Insider: Long a blue-blood, what is IU basketball now?
BLOOMINGTON – So, here we are.
Indiana’s loss at Iowa on Tuesday pushed the last breath out of whatever at-large NCAA tournament hopes the Hoosiers clung to. Once-genuine Final Four ambitions are long gone. In their aftermath sits a fan base frustrated and angry, incensed on social media and increasingly absent from Assembly Hall. Why?
Perhaps because they’ve been here before.
“To me, we improved. We were never consistent, and we did not finish close games at the level that we needed to.”
That’s IU coach Tom Crean talking about the persistent, ultimately fatal flaws of a disappointing season. But he didn’t say it Tuesday night. He said it in 2014.
And he was talking about a season startlingly similar to this one. The year before, IU had won a Big Ten championship. Then significant roster turnover gave way to a disappointing, disjointed 2014 campaign.
Those Hoosiers never adequately addressed the weaknesses that debilitated them so deeply that they missed the NCAA tournament altogether, frustrating fans as much then as this season does now.
In fairness, we have to come to at least a loose consensus about what’s reasonable for IU fans to expect. And that’s tricky. Nationally, Indiana is either seen as a bygone blue-blood or a sleeping superpower, depending largely upon whom you’re talking to.
It’s been 30 years since IU’s last national title. Fifteen years since its last Final Four appearance. Crean’s two Big Ten titles and three Sweet 16 appearances in the past six seasons represent inarguably the best sustained stretch in the program’s last 20 years.
But Crean’s boss, Fred Glass, was a student at Indiana in the late 1970s and early '80s. He remembers — and crucially, still describes — IU as a nationally relevant brand, year after year. Glass sets expectations, which are admittedly high.
As long as Indiana alumni spend to support a blue-blood program, and the school enjoys the facilities advantages of a blue-blood program, allocates the recruiting budget of a blue-blood program and draws the fan support of a blue-blood program, Glass will continue to expect it to perform like a blue-blood program.
Which brings us back to fans’ current frustrations.
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The decay in results under Bob Knight's final six years, followed by the briefly bright but largely underwhelming tenure of Mike Davis, followed by the Kelvin Sampson debacle, pushed Indiana out of the Big Ten’s top spot. Given the root-and-branch rebuild Crean had to undertake in his first three years, his achievements in the past five-plus years cannot be dismissed.
They just don’t tell the entire story.
This will be the second March in the last four IU doesn’t land in the NCAA tournament, barring a stunning turnaround. In one of those other two seasons, the Hoosiers entered the tournament as a No. 10 seed, and lost their first game.
The Big Ten title seasons were each impressive for their own reasons. They also both ended in double-digit Sweet 16 defeats, as did IU’s other Sweet 16 appearance in that span, in 2012.
Over the past six seasons, IU has lost nine, seven, 15, 14, eight and now 13 games. There have been as many double-digit loss seasons as not.
And then there’s how the Hoosiers got there.
Defense and turnovers — issues for this team well before OG Anunoby suffered a season-ending knee injury in mid-January — are not new complaints among fans.
If current trends hold, IU will finish outside the top 250 nationally in turnover percentage for the third time in the past six years, according to Ken Pomeroy.
And, over the past four seasons, the average adjusted defensive efficiency ranking nationally of a Final Four participant is 19th.
Indiana has finished in the top 40 nationally just twice in the past six years, and never higher than 21st.
Finally, there’s the considerably less quantifiable question of leadership. Crean has hammered on it since the preseason, and particularly since Collin Hartman’s injury. His persistent mentions suggest he could tell his team would struggle to find the character necessary to carry IU through difficult moments, as Jordan Hulls, Victor Oladipo, Yogi Ferrell, et al., had done in the past.
Again, from 2014: “There was an open vacuum of leadership in here when those guys were gone that nobody filled, nobody. Some didn't know how. Probably most didn't know how. Some didn't attempt to. And we missed them.”
The circumstances there were different. Crean was talking about the Hoosiers missing Ferrell and Will Sheehey, both on Team USA duty, during critical offseason conditioning sessions that might have pulled his young team closer together.
But they didn’t. And IU spent the winter grappling with some of the same demons it has faced in these past two months. Different season, different players, different circumstances, similar results.
The aforementioned Final Four comparisons are admittedly a bit lofty. But how many programs in the country enjoy the blend of resources, facilities, national branding, tradition, recruiting base and fan support of Indiana? Six? Ten?
If expectations are not that high, year to year, they’re in the neighborhood. And for too many fans, Indiana hasn’t been able to consistently meet those expectations. Sometimes? Yes. Consistently? No. For many IU fans, Tuesday night — and the past two months — have felt too familiar.
So, here we are. The trouble is, we’ve been here before.
Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.
