Doyel: Tom Crean's fate no longer in Tom Crean's hands
"Creaning" is a thing. It's an insult, it's a verb, it's a way of life for Indiana basketball. It's the way the Hoosiers roster turns over almost every year, magically if you want to be naïve about it, with IU coach Tom Crean somehow finding a way to fit 14 or 15 scholarship athletes into the 13-player maximum. How does he do that?
Players leave early. Some for the NBA. Some transfer. Some academically. Some just quit.
Creaning. Google it. It's a word being used by Illinois fans, Michigan fans, Purdue fans, even Indiana fans. It's a word on UrbanDictionary.com: The practice of pulling a scholarship from a college athlete(s) in order to open up a scholarship for a more highly valued recruit.
Creaning is a thing, and it's an unsavory thing, and it's a reason — but just one reason, and not even the biggest reason — that Tom Crean is near the point where his future at Indiana is out of his hands.
Assuming he hasn't reached that point already.
Some would say he reached that point Tuesday night at Assembly Hall, where the Hoosiers — where Crean — were booed off the court by the few thousand IU fans who bothered to watch all 40 minutes of a 77-63 blowout loss to Iowa. Some would say? No need to hide behind a field of straw men. I'll say it myself:
Crean no longer has control over his future at Indiana.
If I'm right, it's an abrupt change from just a month ago. Until the Hoosiers' recent slide, which is more like a skid, which is more like a swan dive into the abyss, Crean was very clearly coming back next season. Indiana was cruising toward the NCAA Tournament, toward a top-four bid in the Big Ten Tournament — and the glorious double-bye that comes with it — and toward a firm foundation for next season. Crean entered this season on somewhat shaky ground given Indiana's regression on the court and its misbehavior off it, but until a month ago Crean had both hands wrapped firmly around his own job, controlling it, winning it.
He's on the verge of losing it.
On the court the Hoosiers have fallen apart. In late January they were nationally ranked, tied for first in the Big Ten, headed for a special, overachieving season.
Today they are unranked, seventh in the Big Ten, losers of seven of their last 11 games and walking the line between NCAA Madness and the NIT badness.
If that's all that were happening here, Crean would be safe. His buyout is enormous, the No. 1 reason for his return. When that's the biggest argument in your favor, and you're the head coach of a basketball giant like Indiana, that's not much of an argument. But Crean's agent took IU behind the woodshed years ago, negotiating a contract that even now, seven years into his tenure, calls for a buyout of more than $11 million if Crean is fired after April 1.
But Indiana — and IU fans — have motivation to come up with the money, and again, it's not just the late-season collapse of a team that wasn't supposed to be all that good in the first place.
Another reason? The team wasn't supposed to be all that good in the first place.
This is Indiana. Sentiment is growing nationally that IU isn't equipped to be the basketball juggernaut it was under Bob Knight, a force of nature who made it happen because times were different and because he was just that good. But that sentiment is far from unanimous among IU fans, and good for them for their ambition. Given the right coach, maybe the Hoosiers are equipped to compete for national titles. But the right coach wouldn't enter his seventh season with one legitimate Big Ten big man, with that big man — Hanner Mosquera-Perea — best suited to come off the bench behind two or three better bigs.
Mosquera-Perea isn't just the best Indiana has. He's all Indiana has. That's a problem for the IU fan base.
So is Crean's well-earned reputation for being less than a brilliant strategist. He has a lot of things going for him — players graduate, the occasional McDonald's All-American signs, he very clearly works his tail off — but Crean has too many moments like last season against Michigan, when he trotted out an early-game lineup that included two walk-ons and was booed after a 6-0 Michigan run had Crean fixing a mess of his own mystifying creation.
Crean's unnecessarily combative persona doesn't sit well with IU fans either. It's one thing to be fiery and even disrespectful of other coaches — Bob Knight, you know? — but not if your team is struggling to reach the NCAA Tournament. Fans of any school, IU or otherwise, tolerate more when they win, but Crean isn't winning enough for fans to accept his occasional sideline oafishness (spats with Jeff Meyer and Tim Miles, and an unreported incident with New Orleans' Mark Slessinger earlier this season when Crean yelled at the UNO coach and was scolded by a referee).
Nor is he winning enough to overcome all the Creaning that has happened — and keeps happening — most outrageously to guard Matt Roth, who committed to Kelvin Sampson and remained loyal through the Sampson scandal that brought Crean to IU. Roth was on Crean's first team that won six games, and he was there when the Hoosiers reached the 2012 Sweet 16 as a redshirt junior. For his senior year? He found out, sort of, that there was no room at the Hoosier Inn for him.
Roth told the Bloomington Herald-Times that Crean never told him directly he had been recruited over. Crean just invited Roth to use him as a reference for job applications.
"You kind of put one and one together there," Roth told the Herald-Times.
The math was easy then, and now. Indiana has 13 scholarship players on roster, none a senior. Crean has signed two players (Juwan Morgan and O.G. Anunoby), and is actively recruiting at least one other (Thomas Bryant). That's 15 or 16 scholarship players for next season. Roster upheaval is again inevitable, whether it's Park Tudor's Yogi Ferrell fleeing unwisely to the NBA or someone magically deciding to transfer. Or both. Actually, it would have to be both. You kind of put one and one together.
Who's about to get Creaned?
Tom Crean is, if IU fans are angry enough to raise $11 million to Crean him.
Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel