Hoosierfan2017

Absolutely not lol.

In football? No, because IU doesn’t have a rich football history. But IU was 16th in the country in attendance Crean’s first season despite going 6-25 with a bunch of walk ons1 because people still wanted to watch IU basketball. NIL has created a system where every player in the country is a one year rental, and sometimes the players don’t even finish out the year. If you could create a system that paid players and wasn’t a complete disaster? Sure, I’d have no problem with that. I don’t care if players get paid. It’s not my money. Doesn’t affect my bottom line. But the college sports landscape that it has created really sucks.

The revenue is because of the universities. The players, except in very very limited exceptions, are interchangeable. Look at the attendance/viewership for minor league teams. It’s nothing compared to college sports. 15k plus people aren’t packing in Assembly Hall to watch Tucker Devries (no offense to him). They’re coming to watch Indiana University. 100k people wouldn’t go watch the Tuscaloosa Tide play the Athens Bulldogs. I’m not against NIL in theory. If people want to buy a player’s autograph, or if Mother Bears wants to pay Anthony Leal to advertise pizzas, no problem with that. But the current “NIL” landscape is so far removed from that. It’s a complete mess, and it’s only going to get worse.

When have the fans been wrong? Mike Davis, Tom Crean, Archie Miller, Mike Woodson. None of them have done anything post-IU.

Don’t attendance numbers count tickets sold rather than butts in seats? IU basketball will always sell tickets, and I don’t think the university really cares much if people actually show up for games, but the balcony especially has been a graveyard all season. Patience is harder to preach in the NIL era, particularly to the same fanbase that watched a coach immediately turn around the worst P5 football program in the country. It’s not Devries’ fault, but Crean’s last sweet 16 team was a decade ago. Happy moments have been few and far between since then. Fan appetite for yet another rebuild is virtually nonexistent. Certainly Assembly Hall will be packed if the basketball team gets things rolling again, but until then I expect more of the same mediocre Assembly Hall we’ve seen recently.

Apathy is the worst thing for a program, and that’s exactly where the basketball program is at this point. The Woodson hire showed IU wasn’t serious about basketball, and the Devries hire showed that no one was coming to save the program from itself. Maybe he’ll do well, maybe he won’t. So far his roster construction stinks, his high school recruiting is meh, and the team on the court is even more underwhelming. And honestly, oh well. He seems like a nice enough guy (and isn’t a raging a** like the last guy), so that’s an improvement. I’ve largely given up on IU basketball ever being anything more than a middling program. I like football a lot more than basketball as a sport anyway, so IU football’s success makes it so much easier to get over IU basketball’s mediocrity. You could throw more money at basketball to try to solve the problem, but that seems foolish to do when every dollar put toward basketball would be better off going to Cignetti. I don’t think we’ll see a pissed off IU basketball fan base like we saw with Woodson. Fans just won’t show up and we’ll keep seeing a quiet, half empty Assembly Hall. It stinks, but you can only keep enthusiasm for a dead program going for so long. Kind of ironic that IU football’s success dealt the final blow to the basketball program. Who woulda thought.

I’m just not a fan of the G5s getting auto bids. You end up with half the first round games being total jokes when way better teams were left out of the playoff. You’ll still have blowouts with P4 games, but everyone knew going in that these two would be landslides (Ole Miss already destroyed Tulane earlier in the year, for example).

I’ll be disappointed if we don’t land a top QB in the portal… The momentum is red hot for the program right now coming off Rourke/Mendoza in back to back seasons. Any top guy in the portal has to at least consider IU as a possibility. QB play can make or break a contender, and I’d feel much better going into next year with a proven producer in the mix.

Kentucky has went to 10 of the last 11 NCAA tournaments and just went to the Sweet 16 and they’re crashing out in mid December because of a slow start. I fully believe the UK fanbase would have burned Rupp Arena to the ground at some point over the last 25 years if they dealt with the same stretch we’ve dealt with as fans. But then certain folks blame the fans… They’re close to getting their wish, though. Apathy is already largely here. The balcony is largely empty for all but the biggest of games these days. Generations raised on bad IU basketball won’t know any different, and they’ll continue to find other ways to entertain themselves. At least then the program won’t have to worry as much about pesky fan expectations….

Take IUBB’s NIL budget and bring Heismandoza back for another year (and save him from the Jets)? Very bueno.

Just cut all of basketball’s NIL and give it to Cig. No point in paying $10+ million to miss the tournament when you can do that for free.

Feels like we’re destined to be mediocre forever.

How not? Alabama and ND both finished the regular season 10-2. Alabama’s road win at Georgia was far more impressive than anything ND did this year. Also had wins against Vanderbilt, Missouri, and Tennessee. There’s a counter argument in favor of ND (I.e., they didn’t lose to anyone nearly as bad as FSU), but to say there’s “absolutely no justification” for Alabama over ND is a huge exaggeration.

ND expecting the ACC to advocate on its behalf to its own member school’s detriment perfectly encapsulates its sense of top to bottom entitlement. It’s not 1975 anymore. You’re not the only school on TV every Saturday anymore. A dump of a program like South Carolina draws more viewers than you. It won’t happen because of $$, but I’d love for the P4 schools to band together and shut ND out.

This sucks. Wasn’t even doing anything crazy like you might imagine when you hear someone got hurt while celebrating. I also saw some comments saying that it may have come at the end of the game rather than during the celebration. Either way, huge loss but gotta have a next man up mentality. At least we have 3.5 weeks to figure it out. https://twitter.com/unnecroughness/status/1998468922748637625?s=46&t=LoczziaTWuqlhvyvHGT92A