IUCrazy2

I think it is fair to wait for the results to be in. That being said, there were a bunch of teams last year that on paper didn't look super impressive coming out of portal season and by the end looked better than our highly thought of guys. Yes, some of that is coaching but I think some is attributable to the attitude those guys came with. We will have to see how it plays out.

https://x.com/DarrenHeitner/status/1917273709678616939 Anybody know who this guy represented? A few other people in the comments complimenting Indiana as well. Won't hurt to get a reputation with agents to be on the up and up with the athletes.

I think that some of the Woodson stuff is bleeding over for him. Woodson is gone but the athletic department folks are still there. I get the impression that they are locking out the rumor monger guys.

Taking a bench player from the national champs to likely also be a bench player on your team doesn't seem like much of an oof to me. You need role players and bench guys.

Somewhat off topic but I don't think that professional Euro players should have eligibility.

Pissy fans=hot seat. Here is my honest thoughts on next year. 22 wins and solidly in the tournament, which is enough for me. Not going to continue to argue with you all. This is all really just personal opinion. If you aren't in the tournament in two years your seat is warm with a not insignificant portion of the fans. If that happens, it becomes harder to do your job. We have seen it with the past two hires. Yes, every coach at Indiana gets at least 4 years but outside of Crean when the program was burned to the ground and you had to recruit freshman to build it, that tends to be the point where the natives get restless. They got restless with Crean in year 3. "Well fans need to realize we suck and lower expectations...." Respectfully, not happening until the Bob Knight era fans are no more. If things are not turned around by then, some of you all will get your wish on turning down the dial. Until then, market and spend like you are still a blue blood and people will have those expectations. I think we have a guy that should at the very least improve on the **** show this has been for 20+ years but I think some of you all are deluding yourselves if you think he could go two more years of missing the tournament unscathed. Woodson was a ******* Hoosier Hero who made the tournament two years in a row and was in trouble by the middle of year three. That is reality. "Well you want to fire him after one year." No, I don't. It just gets ******* tiresome to have to do this defensive song and dance whenever we talk expectations. My bar, and a bunch of other fans' bar is the tournament. That is the pass/fail line when grading the year.

Define hot seat. His team's Twitter people were starting to chatter like what happens with IU. That was the seat getting warmer. He was able to shut it down with the next few years results.

Hurley was on a hotter seat going into year 3.

No

We all have em.

No. This staff plays everything extremely close to the vest. You usually don't know much of anything until a visit is scheduled. So Dixon is probably the news of the moment and then a long wish list of big guys we hope they pursue pretty heavily with Freddy Freddy from Texas Tech probably leading that list.

Making the tournament isn't penthouse level. I agree with your second paragraph which is why I think that making the tournament from jump is really important. We fired Woodson for having bubble teams.

Speaking of will, you are willfully avoiding my point. I know how this stuff devolves so I will just cut the back and forth off here.

Mike Woodson got four years but I think pretty shortly into year 3 we knew he was toast. The fanbase turns on you hard in year 3 if you aren't performing. He would get all four years but if we miss the first two, he will need to pull off back to back stellar years to quiet people down. We all know that and it doesn't matter whether that is fair, or right, or anything else. It is just reality. For what it is worth, I think he will meet the low bar of making the tournament and this whole conversation will be moot.

The first one you got all wrong. On the second you can think we have to make the tournament for him to ultimately be as successful as we want to be without saying you have to fire him if he doesn't. I don't think there is anyone who doesn't believe he will get at least 4 years even if he misses every year. I think he has to make it to flip the narrative on the program. We cannot continue to be the squad that pays Ferrari prices for a Honda Civic. We messed up keeping Woodson around too because we have done a stupendous job of surrounding ourselves with either really established programs who do recruit our state pretty well (Purdue, Michigan State) and some big time programs that made a hire a year before us who had breakout years (Kentucky, Louisville, Michigan). Fending those schools off is already going to be a tall task and a failure to launch in year one could sink him before he starts. He has to make a splash even if it is just a ripple.