lillurk

Indeed. Justin could’ve really helped this year. Would’ve been nice to have someone well-suited to guard Ron Harper Jr., Eric Henry, Franz Wagner...

Probably so and I admire @Stuhoo’s commitment to pumping him up. Hope he succeeds...BC seems like a tough gig to me.

Yeah I wouldn’t argue this a ton, though I think in both spots you recruit lots of IN and Midwest kids and if IU was cookin’ more of them might prefer IU.

Hard to compare but I think it would be easier to recruit at IU if you got it going consistently.

I recall last offseason I made the point that while the three MSU wins were nice, they were real outliers and the pro-Arch crowd should consider just how close IU had been to losing all three. IU had been pretty middling even WITH those wins. Without them, IU would’ve been nowhere close to the bubble two years ago, and sweating a lot more last year.

The start was bad but there have been lots of bad moments along the way, too

Me too. I’m much more pro-Glass than a lot of folks here but he went 50/50 on revenue sport hires, which followed similar methods as far as the public knows: find you coach and focus on him. IU has a different context in Fb Vs. BB though. Dolson’s doing it right.

This wouldn’t be Fife’s first gig, and he did better than he had any right at IPFW. I guess if (like me) you’re somewhat skeptical of the really big fish, if you think Drew and Mack and maybe even Enfield would listen but are inclined to stay put if they get raises, then you’re looking at the other names on the list @Chris007 posted, and among those there’s no sure thing. So you call Stevens, you do your diligence with the Drew/Enfield/Mack tier, you check on the retirees, you interview the youth candidates...does anyone doubt Fife would interview pretty well? Gates and Shrewsberry too. The pessimism about the younger coaches is unwarranted. It’s not like Butler hired Brad Stevens away from the Lakers. Coaching is a lot of work, but it isn’t brain surgery

Four years ago I was wary of Mack for the same reason as Archie: I thought some nice tournament performances were propping up some middling results otherwise. I think Mack’s work at UL has proven I was wrong there. I continue to be surprised how many are dismissive of Fife’s candidacy. Whether you think he’d be good or not, he checks a lot of the boxes we would imagine those making the hiring decision will look at. Where do y’all think head coaches come from? Except the very rare, they were all assistants

The other reason he could be interested is to drive up his own price to stay at UL. I’d be interested if the opponent 3Pt% and 3Pt rate were low enough. Those have been the weaknesses of Archie’s packline. Well, one weakness

Agree, unless the resume has some other meat on it

No no no

Possible to believe Enfield should be wayyy down the list and ALSO that he’s shown enough for us to know he’d be a clear upgrade. I’d rather have Fife and plenty of other choices, but Enfield is better than what we have.

Believe there’s no requirement that it be public, but some publicize it by choice, and others have ownership structures that let it out

I guess my big picture point is if IU’s next coach beats Purdue at least once next year, plays on Saturday in the conference tournament, earns a 4-6 seed and the team looks good in the tournament, we’ll be pretty optimistic even if it wasn’t our first choice hire.

Right. I don’t think I need to remind anyone but IU won the hiring season and so on in 2017. That isn’t working out.

This is not a defense of Enfield at all but: the overwhelming consensus is -we need a change, and -we want to win in an honorable way. Everyone commenting here has opinions on who gives us the best chance to do the latter, but there are LOTS of candidates who might succeed at a high level given the resources at IU. I’ve been critical of the process that led IU to pick Archie. I still think a mid-major coach could make the leap and succeed. Enfield fits something like the Holtmann mold, Fife fits a version of the Scott Drew/Matt Painter mold...the key is getting it right and winning games, not winning the press conference.

It’s important that IU make a good hire. It’s also true that IU has many, many options that will be an improvement over the current situation and/or a lame duck

If anything contacting Enfield might mean someone has a good relationship with his agent and/or IU is casting a wide net. Might be taken as a good sign they’re doing a broad search and gauging interest.

For these reasons I think Enfield is both a good “check in to keep a backup plan in mind” coach AND surprising, given the Tony Bland stuff. In other words, it isn’t exciting and I’d be shocked if it went this way...but you do your due diligence and he’s done more with less.

There’s another site that seems to have a lot of apologists with low expectations. I’m glad I’m a poster here.

It’s a beautiful day for the last regular season game of an era

Lol. The tweet is written pretty neutrally, but if IU had beaten two of NW, MSU, OU, and Rutger at home they’d be 14-11 and probably just need one win to sleep easy on selection Sunday.

Hmmmmmm. On the one hand, it was a rescheduled game, so some might have missed it for that reason. But I would be interested in the trend there, including the numbers for tomorrow and the BTT game if I were a decision-maker here

The other good thing about a big Stevens offer is it shows you’d be serious in the future. Say he leaves Boston this off-season and (God forbid) you don’t hire a new coach this year...he may wait for you next year if he’d like to return to college.