American HoosierX

Well Archie made $1.2 MM in 2014 and received a raise in 2016 so I'm not sure how your math works out.

I think the better question is, who cares?

Funny to call people out for being subjective while making subjective statements.

Would have been great to get Donovan but I love this hire.

A backup plan or "the" backup plan? Didn't he say a few days ago that Alford isn't even in the running? These guys don't have a clue

He owned up to it 12 years later! And this was after being super defensive about it at his introductory news conference at UCLA. He didn't do it out of any real sense of contrition, he did it because of the heat he was taking. The guy is pure slime.

I loathe Crean as a coach but I have to agree with you. The simple fact is that it is just not going to happen.

Hmmm you say you get it but it doesn't seem like you do.

Collegiate sports generate revenue because fans are willing to pay for entertainment that they perceive to have higher value than the alternative things they could do with their time. Once fans no longer value the entertainment in the same way, that revenue will start to decline.

I hadn't thought about it this way but I 100% agree. It would be great if we could part ways on a high note.

Your post inspired me. I just reset the password on my probably 4 year defunct twitter account to do my part

I literally just threw up in my mouth when I read Alford. There is nothing in his track record to warrant that statement. Plus he is not a good human being.

I figured as much but not sure others knew based on their responses Edit: Whoops I swear I scrolled up and down looking for a thread on Blackmon...somehow missed it

Are people aware that Blackmon is now out indefinitely with a lower leg injury? Not sure if it's been posted

In my opinion, team rankings can be fairly misleading due to their emphasis on the overall size of the class. Because Crean tends to bring in large classes, Indiana skews toward consistently higher rankings. It is true that Crean has done fairly well if you look at it from a team ranking perspective. Over the last 5 years (12-16) he averages the 6th best recruiting class behind Kentucky, Arizona, Duke, Kansas, and UCLA with an average class ranking of right around 17 (as your data shows) As an example of how class size can skew this, Louisville had the 89th ranked recruiting class in 2016 because they only had one recruit, even though that recruit happened to be a 5 star. So despite the fact that they have had more or less 3 top five classes in that time frame (one was 6th), they aren't close to the top 10 in average. If you look at things by average player ranking, things look quite a bit different. Indiana finishes 22nd in average player ranking from 2012-2016 behind Kentucky, Duke, Syracuse, NC State, North Carolina, Kansas, Arizona, UCLA, Texas, Villanova, Louisville, Connecticut, San Diego State, Marquette, Stanford, UNLV, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Maryland, and Michigan State. You can certainly make an argument that this way of looking at things is unfair to Crean as he tends to take flyers on lower rated kids. Adding a lower rated kid to an otherwise talented class isn't really making the class worse but it is dragging down the average. However, I think is a valuable counter measure to looking at this purely by team rankings. My favorite comparison is Villanova because they come in at 10th in terms of average player rating at 93.92 (Indiana 90.91). The reason their classes are rated so low is that they are always small...in the last 5 years they have taken classes of 2,3,2,2 and 3. Villanova seems to be everyone's favorite example of how you don't need to recruit well to win. I would argue with anyone saying they don't recruit well, they just don't recruit high volumes. In case you are wondering, in the last 5 years Indiana has taken 5, 3, 6, 6, and 5.