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Another little preview.

IMO, good points in these recent posts. My gut is the realistic best case coming out of this portal is a ~#30 KenPom team with no glaring construction issues. I doubt the talent will look like a sure thing due to the reasons Stu and sk pointed out. Just a prediction, maybe I'm wrong. I can't help but think this still all comes down to sharp scouting and player dev. A program either does this or they don't. If a program doesn't, no amount of money will save them. Like Kentucky. If program does, everything starts falling into place -- culture, identity, execution under pressure... all that good stuff our football program does. The thing that gives me the heebie jeebies is the lack of sharp scouting and player dev we saw last season. I've got to hope the root cause of like 80%+ of that was the hurried portal last year for all the reasons we've discussed (timeline, slow staff hires, etc.) and we couldn't tell who we wanted and we scrambled. Not sure I buy that explanation, but it's possible. We need our high school recruits and whoever we get in this portal to be strategic and targeted additions that fit what IU wants to be vs. something more like taking whoever looks the best on paper and praying it works. Kind of a no-duh I know. Ryan Carr should help. We're in a tough spot. We'll see if this staff can start smartly building a program in season two. We won't know for sure until they play games, but I'm really hoping for a decent looking portal haul that doesn't raise any serious red flags.

Message received Mason.

IU’s Pro Day will be on TV. April 1st.

Good summary of SP+ going into the year (Parker Fleming did the work). Pretty interesting how the B1G is top heavy and the SEC is stronger in the bottom half of the conference. Also, the #18 spot... :-)

Put me in the anyone but the B1G group. I sure as hell don’t like UM or Illinois. Arizona and UConn are much more out of sight out of mind for me.

“Who’s that kid from Greenville? Waylon something…”

Duke can enjoy that getting replayed 100,000 times over the next 25 years. Haha.

It’s pretty clear Quinn and Ferguson were behind everything Woody. Indy Star even wrote about it. Scott had to fight tooth and nail to get rid of Woody in year 4.

In reality it isn’t. CFB is king and drives 70-75% of athletic dept revenue and 100% of a school’s influence in college sports. That’s fine you’re bball first, people like what they like, but this is the reality of college athletics, even at IU.

So earlier you were all concerned about IU athletics as a whole. And now you say you would like to do the worst possible thing for IU athletics. Interesting.

I'd love for Matt to leave, but I think the chance is more or less zero. There are about 25 coaches you can place a bet on to take the UNC job, including insane long shots, and Matt isn't even on the board. He's comfortable in his little world at Purdue and it works for his style of recruiting and coaching. I'm not sure he'd do much better with the high dollar players given how he likes to run things. The "star" guys have given him some issues in the past. My hope is PU has peaked and realistically a best case is they're generally ranked #12-25 going forward and not really in the mix for big prizes. Matt is a very good coach that has had things working very well for over a decade and I doubt they fade from the top-25 anytime soon.

He can't do his job when the guy who approves the bball coach hire and contract decides he wants to make the decision. It's not a "balls" thing, it's the org chart. The Chairman is one of Scott's bosses.

You're just ranting because you like being mad. 1) It's obvious who pushed to hire the unqualified NBA reject no other college would consider AND kept him around for a 4th year. Was it the brand new AD hire? Or was it the NBA reject's best friend who is the powerful Chairman of the Board of Trustees? I wonder who did it. Ask people around IU and they'll tell you, it was Quinny. 2) You can't chalk up a 16-0 +479 point differential B1G and Football National Title to nothing but luck. Too much goes into it. First off, the whole CFB world missed Cig except Scott. Then once IUFB took off Cig could have went to basically any "big/prestigious" program, yet he stayed at IU. In fact, he signed his new contracts at IU faster than any other coach being mentioned with other jobs. That's impressive and Scott made that happen. Would Cig work with an incompetent admin? No. He even specified this group has to be around or else his buyout falls. 3) Since Scott took over, athletic dept revenue is up ~50%. We went from the bottom third to the top third of the B1G. That is not a "pretty shitty" athletics program. That's a stunning achievement. All the above doesn't mean Scott can't make errors with IUBB or other sports. Of course he's not perfect and criticism can be warranted. CDD looks like an iffy hire right now. But it's not like Scott ruined IUBB, that happened a long time ago. However, doing silly mental gymnastics to ignore the huge positives of the past few years is dumb. If this stretch of IU athletics has you this unhappy, I don't know why you follow IU.

He's talking about Arizona's storied past, present, and future in a reverential way. No way he intended to signal he's leaving right before the Final Four, which would create a huge distraction. I just can't see why he'd go to UNC. No ties (in fact he's been out west his whole life) and he already has a program about as good as you can get it. Coaches just don't seem to leave this sort of situation so they can try to recreate it somewhere else. My $ is on him leveraging this into a better contract and more NIL. This may take some time so his name may be out there for awhile with the UNC job. Arizona is a big school they'll give him whatever he needs.

I think people are reading into this too much. Coaches don’t flat out say they’re leaving and he’s talking about Arizona past present and future. I still think he uses UNC to get a big raise and more NIL at Arizona, so it may take some time for him to sign a new deal. Leaving a program that’s rolling for a place he has no ties would be surprising.

Yea they’re gonna keep making the tourney, I just want to see that B1G title/F4 threat continue to fade…

Thank goodness. Should be a bit of a rebuild now. Finally. Hopefully.

Aaron I like your posts but you’ve lost me on this one! Agree to disagree haha. And PU in a home Final Four is playing with fire. Personally I need them out of this tourney ASAP. And it’s not looking good.

Not good, friggin’ Purdue “home” Final Four. I don’t want to deal with that.

Yea, he gained weight in the late 2000’s or so (I can’t exactly recall when) and that nickname started on the IU boards.

The Dusty and Ben thing hurts -- I feel it too. And I'm worried about CDD. Fingers crossed we are good again someday...

He's been in charge for two key hires. One was great, one is TBD but off to a slow start. Still a long way to go before this can be concluded.

He’s a great tournament coach. Ability to make effective in-game adjustments is amplified in importance with the short prep times in between games. Impressive. It hurts to see…