str8baller

These guys are a rollercoaster of team. Fun when they win!

Malice in the Palace probably ruined their best chance at a title. Different era but those guys were tough. OKC coach is very well regarded young guy. Be tough to out coach him to the extent the Pacers need, but Carlisle is one of the best for sure. Always thought one of Birds few big mistakes was getting rid of him the first time.

Thomas Bryant playing real mins in a conf finals closer is nuts. Carlisle is crazy. Also, when they said it’s been exactly 25 years, I started to feel really old. I remember going to those Finals with my dad.

Because the ACC is terrible and any half decent team can run off a few unbeaten weeks and get ranked by the pollsters. Maryland and Indiana won’t have that luxury. Lville finished the season ranked higher than Michigan and Kentucky last year despite them being obviously better teams.

Creans greatest sales job was the one convincing everyone that he had to tear everything apart and start at zero needing multiple years to rebuild anything. Those years were miserable. Even at that, I remember some rumblings in year 3. In any event, once that spell was broken and we started to win fans were unforgiving of steps backwards—as we should be. And if we had taken a poll a bet a majority of fans wanted him gone well before his firing.

I’m sure Duke will be just fine but their strategy might not seem as shiny without a Cooper Flagg on the roster. Florida went hard after midmajor dudes and made it payoff eventually. It’s the wild wild west out here.

Certainly could be. I think you’ll be surprised how quick expectations rise. They did with Crean, and a perpetual mediocre coach will be run out, imo. Also, I get what WayneFleek is saying. I respect him as a poster. My point being—which Pagoda made below—is that there’s simply too many unknown variables at this time to get wildly bent out of shape. I get the complaints about rim protection or whatever. But there’s more than one way to design a defense. If you told me prime Bo Ryan was coming back to coach this roster, I’d bet serious money we’d have a top25 defense even without the rim protection. Just a thought exercise to say you don’t need a conventional roster to be good at certain things. Similarly, nobody thought Michigan or Lville would be what they were last year just looking at their roster . I have no idea what CDD has in store, but I’m willing to give him at least a year. But that’s just me; ultimately people can post and feel how they want.

That’s giving your nervousis a lot of credit. We’re like 3 years into a fundamental shift college athletics. Let the new guy cook and enjoy the ride. We’ll learn a lot next year but it’ll hardly be the end all be all of his time here. And if he ultimately sucks…it’s just another day in Indiana basketball.

= “complain “ but not in the king’s English :)

Watching posters crash out 2mos into year one is wild. It’d be almost excusable if we didn’t watch a midmajor football coach with a bunch midmajor guys get to a 12th place finish (or better). The funny thing is, if we suck next year how’s that any different than the last 25 years? Just relax and see what the new coach sucks we’ll know in a couple years and we can sit back and ***** for 3 years until he’s fired. IU basketball at its finest. No need to get a head start on the misery tho.

I’ll wait to pass judgement on CDD’s approach. I have to say that I’ve been pretty consistent in thinking the GM role is a valuable one. You really see it taking off in football where there are 5-10x the number of players. With that said, that may be why he hired non bench staff first. They might be filling the same purpose without the title.

There’s nothing the NCAA can’t screw up, so I have no faith they can navigate this successfully. But, there should be several arguments to maintaining some semblance of the current system: 1) He’s not barred from earning NIL. If he wants to make money off his likeness he’s certainly allowed to. For example, Cody Zeller can come back and make money off of being Cody Zeller former IU player even though he doesn’t have eligibility. 2) So long as the programs are tied to the universities, which have typically been 4 yr degree earning institutions, there is some justification for limiting eligibility to 4 yrs. It’s not a capricious limit to favor the schools but instead allow other student athletes to matriculate through the system. 3) I don’t know much about anti trust law, but I’m failing to see the anti trust issue as he’s allowed to play for compensation in any number of organizations not named the NCAA. And in the event they lose on anti trust grounds they can seek an exception from Congress. The NCAA is so dumb it drives me crazy. Everyone could see they were going to lose the Obannon challenge from day 1. They had ample opportunity to get in front of this and put something sensible in place. Their obstinacy and idiocy along with horrible public relations have put them in a position to be completely dissolved if this goes south.

I’m not even sure the experts that weigh in on this stuff have an idea of the totality of it. It’d be cool if the NCAA made a reporting requirement so we could monitor it and compare.

Yep, he had issues with perimeter players both offensively and defensively. Otoh, he did allow our bigs to flourish. TJD, Ware, Teneau and even Ballo were at least good under him. Now we have posters freaking out because we don’t have bigs. Gotta love IU basketball!

Several Archie players transferred out and had success elsewhere. But yea…I wrote at the beginning of transfer season that I understand why CDD cleared out the roster entirely but some posters are going to be surprised when they see these guys go to other schools and play well. Mbako was an obvious one. Rice could be another one.

I think this is closer to the truth. Just your garden variety bureaucracy that’s accountable to no one. What’s the NCAA’s incentive to hurry? Because some message board fans might get mad?

I honestly haven’t found it to be much different than any of the other ones. The one I always have issues with is espn. And sometimes tbs/tnt at tourney time. I kind of liked NBCs presentation of cbb this last year.

Painfully, that analogy works in more ways than one.

NCAA is so scared of going into court and getting obliterated they’re acquiescing to anything…lol.

They never were going to have one this year. Cheaper to keep your own players. Big players don’t move much. Ware was a malcontent at Oregon. Ballo was a roster hopper. Guys like Storr and Love were labeled malcontents and/or roster hoppers. Those were some of the highest ranked guys. A big NIL covers up some mistakes in roster building but you still have to somewhat build it from the round up. Even from the beginning everyone universally has said looking at the new teams last year the range of expectations is like 10 seed to 4/5ish seed, at best. So I’m not sure where the top 10 roster expectations are coming from all of a sudden.

Makes sense. Why pay end of the bench guys? In the NBA they’re league minimum types. Top 2-3 players really matter and is where the bulk of the money will settle if the pros are any indication.

We couldn’t have been too low in NIL. We never even came close to losing a player like a bunch of teams. We got the top ranked center in successive years. In 23 people here were pumped about Walker and even Sparks being a backup. Woody stunk at building a roster, but he didn’t seem to have trouble landing the guys he wanted. With that said…last year is the first year that I really felt like the whole NIL was truly a mad scramble free agency type market. So it’s really hard to compare. There could be a hundred reasons the team is built the way it is, but I doubt lack of funds—compared to our peers—is one of them. It was just a couple weeks ago everyone was crowing about outbidding UK and the commits were rolling in.

I mean…Duke is probably the most successful basketball program in modern times and they have a wealthy alumni base. I’d fully expect them to be top 5 if not #1 in basketball NIL spend. How many times have we went head to head with Duke for a guy and won out, historically? It’d be weird for IU to be top 10 last year and not this year. Funds don’t seem to be an issue for the football team either. CDD spent the money how he spent it. Gotta assume the guy has a plan.

So no Leo Curtis, huh? At least we’ll get to see him in the conference.

Pretty much this. I think some people have confused Woodys problem with getting blown out in about every big noncon game with the notion that good teams never really get blown out. The latter isn’t necessarily true. Florida only lost 4 times last year but one was a 20 blowout at Tennessee. It happens from time to time, sometimes even to very good teams.