Vauxhall and IU

You know, there was so much talk worrying about the fans not getting behind the plan B hire if Stevens didn't pan out. But I gotta say, after having my heart ripped out like this, anyone* who actually WANTS to come here and will actually take pride in the job of coaching IU (rather than using it for rat****ing contract moves) will have my unwavering support. That's where I'm at emotionally after today. I gotta say, just hearing Beard talk about IU with such obvious respect was a breath of fresh air. *not Alford

Suffice it to say it would be a massive PR embarrassment for IU if we hired him, as in like, "organized protests outside Dolson's office" level bad. I'd be right there with them in solidarity. Google Pierre Pierce. It's bad.

That's when we hit em with this

This is kinda where I'm at. I admit to being a little cooler on Beard than most IU fans. I'd be perfectly happy with the hire and he'd obviously be a huge upgrade but I don't think he's the savior a lot of people think he would be. He's had a couple impressive tourney runs (granted, one REALLY impressive), but ideally, that kind of thing is gonna be a baseline expectation of anyone we're look at (hopefully). Furthermore, I see him as one of the least likely to take the offer. Whether or not you think Brad leaves the NBA, there's at least a good reason why people think he MIGHT come here, given his background. But Beard doesn't have any Indiana ties or even any Midwest ties I'm aware of. The main reason a lot of people want him is his Knight connection, but think about the period he was coaching under him - I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Knight probably wasn't painting a real rosy picture of IU at that time. On top of that, he's already earning a top salary, and has family considerations, and yet people act like he's just sitting by the phone waiting for the IU call. Definitely not against the idea, I'm just saying I think it's a real stretch.

Well in case anyone's wondering how the level of discourse is going over on the Facebook groups, one guys asked "Does anyone under 50 actually want Steve Alford?" and another guy commented that the post was "racist" because it "excluded people 50 and older." That's why I limit my online IUBB chatter to basically just this site.

This got me thinking and I realized something: a lot of IU fans' obsession with in-state recruiting is a matter of misunderstanding correlation vs. causation. We didn't become great by recruiting Indiana kids just for its own sake - rather, it was the fact that we were great that made all the top talent in the state WANT to come here. Of course, when you're talking about low information fans on Facebook (the kind who are convinced Steve Alford would have success here because he "understands the history") they're not thinking in these terms, they're just picturing cornpone imagery of kids shooting hoops on the side of a barn as if that's still anything resembling reality. They really do think there's some preternatural mystical quality to being from Indiana that somehow makes kids better basketball players. It's funny until you remember this is the mentality of such a depressingly large chunk of IU's fanbase.

I didn't even think to include the picture I took. Looking at it now, 70% may have been generous. I remember afterwards everyone just kind of filing out of there quietly, with this big collective feeling of "...ohh-kayyy."

All this talk about low attendance numbers has got me thinking about something. Show of hands: how many folks here were actually AT the notorious Indiana State game? I was. And I remember going in being SO pumped, thinking this was a new era for IU basketball and that the fanbase was raring to go after the darkness of the Crean years (which in retrospect, LMAO). I genuinely believed that the place was going to be packed and rocking that night. Instead, I got there and discovered the Hall dotted with empty seats. It might've been marginally better attended than the usual cupcake games but it was still only maybe 70% full, and a huge number of the people who were there were ISU fans. That, more than the pathetic showing in the game, was what really had me concerned that night. Then, even weirder, after the game my buddy and I went to Trojan Horse and it was like 10pm on a Friday night and Kirkwood was completely empty. I was just like "what's happening to this town?"

What's really amazing is that out of these last five games, we now learn that four of them could have been eminently winnable. And yet.

The idea of needing an "IU guy" is insipid crowd-pleasing nonsense to pacify the Facebook dads and no one else. Take Alford, for instance: setting aside his disqualifying moral failings for a moment, the idea that Alford would "help with in-state recruiting," as I hear so often from these types, is laughable. Not only do today's kids not remember Steve Alford, we're coming up on a time when these kids' PARENTS don't even remember Steve Alford. We're all IU fans here, so this is a bitter pill to swallow, but kids today don't care about IU's history. In reality, I don't think many of them care about college basketball in general, but that's another discussion for another day. We already have basically the ultimate "IU guy" as our AD, and the AD is the kind of position where this kind of thing matters. The head coach, in essence, is a technician, not a poet expressing his love for the ineffable IU mystique. If a coach is like Allen and clearly relishes that position and loves the school and the program, then that's gravy. But the AD job is the one where you need someone who lives and breathes the history, because that's who has the power to make moves to put us back in a good position. The coach is just the facilitator in that regard.

Did you not read what I wrote? I said "Crean's last year." In 2016-17 we had 3 NBA players (granted, one out for half the year due to injury) and we went to the NIT. Two years later we've got 2 NBA players (one playing injured for most of the year) and...we went to the NIT. Pretty dang comparable if you ask me. Crean won the B1G twice and both times missed the tournament the following year. The cumulative average of that kind of inconsistency is, by definition, mediocrity.

I should have been clearer: I didn't mean to imply Archie's coaching wasn't part of the problem, obviously it's the biggest part. What I meant was, there's this mentality, which I certainly shared during the leaner Crean years, that we have all the parts in place and if we could just plug the right coach, a real X's and O's guy, into this well oiled machine that we'd be fine. I don't buy this idea anymore. The rot in this program is way bigger than just the coaching staff. Obviously the Archie/Holtmann switcheroo is a counterfactual and counterfactuals are inherently silly to debate. Sure, some of Archie's deficiencies would've been apparent at OSU, and we probably could've stolen a few more wins here and there on the strength of Holtmann's apparently superior coaching acumen. But I don't think it would have been THAT different. Because what I see in the past five years, between Crean's last year and Archie's tenure, is two coaches with polar opposite styles, demeanors, and coaching philosophies, with remarkably similar levels of mediocrity. That tells me it's not just an in-game coaching issue.

I firmly believe that if we'd hired Holtmann and Archie had gone to O$U like everyone thought would happen, the results would be about the same and everyone on here would be cursing Fred for not hiring Archie. Anyone who thinks our issues are just X's and O's is kidding themselves.

Well said. Those of us who were Archie supporters need to stop beating ourselves up for being "wrong," because there was no reason for anyone to think we were wrong at the time. Archie was THE hot coach and if we hadn't gotten him, some other big name school would have, and sadly, probably would've had more success with him than we've had, because whatever issues he's had sure haven't been unique to his tenure. He's not an aberration within 21st century IU basketball, he's the norm. Among IU fans there's a quite a few folks whose whole schtick is saying I told you so, and that's a bad look. Unless you inexplicably had it out for Archie from the start (like some people seem to have), we all at the very least wanted him to succeed and make us as good as he possibly could, whatever his ceiling turned out to be. I just don't think any of us knew that ceiling would be so low.

Real dose of perspective after this game. Losing a winnable basketball game sucks. Losing anyone, let alone a legend like Daryl Thomas, at 52 sucks even more. Heavy stuff to process after getting so frustrated wondering how much worse things could be for this program right now.

We joke, but there's a kernel of truth here. In 2017 I was terrified we would hire Alford and I would have to stop following IU basketball. Now it's like "we might hire Alford, but on the bright side, that means I can stop following IU basketball."

So, in other words, other schools hired him, so it's okay? Yeah, that's not how this works. I don't care if other schools hire him. That's their problem. I didn't go to those schools. I went to IU. I care about the integrity of IU as an institution, not just the W/L record of the men's basketball program. Half (or more) of IU's student body are female students. And, infuriatingly, it's a statistical certainty that a large percentage of them are sexual assault survivors. Hiring Alford would be a slap in the face to every single one of them. It would send a message to IU's female students, and to the world, that IU doesn't take sexual assault seriously. That is unacceptable to me and I know it's unacceptable to a lot of other alumni as well. This is what's at stake here. This is why Alford can never, ever, EVER be our coach.

When you first started making excuses for Alford's conduct, it still was obviously terrible but it was, at the very least, consistent with your "literally anyone in the world would be better than Archie" schtick. But it's gone way beyond that at this point. You seem to genuinely believe in your heart of hearts that what he did wasn't a big deal, and that's extremely disturbing.

That's underselling just how bad it would be. We wouldn't just be having this conversation again in four years - we'd be having this conversation with an even more decimated fan base. I shouldn't even say "we," because I wouldn't have any part of it. If IU hires Alford, I am done, and I mean DONE, until both he and Dolson are gone. And I know I'm not alone.

"Underappreciated" I guess would be more accurate. Not underrated from a rankings standpoint but underrated in our collective memories. They weren't destined for greatness but they were night and day from the previous year, and night and day from the garbage we're seeing nowadays.

The question wasn't what our record was, the question was what players were alpha dogs who hated to lose. The team's struggles didn't make Yogi any less of an alpha dog. I remember his sophomore year you could just sense his frustration that the team wasn't where they should've been. Also, I'd submit that Yogi's junior year team (2014-2015) was underrated. They were never gonna be FF contenders (which I know is all some folks care about), but game in game out I loved watching that team play. They at least made *something* out of a season that could've been completely derailed by off-court issues.

We haven't had a genuine article, dyed-in-the-wool alpha dog since Yogi. Juwan was close. Since he graduated? Nothing.

This game is a great example of why it's been this season in particular that's soured me on Archie. I feel like a lot of folks' criticism of Archie was based on just wins and losses, and while yeah, our W/L weren't where we wanted them to be, every year I felt like we were making incremental improvements and slowly but surely solidifying our defense into something really efficient. But the way we've regressed so much on D this year has laid waste to that theory. Archie's whole coaching philosophy is supposedly defense. It was why I was so excited to watch his teams after the fun but empty calories of Crean ball. If we were still occasionally losing tough games but showing improvement on D, it'd be one thing. But if our D is going to be this bad, it negates his entire ostensible reason for being here.

Wouldn't be sad if it didn't.