IUCrazy2

NIL won't cover for lottery pick money. If he is guaranteed a lottery spot, he should go. That guaranteed money is life changing and an injury can mess that all up. We were all holding our breath when he awkwardly went down, imagine if that was some weird leg injury. I have no idea what the NBA wants, so hope he is back next year. However, if he is a lottery pick he has to go.

Indiana 5 Purdue 0

Well we know who got the brains in that family....

I don't like storming the court against Purdue...don't feel like we are in that place anymore either. Personally, we should expect to win Saturday.

Losing Johnson does play into that a bit (returning minutes and points). I just don't think we have figured out what we want our identity to be since Knight left. We kind of dip our toe in two different pools and it isn't working. We want the flash of the talent factories but the ethics of the system schools. Maybe NIL changes the calculus that goes into both of those but I think that has been our issue the past two decades. We wanted to "showcase" our players and get in the NBA on one hand while not fully committing to doing the types of things you had to do to get those types of players to begin with. And I feel we were afraid to put in place a system like Wisconsin or Purdue because those top flight players don't want to do that stuff and/or you need players on campus longer than 1 or 2 years for that to be effective. We have to commit to being something.

You picked one class. HoosierAloha has a pretty good comparison for several of the teams. Michigan State, Illinois, Ohio State, and Michigan are probably the only 3 teams in the league who consistently come close (or exceed in case of MSU) to our on paper recruiting. Do we have Misses? Yeah, so does everyone else. Did COVID impact ratings? Possibly, but that would impact everyone, not just Indiana. The truth of the matter is that we land quite a bit of talent. Geronimo, Leal, and Galloway would be considered a good to great class for all but a few teams in the league and you are downplaying them. That's the point.

If the fans overvalued it, so do the talent evaluators before they get to Indiana. They can't all be in on the hype machine too can they? You can go to the 247 site and get a rundown of where each team fell in recruiting rankings in comparison to the rest of their conference going back to 2011 IIRC. Indiana is consistently a program getting among the best talent in the league. Why that hasn't paid off is a fight you see on every Indiana forum, however, the fans have a reason to believe we have talent in comparison to the rest of the BIG.

To me, we should be trying to work ourselves back to a point where we are a 5 or 6 seed in the tournament. I think it would be difficult to get much higher than that without going on an epic run. Get to a 5 or 6 and get everyone back and you have a chance to get to the Sweet 16. Get to the second weekend and anything can happen.

Excuses.

Dane Fife leaving is the reason our defense has gone to poo. (Not for any particular reason other than the legend of Dane Fife cannot die.)

We don't agree because you are wrong. Carry on.

You could have stopped at the bolded part. I bet Collins would take our roster in the same timeframe Woodson has and beat his current team under Woodson. Same with Shrewsberry. Btownqb keeps making the argument that they are a better team than us without XJ and RT and I keep saying that we still have better individual players than they do even without those two and that the reason we are not winning is because we are not maximizing the potential of our team. "Can't expect to beat that better team when XJ and RT go down." Yes, yes you can. And you should expect it because Indiana ALWAYS has a better pick of players than Northwestern. Always. If you can't expect to beat Northwestern on a 70% clip (better at home) with that actuality, then you have the wrong coach. We have outrecruited Northwestern in all but one year going back to at least 2011. We are 9-7 against them in that same timeframe. We have better players coming in and they end up having a more competitive team based on the sum of their parts because our coaching staffs are failing. Most years Indiana is in the Top 25% for recruiting in the BIG. They never were below the Top 50%. We have as good or better players in any given year (coming in) than all but maybe 1 or 2 other programs. "Well they don't turn out that way..." That's my whole fudging point.

Try and argue against what I am actually saying as opposed to whatever argument you have made up in your head.

Our roster is just fine, our coaching (or lack thereof) and our offensive and defensive schemes (or lack thereof) are the problem. NW and PSU are not better than us because they have better players. Just stop with that nonsense.

Yeah, can't wait for all of the "Kentucky fans are insane" articles that we always get.

On one hand I agree and that is completely fair. Then again on the other hand, we have literally had some "event" (excuse, factual reality that could be used to blame or explain poor play, or whatever you want to call it) for the better part of 2 decades now. You can start about the time "Help is on the way" was uttered and basically go from there. It isn't like we have dog meat sitting on the bench IF the players and staff are doing their jobs. Yes, we lost X but we still have JHS and Bates. Those guys are young but they came in very highly touted. Race did go down but we have a junior in Geronimo and another really highly rated big in Reneau as back ups. TJD isn't himself but he is still capable of putting up respectable numbers. I just think this program has a real tendency to have a woe is me attitude about things. It has been around for awhile. "Somebody got hurt, what can we do now?" It is this idea that play seems to be dictated by outside forces as opposed to internal drive. "These guys work hard." Great. They move around and run around and physically practice hard. Are they learning though? Are they being taught properly? Effort in sports is about more than physical things. It is learning your sets and defensive assignments. These players are the most coddled and taken care of players at Indiana University ever. I don't care about the excuses. We all know what happened to Race and X. So what are these other very highly rated guys going to do to keep winning games? That is literally what they are getting paid for now.

Right now, Penn State, at least until the team shows a pulse again.

I don't think Fife leading led to the struggles, I think it is possible that the reason Fife had to leave is merely one symptom of what is causing the struggles. Again, Fife came from a successful program at MSU. Arguably THE most consistently successful since the very late 90's. He did ok there. He only lasts one year here. If Fife was acting like the heir apparent, who put that in his head? NIL was new, technically he isn't supposed to be involved in NIL discussions so it is possible that led to those items. He talked politics with a team that was pumping BLM in 2020. You think that stuff didn't come up from their end? There are players arguing with fans on Instagram after the Northwestern game. Losing Fife wasn't what made things go south but it very much could be a small glimpse into why things are going south and that looks to go up to at least the AD from the outside looking in. https://www.barstoolsports.com/blog/3451701/checking-in-on-indiana-basketball-theyve-lost-two-games-in-a-row-annnnddddd-players-are-now-fighting-with-fans-on-instagram Soft like a Twinkie filling.

That's fine, now do Hunter and Rosemond. I think the issue people have is that those two don't appear to be doing sh*t either. Not like we are killing it in recruiting, we had a bunch of misses over the past year and development doesn't appear to be their thing based on the court. Fife (reportedly) got out over his skis a bit (although this is always told to us in a "trust me, I know but can't give you any detail way") but he is somebody that the fans have familiarity with. He was a player, he was on staff here, he coached another D1 school up state, he had been an assistant at an in conference school for arguably the best coach in the league for a decade....kind of crazy how things just never seem to work out right at IU.

If so though, there is a Bob Knight quote about what the @$$ to the bench does for a player. Banks, Duncomb, and Leal never get off it. Gunn did get off and had some mixed minutes. Knight wasn't afraid to go to that bench to make a point. He took a 50 point L @Minnesota to make the point. Players will do what you let them do. You can't always be their buddy when you are the coach....

I think we just need to go get a competent guy. If we get a winner we have some built in program advantages with NIL that should attract some talent. We need to be running some type of system though. I know a bunch of people did not want Alford in the end, but I think when most of that "We need an IU guy" talk was most prevalent, usually those people meant, "We need Steve Alford."

Whether you would think he was the guy or not, I don't think Woodson was the IU guy people had in mind when they were calling for that....(cough Alford cough) And I honestly believe those calls decreased for most of the fanbase the further we got from Knight.

Indianapolis in Lucas Oil with split seating. You will get nothing like that environment in any other major metro area.

So...when does basketball start?

Washington will be in the mix because of the Seattle-Tacoma market. This is mostly about that anyway so you have to factor that in.