Hoosierfan2017

“very reasonable and for those that want premium seating and are willing to pay extra, they will have that opportunity as well,“ they claim on their Twitter. Also that prices will be revealed on Friday. Pretty strange to me that they didn’t just announce prices when they announced the event.

Honestly, this sounds like a Hoosier Hysteria that you have to pay money to go to. Pre-Covid times you could get player autographs at HH. They’re even doing the same events - 3 point contest, dunk contest, scrimmage. I’m sure people will go to it, but not really worth the social media hype, imo.

What are you arguing? That all the weird stuff he does is ok because “he’s going to directly make athletes considerable money”? Or are you arguing that that stuff isn’t weird in the first place? My position is pretty clear. I think his proclivity to seek out recruits, often in embarrassing fashion, makes him a detriment to the program. Maybe that’ll change. We’ll see what tomorrow’s big announcement is. I don’t care how much or how little IU players make. It doesn’t affect my life at all. I just want to see IU win. If that happens then Eric can smoke as many cigars and post as many feet pics on Twitter as his heart desires.

Sure, whether it makes me uncomfortable is irrelevant. But if it makes me uncomfortable, chances are it makes some recruits uncomfortable too. He almost certainly made Jeremy Fears feel uncomfortable. And it’s completely unnecessary. Why was a middle-aged man interacting with recruits like that in the first place? Why is a middle-aged man tweeting the videos at recruits that he tweets? Every school will be able to do NIL for their players. IU won’t be the only school with it. IU will, however, be the only school with Eric Pankowski. You think that’s a good thing. I don’t.

Ok Eric. You can’t create NIL opportunities for players who don’t come to your school. Harassing recruits for Twitter likes is a good way to keep them away. You can say that the ‘critics’ haven’t done anything that Eric has, but that goes both ways. The ‘critics’ haven’t done the bad things either. We haven’t tweeted at high schoolers about how we’re going to get their names tattooed on our bodies. We haven’t posted videos talking about how we’re going to name our kids after high school recruits.

But just as the argument there was that their tactics aren’t necessary to succeed in college basketball, the Hoosier Hysterics aren’t necessary for IU to succeed in NIL. Bloomington is a basketball crazed town in a basketball crazed state. If IU gets back to a constant top 25 team, there will be no shortage of willing sponsors. Why risk it with these guys and their baggage?

I don’t really agree, but for the sake of conversation I’ll drop that argument. The backslides are what get people’s attention, and it’s the backslides that affect us with recruits. They aren’t the NIL guys to Jeremy Fears. They’re the corner you and make you feel uncomfortable guys. Back when we were looking for our next coach there were multiple coaches who are very good, but coaches many people didn’t want to hire because they didn’t like the way they operated. That’s how I feel about the Hoosier Hysterics guys. I don’t like their style at all.

Dawson Garcia wasn’t just one moment, though. It was a string of tweets over the course of multiple weeks. Some of the tweets included the following: It would be one thing if they realized that their behavior was weird and changed. But, they haven’t. They’ve doubled down. The best way to get NIL opportunities for our players is to win. Become a top 5 program and businesses will come calling. Major business. Duke or UK won’t have to hire a carnival barker to get their players deals. If we win enough we won’t either.

Because I find him neither funny nor relatable. He puts out videos all the time where he’s just weird. It was weird when he tweeted out a video where he said his kids names were now Jalen, Hood, and Schifino for the next week until he makes his college decision. It was extremely weird when he tweeted all kinds of strange things at Dawson Garcia. It was weird when he cornered Jeremy Fears and trashed Illinois in front of him. The Jeremy Fears embarrassment is especially significant to me because it just happened three weeks ago. It happened a month after the NIL collective was announced. The JHS videos happened after it was announced too. Any stunts of theirs like that should’ve ended when the NIL collective was announced, but they’re keeping them coming.

If by ‘at times’ you mean almost every time he’s on camera, sure. He’s not the only good marketing guy out there. But he’s the only one I’ve ever seen corner a recruit and tell him to ‘blink twice’ if he thinks X school he just visited sucks. I have no idea what he’s like when the cameras are off. The only image I have of him is the one he’s gone to great lengths to put forwarding on camera. The image he’s put forward is that of a clown who, at any given moment, is capable of embarrassing himself and everyone he’s affiliated with. He ‘rolls the dice’ in ways that really aren’t appropriate. I don’t know who in the IU administration watched this video and thought ‘yup, this is the guy I want marketing for us.’

Here’a a fairly tame example. “Holly, we may have to have a kid so we can name him Jalen Kenya Hood-Schifino Pankowski.” Posted after Jalen committed. Tried to tag him, but luckily looks like he tagged an old account. People have different reactions to this kind of thing I suppose, but the only reaction I’ve ever had to a video he’s done has been “oh god please make it stop.” His bio may sound great, but potential recruits aren’t going to be reading his bio. They’re going to be scrolling through Twitter and wondering why is this IU-affiliated middle-aged man tweeting at me about getting matching bff tattoos and naming his kids after me.

The Eric guy has had a number of uncomfortable interactions with potential recruits. He won’t ever be the reason why a recruit picks IU, but he very well could be the reason they don’t, imho. His tweets at Dawson Garcia were extremely off putting. Just a few weeks ago at the Cincy game he had an uncomfortable interaction with 2023 recruit Jeremy Fears. He either completely lacks any self-awareness and doesn’t realize how uncomfortable the situations he creates are, or he does realize it and just straight up doesn’t give a **** He’s like a kid following around his favorite celebrity hoping he gets a picture with them, only he’s the grown man in the situation and the people he’s bothering are teenagers. As a school, you can’t really control what random fans on Twitter do, but you can control who you go into business with. I think he’s a liability, and I think it’s an awful decision by IU getting into business with him, but they obviously see it differently. Time will tell.

Whatever it is, I can’t say I’m thrilled about those weirdos being officially involved with the school. It’ll be tough for the good to outweigh the bad and the creepy.

I’m sure they will try their best to do so. Phinisee was really bad last year. He shot 33% from the field and 23.7% from 3 in conference play. He didn’t even score in 15% of our conference games. If he gives us the best chance this year then either he drastically improved offensively, or our talent level isn’t where we think it’s going to be.

Phinisee can’t shoot, though. Through 86 games he has shooting splits of 36/29.8/67.5. Barring a miraculous offensive improvement, I’m going to be extremely disappointed if Rob Phinisee is playing significant minutes for us this season. He was a huge reason for our offensive struggles last year. Far too often we were playing 4 on 5 on offense with him out there. He would walk the ball up the floor despite Archie constantly yelling at him to go faster. We, at least in theory, made too many guard upgrades for him to keep getting a lot of time.

Is this kid good? It looks like he’s unranked on 24/7 but his offer list isn’t that of an unranked kid.

My biggest fear with Tuttle is that the OC will close up the playbook and we’ll run very basic stuff (which, we’ll, we seem to do anyway honestly). Tuttle got the first team reps all spring because Penix was still out. That plus two weeks to prepare should be sufficient to get him up to speed. Let him air it out and see what happens. It’s not like our run game is any good.

Insanity. Allen’s loyalty to Penix is going to kill whatever chance we have to salvage the season. We have a perfectly capable backup in Tuttle. In his limited time yesterday the offense was moving much better with him under center. If Allen watches the games and believes Penix gives us the best chance to win then I have major questions about his judgment. You can’t keep playing a guy because of what he did for you a year ago. Not when that was before a second ACL tear. Not when he’s been terrible almost every game since then. I’m sure Michael is a great kid and he’s fought through a lot injury wise, but as a head coach your job is to play the guy who gives you the best chance to win. That’s not Michael Penix.

True, but we can’t really count on any favors from the Big Ten officials when we’re playing schools like MSU and OSU even though we’re at home.

I remember being disappointed by the music in the past. And I do get that it can be hard to find music that everyone will like and that is appropriate for families with young kids. But some more pizazz would be nice. I wouldn’t mind some variety in the events either. Every year they do the same thing. Maybe a ‘make it take it’ 1 on 1 tournament, a coed 3 on 3 tournament, just something new. You could even do the regular events and then do a 3 on 3 tournament in lieu of a full on scrimmage.

Haha. Okay okay just to clarify by ‘sex appeal’ I’m not talking about women. I just mean our program lacks ‘sex appeal’ to recruits right now, we currently lack that ‘it factor’ that draws in recruits. I used a poor choice of words, lol.

Idk, the ‘home cookin’ against Cincinnati led to our best defender getting ejected on a highly questionable call. With the way we’ve looked so far I wouldn’t be shocked by a disappointing crowd against MSU in a couple weeks. I think we’re good enough to compete with and beat the other middling teams in the conference but we definitely haven’t taken the step everyone hoped we would.

We would self-inflict the death penalty on our program if that ever happened at IU, lol. That incident aside though, schools like Kansas and UK do always seem to have more exciting ‘midnight madness’ events than we do.

It’s not that we’re losing, it’s how we’re losing. We’ve been outscored 58-6 in conference play. We haven’t scored a touchdown against a big ten program this year. We couldn’t score against PSU. Villanova score 17 points against them. In the past we’ve been able to compete against the top teams in the conference. So far this year we’ve taken a big step back.

Imho, Hoosier Hysteria has been lame for a while. I can’t speak on this year because I’ve only seen a couple short clips, but in years past, at least dating back to 2013 and moving forward, it’s been boring. At least in my 20something opinion. These types of events are supposed to be high-energy and electric. They’re supposed to be ‘cool.’ Ours have been pretty stale for a while. I think it all goes back to IU being an old and stuffy program, not a modern day ‘cool’ one. We lack sex appeal. Hopefully Woody and his staff can change that.