Hoosierfan2017

Absolutely. Beating Purdue was a great moment, but it was just that - a moment. It was fun to enjoy, but the program was still what it is. As I added to my previous post, good moments like the Purdue game are harder to enjoy these days because there’s the lingering “the collapse is coming” feeling. And here, the high of the Purdue game was short-lived as we got blown out at home by a mediocre Michigan team three days later. Romeo was the #7 recruit in the country. He was the finishing touch on the #10 recruiting class in the country and the #2 class in the B1G. We thought we had a great young coach in Archie. The future looked incredibly promising. It was the best I’ve felt about IU basketball between the 2016 sweet 16 run and today.

I don’t know what your deleted post quoting me said, but I enjoy the good times. There just haven’t been very many. The highlight of the past 6 years or so was probably Romeo’s commitment day. That day was a lot of fun. Tons of hope for the future. Since then, every year has been the same. The season starts out well and then we collapse in February. It’s Groundhog Day. Even the one year we may have made the tournament before it was canceled, we started the season 15-4 and then lost 8 of the next 12 games. This year, we entered February 16-5. Easily a tournament team. Fast forward a month and we’re 18-11, losers of 6 out of the last 8. It makes the few bright spots we have here and there much harder to enjoy. There’s always a lingering “the collapse is coming” feeling.

I don’t ‘hate,’ any of our players. I’ve never met any of them, but they seem like nice enough kids. They’re just not the caliber of talent I want on our team. We want elite results but we’re never going to get that with middling talent and middling coaching. Maybe it seems like I invest ‘so much time and energy,’ idk, but I really don’t. I post a handful of times on here a day when I’m bored or when things are slow at work, sometimes more sometimes less. I don’t watch as much as I used to. I watched about half of the Rutgers game. Didn’t watch any of the Minnesota game. Maybe that’s the natural progression. From appointment television, to watching most games, to watching some games, etc.

I could, but when passionate fans quit caring your program really dies. I hate to say it, but the fans who saw the glory years are getting older, and the younger fans have seen little glory. I’m so negative because I want the program to be great, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be great, but it’s not great.

When I’m fed a sh** sandwich, I don’t pretend that it tastes good. We haven’t made it past the sweet 16 in 20 years. We have only made 3 sweet 16s in the past 20 years. We’ve only made 4 tournaments since 2008. We haven’t made the tournament since 2016. Since then, we’ve finished T-10th, T-6th, 9th, T-10th, T-10th, and 9th in the conference. We suck, and we’ve sucked for the better part of two decades. I don’t know an IU basketball program that’s elite. I was a 1st grader the last time we played in an elite 8. As for sucking in the future, what has the administration done to make you think we won’t keep sucking? They’ve done nothing to suggest that they’re serious about winning big. We needed a big splash to right the ship when we fired Archie. What did we do? We hired a 63 year old failed NBA head coach with zero college coaching experience because he played at IU 4+ decades ago. He somehow took over a bad offense and made it even worse. If you’re optimistic for the future that’s your prerogative, but it’s blind optimism not based on the reality of our program.

This shot was so much worse than I remembered last night. We let him trot down the court, made no attempt to double team him, pressure him, etc., and he just dribbled into a 3. We played it with no desperation. No sense of urgency. You’d think it was the middle of the first half, not 10 seconds left in the second half of a tie game.

You’ve said before that we asked around and several prominent names shot us down, right? If we were only going to pay the guy $3.5-$4 million a year, us getting shot down by top guys makes a ton of sense. Why leave a nice spot for a comparable salary? It wouldn’t be a good decision. If we were offering $7 million a year and no one wanted the job, that’s depressing as hell. That’d be a substantial raise for almost any coach in college bball. But I’m not surprised we weren’t offering that much and that no one wanted to come for a middle of the road salary.

We need some new age boosters who aren’t as enamored with the past, but on the flip side of that, those people haven’t seen IU have extended success. They’re probably less likely to pony up. For example, my parents are in their late 40s and were teenagers the last time we won a title, and basically my age the last time we made a final four. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised either if the old boosters decided Alford was the golden son who could fix things.

That’s what I was hoping for.. Haha. My only sources here are the nightmares of btownbanners posters.

My sources have been telling me that Dolson has his eyes on Steve Alford if Woody doesn’t work out (or does work out and then retires).

I don’t even consider it cheating. Cheating is when you’re trying to gain competitive advantages on your opponents, imo. If we ‘play the game,’ we’re just leveling the playing field. Right now we’re trying to win with one arm tied behind our backs.

If you’re stuck explaining why losing more than half your games as a coach isn’t actually that bad, you’ve lost the argument. Stevens’ winning percentage was 10% higher than Woodson’s. He also made it to the ECF 3 times in 8 years. But the comparison of their NBA records is silly in the first place. We don’t play in the NBA. Stevens coached college basketball, won 77% of his games, and made it to two NCAA championship games in six seasons.

Why so much focus on them only winning 18 games last year? The season was shorter than usual because of covid. And they made it to the second round of the ncaa tournament.

He won 46% of his regular season games and 39% of his playoff games. Is that supposed to impress us? No one gave him a head coaching job between 2014 and 2021. Until we did.

Only two coaches in college basketball get paid $7 million a year. Calipari and Coach K. You’re just making excuses for the administration. The disaster that was our coaching hire is easier to swallow when you believe we didn’t have any other options.

Sampson knew what it took to win at a high level in the P5 and that’s what he was doing at IU. He kept doing it because he wanted to keep winning. And winning he certainly was. We were rolling when the admin fired him. I’m not going to blame him when he was doing what needed to be done. I blame the administration for not having his back like any other elite program would’ve done.

Lol this is a good troll but it’s completely ridiculous. Woodson got fired by the Knicks in 2014 and didn’t get another head coaching job until we hired him. No one wanted to hire him. The NBA reuses head coaches like crazy and still no one wanted him. Not surprising. He won 46% of his games and made it past the first round 3 times in 9 seasons. We hired the guy no one wanted and we see how that’s going for us.

IU players skipping class and doing drugs is nothing new. And I don’t want choir boys, I want ball players. IU could have worked with Sampson to figure things out like most other elite programs would do but the administration wanted to virtue signal and then give ourselves the death penalty. We fired an outstanding coach for making too many phone calls while other schools look the other way when their coaches deliver duffle bags.

It beats whatever the heck we are and have been for the past couple decades.

Am I missing something? I think this is the second time I’ve seen someone say this.

This team just isn’t fun to watch. Our offense is gross. It’s even worse than Archie ball. Our defense is very good but we can’t get stops when it matters most. We let their best player walk up the floor and splash a 3 to win the game. Coaching was awful. His rotations were awful. He blew our last timeout 3 seconds after Rutgers called timeout. Would’ve been nice to have one at the end.

Because they win? Lol. We haven’t made it past the sweet 16 since 2002. Here’s what UK has done during our dry spell from 2003 to today: SEC Champs: 8x SEC tournament: 8x Elite Eight: 9x Final Four: 4x NC: 1x That’s in 19 seasons. No tournament in 2020 when they were #8 in the country, so that’s 9 elite eights in 18 seasons. Is our faux moral superiority better than going to the elite eight every other season? There was a time when we considered ourselves UK’s peer. Unfortunately that time has passed. Then there’s UNC: ACC Champs: 9x ACC Tournament: 3x Elite Eight: 8x Final Four: 5x NC: 3x But hey, maybe we can hang a few “did things the right way” banners.

Despite that, they’ve still made the tournament more recently than we have. More importantly, though, how many times has the NCAA levied a punishment like that? Once? UNC pays its players and sends them to fake classes. What’d the NCAA do? Nothing. Bring great is hard. It’s a year in year out commitment. It’s much easier to be mediocre. Our administration would rather pat itself on the back for “doing things the right way.” It lets them feel good and morally superior. Nothing from our administration signals to me that it wants IU to be an elite program. They fired Archie and then hired a 63 year old with no college experience because he played at IU 40 years ago. They’re not serious about winning big. The program is making plenty of money, so no reason for concern. People hate Goodman because he trolls IU, but IU is an easy target.

Rutgers has punked us in recent years with an East Coast grittiness/toughness that we haven’t been able to match. I hope the team is ready to match that energy tonight.

They can vacate the NC in the record books, but the memories and the impact on the program don’t go away. The title run helped recruiting during those years. It elevated the national perception of the program. And it really took some egregious stuff for the NCAA to punish them. The NCAA punishes teams so infrequently that I think it’s definitely worth the risk. The number of punishments is vastly outweighed by the amount of cheating. I’m not even saying that I wanted Pitino in particular. I think you could get similar results from other top tier coaches who don’t (publicly) have his stench. They wouldn’t attract the NCAA’s attention like he probably will. But it’s frustrating to me to see a conference rival going for it while we are only concerned with looking squeaky clean. I want IU to be a top 5 program in the country like it was when my parents were kids, but I don’t think I’m ever going to see it. We (the IU administration ) won’t do or allow the things that top 5 programs do.