str8baller

Purdue…lol

When you spend that many hrs in close proximity every day, fit is huge. I’m guessing there’s significant overlap between the people who (somehow) thought Fife would eventually be head coach and those unhappy with the hire of a guy they don’t know much about.

I’m confused by this part. Are you saying there are effectively caps on the payout dictated by year? Or are you saying you can’t tie payment to longevity?

He’s one of those guys who come in as a freshman and everyone is excited because he’s good and smart and plays hard. We start doing the math in our heads on him improving each year and his shot getting better. And then….it never happens. If anything he got worse, especially this year. He went 7/17 from the FT line and only had one season over 70% from the stripe. You are unplayable in close games at that point. Seems like a good guy, and he always gave great effort. We won’t forget his game against Purdue or shot to beat Butler. But it’s pretty obvious his time here was coming to an end. He was a borderline below-avg backup PG this year as a senior.

What’s over the top? None of the stories I’ve read here seem implausible, even if they are quite unflattering.

Good for him. I always thought Ball St was a solid job. Decent and fun campus for a mid major. In central Indiana near FW and Indy, so you have a pretty natural recruiting ground. The right coach could build a competitive program there.

I would agree on the ball handling. The lateral quickness part is ridiculous if compared to a guy like Kopp. He has sufficient lateral quickness to guard on the perimeter. His mental lapses on defense, especially off the ball, are what kept him out games. That should improve with another year under Woody.

No kidding. Race was a better 3pt shooter down the stretch than Stewart and Kopp. And JG was starting to step out more. I had as much confidence in him hitting a 3 as I did Stewart or Kopp. Low bar to clear, though.

If any of that stuff is slightly true, then they did Fife a favor by letting him finish out the season. And whomever hired him needs to take stock in their own evaluation of their performance. I’m not one for yes-men. Let the cuss words and conflict flow behind closed doors. But when you leave the locker room (in this case) everyone needs to be on the same page. I have zero tolerance for that type of public blame shifting and back biting. Not knowing anything about the situation, I hope those reports aren’t true, for Fife’s sake. Not a good look.

Not a shocker. I’m interested in the Fife thing. What about Thad?

This. IU has never taken any moral objection to playing outside the NCAA rules other than for the sake of breaking rules itself is wrong. Even Knight derided the NCAA as a stupid and inept institution. He seemed somewhat intent on adhering directly to the letter of the law so he could show how great of a coach he was. “These rules are dumb and ill-enforced, but I’ll play your game and beat everyone anyways.” So now that we have a legal way to compete with other programs paying players, I’m not sure why we aren’t leading the way. I see written all the time about how great the KSoB is or how credentialed this president or dean is or how much money the AD has raised. Yet when the time comes for real action we seem to get confused and caught flatfooted with regards to this NIL stuff. Everyone knew it was coming for years. The programs with real leadership most likely have had a plan ready to go.

And almost zero chance to win a title once again. I think that the real issue is that people don’t care so much that Minnesota is, on average, better than Wake Forest. They see that in the SEC Florida and UK have won multiple titles the last couple decades. UnC, Duke and Virginia from the ACC have titles. Uconn, Syracuse, and Villanova in the BE. The B1G have none until you get to MSUs over two decades ago. No one but us cares that IU won a play-in game. And I only care in a vacuum relative to our recent putrid performance.

My thoughts, too. He was starting to step out and shoot it a little. If he can tighten up his handle a little and get respectable from 3, he could play on the perimeter in a big line up. Additionally , almost all of Races makes from 3 we’re on the back half of the season. Think he was 12/30. So if he can continue that, we could play bigger and still not clog the lane. JG should be able to play the 3 or 4 in college though.

I think everyone kind of covered it. But I’ll add: 1) Recruiting- some of it is structural. The population migration west and south means we have more programs competing over less people as most people, not on the east coast, have moved south and west. The state of Florida has more basketball and football titles this century than the entire B1G combined (unless you’re counting Maryland which I don’t). The state of Florida has three major universities competing for talent in their state, same as Indiana. Now go look at a graph of population growth over the last 50 yrs between the two states. 2) Recruiting - part 2. As others have said, some of it is Indiana being down. Other top basketball programs like MSU, Michigan and Ohio State haven’t taken up the mantle quite enough in our absence. There are several title game losses among that group though. A lot of it is IU. If Kansas were bad the last 25yrs, the Big 12 would be similar. 3) Officiating. I actually resisted this one for quite a while and don’t think it is as big regarding recruiting as the two points above. But watching guys like Edey (who adjusted fairly well, imo), Cockburn and Williams play this weekend trying not to draw a charge every time down the floor was pretty funny after watching them just bully their way through the B1G season. We do a disservice to our teams, who often seem to do ok in pre-conf play, by letting them bang on each other for 3 straight months. We play longer and faster teams in the tourney and have nothing to fall back on when we can’t physically punish them. Also, I guess it’s ironic that we added Nebraska, PSU and Maryland and they both went to crap in football and basketball, respectively. Rutgers adds nothing in this regard.

Lmao…dude, you just saw a good coach do it and it worked (minus the bailout foul). You asked why and I told you. Basketball isn’t played on paper and good execution always beats a trap. Your response is akin to saying blitzing in football is dumb because it leaves someone open. “Just throw it to the open guy…eazy peazy…can’t imagine why the scrub QBs suck. “ If you want to litigate it, take it up with Scott Drew.

With good close outs and positioning you have to make 3 passes to get to the open guy.

You do it late because there isn’t enough time to rotate the ball around to the open guy.

UNC on tilt now. Baylor will likely take this

Bad charging call. This is crazy. I want it to keep going just to see how bad it can get.

Pretty quick 5 sec call. I’m in awe of these refs

Terrible call that has completely changed the game. Refs going all in on UNC right now. Really weird.

How do you explain the first ten-fifteen minutes where we were winning? Seems odd that some mysterious mental issues crept up while they were on the floor and we were all watching. But we’re all just speculating, so I won’t discount the possibility.

UNC is working Baylor in all areas of the floor. Impressive.

I didn’t participate in the grade the season thread cause I don’t really know what that means. But I’ll say that Woody seems to say the right things, imo, with regard to what needs done. The thought of a little more off the ball motion and perimeter orientation (just taking a stab at what he means by “style “), better shooting and more athletic defenders on the wing has me excited. If we can keep that top league defense (or close to it) and get top ~40 Kenpom offense, then we’ll compete near the top of the B1G and have a seed giving us a chance to make a run in the tourney. To that end, seems like if we’re bringing in transfers we want another stab at a 3/d type wing and a big who can rebound and help defend a little.

Chatanooga got screwed on a terrible block call