Leaderboard

Yup. No matter who wins non-a$$holes lose.

Here comes Brad. Wonder how the daughter will vote.

Reneau stepping up big time in the second half has me in shambles. The guy would have been such a monster this year

Bill Rafferty is 82 years old.....hats off to him, he really loves this tournament!

Really getting tired of official reviews every time someone catches an elbow to the face.

Might be able to secure himself a role as a hobbit in the next Lord of the Rings sequel!

Crean didn't get fired because 2016 wasn't good enough. He got fired because that was the only season out of his last 4 where he had a winning conference record.

God hates them, everyone knows Baptists shouldn’t be dancing

Are you proposing a secluded meal that includes Stephen Spielberg, Zendaya, Margot Robbie, Ben Affleck, and MICK CRONIN? i am so down with that.

Don’t enter the transfer portal without a complete staff when your team isn’t even playing in the tournament. How’s that for tangible non slogan catch phrases thats a very clear bare minimum. Not having a staff after 6 weeks is insanely stupid. Coaches are lined up and hired all the time while they are still coaching. Getting strung along by candidates trying to get a bigger offer elsewhere isn’t an excuse. It’s a screw up.

Your post is a recitation of non-specific catchphrases. Every situation is different and the details of each situation are absolutely relevant. Will Devries succeed? I don’t know. But I do know it’s too soon to tell, that Devries hasn’t whined at all, and that “breaking down a door” sounds like a slogan, not a way for a coaching staff to establish a consistently winning program.

No use arguing with the guy. He spent all last year blaming us, and fans at large, that pushing out Woody was why no good coach would come here. During the first half of last year, he compared Dusty repeatedly to Crean because of their perceived common faults. Cited FT shooting, blowing late leads, and “incompetent in game management”. Became awfully quiet on both these fronts once Dusty continued to kill it and Woody’s tenure ended in a toxic whimper coupled with us upgrading at coach. Dusty May would’ve been in Bloomington if we let Woodson go after year 3. He was as obvious of a great coach as there’s been in years. Pushing out bad coaches ‘early’ doesn’t prevent great ones from being available to you at IU.

Pulling hard for SLU today

Northwestern 7 footer Cade Bennerman entering the portal. Redshirted his freshman year. Had a pretty nice list before picking NW including, if you believer 247, a Michigan offer. From what I can find of him he’s really long, very fluid, runs well and appears to have a fair bit to work with. Redshirted because he’s a late developer and looks like he didn’t weigh much more than 200 when he would have hit campus. Got to confess, an athletic 7 footer with 4 years of eligibility and has been well coached for the last year hits some of my hot buttons for a backup 5 pretty good. May dig into him a bit.

A bit confused about why we are debating Tom Crean's tenure 10 years later... I liked Crean, he was a decent coach and a good guy. But just because we made two bad hires after him, doesn't mean Crean deserved another decade here.

Watching another kinda unwatchable game: UCLA v UCF. One nice realization for me from this game? Steve Lappas is a great listen as the color commentator. New York salty and smart.

Nah. I’ll call you a masochist. Lol

And he’s still really really good. Amazing to me how he sounds basically like the same guy as he did twenty years ago.

If they can just handle the ball a little better and reduce turnovers, they have an easy path to win this one. side note: I’m not a fan of Pat Kelsey, not sure why but I just don’t like him lol

UK had a lot of swing and misses 2 years ago. But it should be interesting

There were a lot of people on this board and social media in general who, two or three years ago, said Dusty May was “mid major flavor of the month” and that nobody would want him here if wasn’t an IU grad. I remember it clearly because many were in response to my posts as to how good May is. But of course most will deny saying that now. I have posted this here before, but my son has talked at great length with one of Crean’s former assistants about Crean as a head coach. He said Crean is as good as anybody at X’s and O’s and coaching adjustments, but is held back by a lack of organizational skills. Where Cig has a “process” and “routine” and “working the plan,” Crean had chaos. Good coach, bad CEO, so to speak.

Lot of internet chatter that Hubert Davis is out at UNC. Reportedly some big $ boosters have said they've lost faith.

Crean was fired by the AD for reasons that a lot of us fans were never told in public. What bothered me was not the wins and positive runs, it was that he overhyped everything...and focused on some things that in hindsight did not bode well for the future of Indiana basketball. He seemed frantic at times...but lots of coaches do. He did not seem to deal with locker-room issues. Discipline seemed inconsistent. He was a very hard worker and at times drove his team, apparently, to exhaustion prior to some games. He did not create positive situations or matchups for game tactics and strategies. He overhyped recruits, the season and his sales jobs on a few players was something that seemed to come back as a detriment during games. He allowed players to take it easy on defense if they played fast and scored on offense. And then starting with the Northwestern game in his last season,Crean used physical placards, which he dubbed "echo signs," to send signals and directions to players during games. These signs, which included directions like "call out screens" or "no hopping," were used to improve in-game communication and defensive awareness but they resulted in serious ridicule and players felt demeaned. He broke the pipeline to Indiana high school coaches. For instance, he did not seem to be able to continue to draw recruits for the future. These issues were common knowledge and some recruits seemed reluctant to step into it. When some top Indiana high school prospects went elsewhere Crean's future became more tentative at IU. The cupboard of recruits and players was lacking in that last year, and the future was not looking good.

I just saw a clip of Mark Pope's reaction to the final sequence of regulation against Santa Clara. Sucks he coaches Kentucky because he seems like an otherwise pretty likable dude.

Fair? Rules? In college sports? Players are allowed to be in all the commercials and movies they can get roles in. Though national ad campaigns seem to be only for the top few players in CBB and CFB. Like Arch Manning or Caitlin Clark or Cam. Even pre-NIL, big programs had the advantage of providing more exposure to a player which ultimately leads to opportunities. And in the NIL world it's amplified. Players have more money making opportunities at a big place like Texas than at Iowa St. Is what it is. Not to get in the weeds, but if you're interested, the way NIL turns into pay for play is the school's media partner promises/guarantees a certain amount of NIL "opportunities" for the player while they're at the school. These opportunities are mostly nonsense and not actually worth it from a marketing point of view, but this approach with the media partner works within the NIL "rules." So, for example, a Blue Chip player's deal will be something like $1M of rev share with the school and $3M of guaranteed NIL ops from the school's media partner, and that's how they make $4M per year. Kinda silly but that's the system right now.

Happy to see it. Putting some of the emotional immaturity aside he seemed like nothing but a good kid.

Nonsense. Mo Creek was from the DMV area, not the Midwest, so have zero idea why that would have any bearing on Midwest area kids or AAU coaches? Crean landed high profile DMV area players like Troy Williams and Robert Johnson after Creek and fellow east coast 5* Noah Vonleh and Thomas Bryant long after Creek’s departure. Had no trouble bringing in James Blackmon or Hanner Perea who were both highly rated as well. Recruiting was the least of Crean’s problems. Was Crean’s in-game coaching the best? No. Did he still win multiple B10 titles and advance to the second weekend multiple times? Yes. This idea that Crean was tailing off at the end is pure lunacy. He literally won the B10 the year before he was fired and had a team ranked as high a #3 in the country the year he was fired with wins over Kansas and North Carolina, the latter who would go on to win the title that year. Hell Crean had a ranked team the week prior to OG blowing out his knee. The wheels fell off after that and the end of the year slide was disappointing, but let’s not act like Crean fell into some deep abyss at the end of his tenure. He had a ranked team who lost its best player to a freak injury.

1st 2 minutes I listened, he criticized a bad ref call and then called UCF out for a garbage possession. Can we fudge a 5 year run at Rutger on his resume so he can be on BTN next year?

Let see how he does next season without Stirtz.....

Ben McCollum…what could’ve been…

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.

With you on Kelsey. He’s lower key about it than most of the d-bag coaches but he definitely feels like he’s in that fraternity.

Yes! Sub-optimal first few weeks that contributed to a meh first year. Doesn’t mean all is lost; means learn from it and do better.

SLU held tough for a long time. Michigan is just another level.

That is actually the whole point behind NIL. It’s been bastardized by the “collectives” acting like a payroll.

Awesome game thus far

Losers whine about the obstacles Every loser we hire gets the same excuse made for them. Crean didn’t know the mess he was getting. Archie didn’t know the mess he was getting. Woody didn’t know the mess he was getting and now DD didn’t know what a mess he was walking into. If the door is closed you open or break it down. Stop letting obstacles lead us to failure.

Yes. Krshevski was given roles in national ads for years, that was a nice recruiting advantage for sure. Dang! Cigs could be perfect for funny ads, but he's too locked in for such things I'd figure.

I didn’t say he would flounder. I just don’t want to watch it on a regular basis. Same with Bo Ryan at Wisconsin. That style is atrocious. Florida will be doing the world a great service by smacking Iowa. Also, the idea that he will go grab the next Stirtz is not likely going to happen. Not many D2 players can make that jump in a yearly basis and if that’s what he is hanging his hat on, then I think this year is the ceiling. They are rumored to have 2-4 million in NIL for next year. So he will continue to play slow methodical grind it out style to have a shot at winning games. Finish middle of the pack and when they make the tournament, they will get bounced the first weekend. Iowa had that in Fran with a much more entertaining style than this. Iowa fans are already complaining down the stretch about the team. But the NIL isn’t there for him to get the talent needed to play at a faster tempo regularly. I have more faith in DeVries and Buzz Williams to figure it out at IU and Maryland with much greater resources than for McCollum to figure it out and be a top 5 Big Ten team. McCollum isn’t the Cig like hire, Dusty May is.

They are about to get ran off the court by Florida on Sunday and I will be thankful for it.

Brownell is not brilliant!

Purely stylistically, I enjoyed watching Iowa play more than Indiana this year. Call me a McCollum fanboy if you want lol

Yeah watching Iowa this year has made me glad we didn’t go with him

I ain’t leavin, my @$$ was just itchin’. Bad day. Thanks ya’ll.

This Vashon team wasn't exactly chopped liver. They won the last 6 state titles and this was Vashon's first loss in the final four since 1999. Vashon was 20-0 with 10 championships when making the final four since 2000.

Tom Crean's Mom enters the chat. : /

Yeah, I am no Tom Crean hater. I actually like the dude and he was the right guy at the time. When nobody would touch us he came to a dead program and resurrected it all because “It’s Indiana.”

Is there a Cliff's Notes version?