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Haha. I forgot about those. Great memory. Really paired well with cutting down the nets after the OSU loss when we still clinched a share of the B1G.

Very cool.

If he goes there good riddance. I know nothing, but I’m not worried yet.

Man that was so satisfying, as was the other Hemby short yardage TD. It's kinda easy to forget now, but at the time, after Old Dominion and Iowa, we had concerns about our short yardage capabilities. This game alleviated those, to say the least.

Josh says he’s never went up against a defense as complex and disguised as Bryant’s. And it’s made him much better. ;-) Also, I just can't wait for the season to start.

Man, I really appreciate Carr coming back to IU to work with IUBB and hopefully help us get good again. Not all our former managers are willing to.

I'm pretty sure 2026 is in the mid-30's. I'd guess we're right on the edge of the top-10. Pretty nuts. I think there are 20 or 25 schools spending pretty big, like the $30-40M range, so I think about as we're spending at a very competitive level. Beyond that, no idea, but whatever it is, it kept Cig around.

Big.

Yea. In this case I mostly got that from Cig himself when he said this in April ‘25: “I think our little pot of gold is pretty nice, but we're not at $40 million. Or $30 million. Or even $25 million." https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/the-race-to-keep-up-with-40-million-rosters-is-shaking-college-football/ I took that to mean low 20’s which I heard from a few other people. Unfortunately for some who want to explain away IUFB as buying a team or being really old… it just ain’t so. It was simply incredible coaching.

I think Carr has a lot of influence with everyone. I also think if we flop and it’s clearly on CDD, Scott will try to keep Carr and marry him up to the next guy. But, like you said I still think CDD has the final call on all things IUBB. Like Carr can’t force a player on to the roster. Regardless, this portal seemed to go pretty well. The money helped too. Time will tell…

He’s visiting IU this weekend…

Is there any difference between tampering and recruiting anymore? I think it's the same at this point. You've got to start tampering with your targets early, they love all that tampering attention. That's the key to getting players. :-)

Yea I think. It's just a discussion and the question on why it took so long was raised. And yes, I'd guess Carr had plenty of leverage the whole time, he didn't need to leave the Pacers, and it only increased once the season got wobbly. Not disagreeing with that. Pretty cool we got him, assuming we perform this season. What additional authority and autonomy do you think he has vs. other GMs?

I don’t know. After our ‘25-26 roster was set there isn’t a rush to get a GM in place. It’s pretty common for someone to need some convincing (comp, NIL budget guarantees, whatever) to change jobs. I’d guess Scott knew him before Darian. Not sure what can be concluded from that. CDD worked on Ryan for months to get him to join. I don’t think Scott forced it. But, if someone reports otherwise I’ll listen.

Ha. I don’t think there is anything surprising. The plan was always to hire a GM. It would be great to do that the day after CDD was hired, but it’s reasonable to see how such a big hire isn’t possible in such a short time. CDD worked on Carr for months before he joined, he wanted him on the staff. At the end of the day all these recruits look at the head coach who has to close them. It’s still the head coach’s call and he’s responsible for the results. There is plenty to criticize and be concerned about 13 months in, but hiring a GM doesn’t seem like one to me.

CDD is still in charge of the roster. Ryan is part of the IUBB staff and reports to CDD. Every CBB coach relies heavily on their staff for recruiting. CDD hired a guy to improve and round out his staff. Pretty standard stuff.

Yes. Though this is already happening to a significant degree right now, so I'm not sure how much exempting the MMR deals will further increase roster comp. Most of these MMR deals are already getting approved. But some are getting caught up, like some of Nebraska's football deals among others. I'm not sure why some are having issues and others are, I'd guess it's legalese. When I first read this, I assumed they just wanted to remove the legal song and dance around these MMR deals that are already happening everywhere and mostly getting approved. Looking at IU, our football and MBB rosters cost over $50M vs. the $21M rev cap. It's so wild. As far as I can tell, if a donor has a dollar they want to give to players, schools have a multitude of ways already to get that dollar to the players.

Yes. Personally, I care about this rivalry. Probably more than Purdue. I don't like them. And to be honest, they put a lot into their bball program and they're a good measuring stick for us. They've beat us up pretty good for 35 years, which is annoying (of course we had a period of not playing them in there). I'd love to see that change. And I'll say it again, once our current series contract with them is up, my wish would be playing them every year in Lucas Oil 50/50 crowd split at midcourt. If they want to alternate the 50/50 crowd to the Yum Center that's fine, but IIRC Louisville may be able to block that. Anyways, this should be the Red River Rivalry of CBB. To get back on topic, I hope UK's portal continue to go poorly.

Reports say he got $12M for a roster. Interesting situation to be in with that much cash. His staff looks thin. Maybe he’s got the late staff assembly issues? Or perhaps he has a plan. Or maybe no one trusts him…

The wind actually made these guys hit some long irons into 18. Nice to see in this driver/wedge era. Helluva approach from Fitzy in the playoff. Man that was good.

Rabby and the Hysterics said we were going to be close to $20M. Maybe we end up high teens. All we can do is ballpark estimate. While I agree budgets went up, it sure looks like ours went up a lot more than most. Rev share is basically unchanged this year, so the difference is all NIL, an area we excel at. The national recruiting guys are talking about huge spend for IU and few other schools are getting that kind of talk. I'd say consensus is IU is around #5 in roster spend, maybe #5-8 to be safe. I'm trying to be reasonable in that we're still in program build mode with a whole new roster. Making the round of 16 seems pretty reasonable goal. If we have a good season and get like a six seed and go down fighting to a strong team in the round of 32, that's not the end of the world. But with this much money spent expectations sort of have to be somewhat in line with the spend, at least in my opinion. That's certainly fine, to each their own, and I'd be lockstep with you if we only spent like $13-14M. But with nearly $20M roster spend... I just think that changes things. I suspect the AD has higher expectations when they gave MBB at this much money. But I can only guess...

Dittos. And in my view this is only way to win big, we can't be rebuilding every year. I don't think our roster budget can go any higher than it now without some serious results. Though i was surprised at how much we just spent, so what do I know? The $20M for the roster this year was a shot in the arm or a big blast of lighter fluid to get this going. If we can have a good year and develop and retain players, that means we're in the portal after next season needing only a few guys. And we can sell stepping into a winning team, which would probably open up the universe of players we can get. Then we can potentially start dreaming big. But, we have a long way to go. CDD has a lot of work to do getting this brand new team to gel. Some of these guys got big paydays -- as Marvin Hagler said: “It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you've been sleeping in silk pajamas." I don't want to see anyone out of shape, or being pouty, or talk of players not going what the coach wants. I think CDD can do this, but it's not easy. We'll see.

One thing I’m hoping for is Samet benefits from the prison ball nature of the B1G. He beats the hell out of teams, doesn’t get called for many fouls, and the opposition cries about it. That would be a nice change.

I get your point here, and you could be right. But, I'm not sure we know enough yet. - Anything around the program's "thinking" is getting pretty presumptive. None of us really know, including the Rabby's of the world. - We might be low on money like you said, and that combined with minutes availability may limit our ability to get another obvious "impact" guy - Let's see who we get. If the final additions are really gnarly, then I'll jump in the concern boat I'd guess these last three spots aren't quite what we hope, but at some point this staff is just going to have to prove they had a plan and made it work despite what it looked like on paper. If they can't do that, we've go a serious issue. Like with IUFB right now, I'm looking a TE spot and I see six young guys with limited experience. I'm pretty surprised we didn't pick up a vet TE in the portal, we easily could have. But, I'm sure the staff knows something I don't. I'd like to see some of that from the IUBB staff this season -- the old upside surprise that explains something that looked iffy on paper.