coaches, our last 4+ coaching cycles have proven where we stand among the coaching ranks. This is not just an IU problem, but if anyone thinks that “coaching at Indiana” is an opportunity that means much these days then you’re kidding yourself. IU is not a top 10 job anymore (and neither is just about any job except Duke, Kansas, and maybe UNC). Everyone else is tied at 4-40, meaning if you’re coaching at a decent school in a P4 conference then you have all you need to win occasionally at your current school and do not need to be at Indiana, or Louisville, or UCLA, or even Kentucky to win big. And most of those other jobs pay very well and have much lower expectations than what comes with coaching here. Now on to the students…For the longest time our basketball team got a pass for its mediocrity because football was even worse. We could sell freshmen on Indiana basketball being part of the student experience, something they will remember after they graduate and a privilege to be a part of while on campus. That’s gone with today’s student body, and it will only get harder to sell the longer we go without winning on the court, especially for out-of-state students who did not grow up with generational IUBB stories and lore. Our student body now has the ultimate bragging rights in the country’s biggest sport. Our football coach is the face of the sport and our university. Indiana students have finally tasted success and they’ve experienced it in something that is more fun to watch, attend, and socialize around than basketball. Why would (or should) they haul their butts to AH on a cold January night to support a mediocre team with a new rotation of faces that will be gone each year? I certainly do not think we’ll become Auburn or Texas where basketball is something cute that is only there to kill time in the winter, but at least as long as Cignetti is here IUBB will also have to compete with IUFB. Finally the fans and alumni…I haven’t been tracking attendance this year, but I can say that I have never been less enthusiastic or interested in following a team than this year. Part of it was definitely football cutting well into basketball season, but the underwhelming hire that was DeVries and the player turnover allowed apathy to settle in quickly once the losses piled in. Myself aside, in general, the buzz around the program on the internet, media, among friends, game watches at bars, it all feels missing right now. We finally played Kentucky in basketball this year. The buildup for that game was nothing compared to how it was 15+ years ago. The fans and alumni are the glue that have held this program together for 25 years. Unlike Nebraska football, which is all their fans have (this basketball season aside), Hoosier Nation is more dispersed and has other teams to follow, even in our own state. The lynchpin for IUBB being our eternally optimistic and loyal fan base is not sustainable if the program is no longer creating new generations of fans at scale. None of this is to say that Indiana basketball is not historic or does not hold a special place in the sport, but nostalgia and fan support have not won us games and an open checkbook in an era where players can be paid is not getting us winning rosters. There has been something fundamentally off with how this program is approaching the sport because it should not be this difficult for this long. The administration is not the problem, which some alluded to as the cause in previous years. We now have a university president who helped support a championship team in football from the ground up in two years. It should not be this hard for Indiana basketball to be good, especially since we’re one of 6-8 resource-rich programs in the country that actually emphasizes basketball…but yet it still is… So what now is Indiana University basketball? To be honest, I really don’t know. We can say we’re a blue blood and point to our banners, tradition, and fans, but that doesn’t win us games and at this point recruits don’t care. No one under 30 has “grown up with Indiana basketball.” We can say we’re always only one coach away, and if we keep trying enough coaches then we’ll finally land the guy who can keep local talent at home and sprinkle in national recruits to finally make us a perennial top 10 team again. To be honest, I think there may be too much cultural inertia and delusional fan expectations to let a coach breathe and build here. To be more succinct, I’m skeptical if we had landed Brad Stephens or Dusty May that they would have been as successful here as they were/are at Butler and Michigan. This football championship and the culture/identity that Cignetti instilled to make it happen has been really sobering when looking at our meddling basketball program. Do we need a basketball coach who has experience, can lead his team, and build a culture? Absolutely. We cannot have someone lazy like Woodson, completely misguided like Archie, or in over his head like Davis. But to do so we either (1) need to keep the coaching carousel moving until we finally hit, or (2) we can be hands off, let this program finally get some stability, and allow a new culture to emerge. I’m firmly in the camp of option #2 at this point. I really like the Carr hire, and I’m hopeful that DeVries will be accepting of Carr/Dolson running the show and DeVries just managing the games. If DeVries can’t accept the new approach next season then I say we get rid of him in March 2027. But if he stays beyond Year 2, or if we bring someone in to replace him for 2027-2028, then DeVries/this other coach should be given a while to let this new Carr approach work and make something of their own in Bloomington. The fans/IU media need to let go of what Indiana was and allow whatever Indiana can be to manifest. I’m talking giving whoever is our 2027-28 coach 6-8 seasons to breathe and let something build organically. Get a new culture in here, even if it takes a few years to emerge. What that looks like or will be is TBD right now, but it needs to be forward thinking and look beyond selling tradition and nostalgia. Keep the candy stripes, keep the simple uniforms, and make sure the players are not scumbags…other than that, I’m indifferent to what this program looks like 3-5 years from now as long as something sustainable is allowed to happen. Because whatever Indiana basketball was or thinks it is….it isn’t.

“Miami Ohio’s magical run” brother they beat the T-11th placed team in the ACC let’s mix in a water.

This relentless attack that the fanbase is the problem is so delusional. And that Indiana despite its history, resources, NIL, and everything else being top 10 or top 20 at worst is just an average high major job and its expectations are out of line with reality and that the fanbase deserves “what it gets” is the most maddening narrative existing to me.

Kinda crazy that was UVA's first NCAA win since the 2019 title game.

Logan-Rogersville defeated Vashon 74-60 and faces Clayton tomorrow at 5:00 ET for the Class 4 state championship. Branham 31p, 9r, 2a.

Tom Crean's Mom enters the chat. : /

You say IU is the leper of college basketball when it comes to college basketball coaches. Yet the Big Ten coaches literally voted this year that its the 2nd best job in the conference. The conference itself is arguably the best / 2nd best conference in America ? So how did that happen?

There has probably been an innumerable amount of higher quality coaches hired by other schools in the span of time since we've hired Archie, Woody, and DDV. The problem is not fan expectations. It's hiring coaches that don't win enough. All you have to do to fix the imaginary problem of "fanbase expectations" is hire a capable coach. IU hasn't been able to do that in a long time because of either A) general incompetence B) undue internal politics. The administration just hasn't been able to get out of their own way and the fans are exhausted by it. Maybe it's different with DDV. But if it's not, the answer isn't to let him automatically have the better half of an entire decade.

In that case, Cig would have shown improvement and CDD would have not shown improvement. A coach just has to show improvement to get more time.

I just don't follow this. Amateurism is great, but it needs to be the athlete's decision to be an am or a pro, and not forced on them. P4 athletic depts generate $120-300M+ in revenue per year from media rights, ticket sales, sponsors, etc. There is nothing amateur about these operations -- head coaches are making $4-13M/yr, coordinators $1-3M/yr, etc. FB and MBB players play a large role in generating all this revenue. How can you justify not paying them? Rev share and NIL (which is absolutely pay for play) is currently valuing P4 FB and MBB players at $250K to $5M+ per year. These are elite athletes the market values and you're telling me they should get $0 to play? That's very unfair, and the courts agreed. Sorry Fernando, nice 16-0 title run with all those sold out stadiums and huge TV viewership, but you shouldn't have been paid $2M for that, you've got to be an amateur. And little side deals doing marketing work doesn't make up for stopping players from getting paid to play. And at the end of the day, it's harmless. Roster payrolls are mostly funded by rich donors. Athletic depts usually take nothing from the schools, and if they do it's usually de minimis. So we've got rich people paying generally working and middle class kids money to play sports. I'm not seeing anything wrong with that.

Saint Louis putting on an absolute clinic!

Tar Hole nation is going to be livid. Going to be a fun week going to work. They won’t be kind to Davis.

UNC can suck it!

UNC-VCU game is entertaining -- but it's not very good basketball.

I’ve never been more certain that you can’t go wrong in the top-4. Even at 4 if you’re “stuck” taking Wilson. If they can just get one of those guys it’s going to be a LOT of fun.

He has me hoping the Pacers tank-a-thon pays off