It's no longer hoop heaven, but Hoosiers seek an angel

Mike Woodson is the latest IU coach to lose his job in a place that's firmly living in the past.

Mike Woodson

Bobby Knight was tough to take, tough to like from afar, tough to rationalize. The fact that he also was tough to beat, as Indiana’s basketball coach, supersedes all that, and hangs over Bloomington like the mushroom clouds he always detonated. He certainly has been impossible to follow.

Knight lost his job in 2000. Mike Woodson, who played for Knight, is the sixth man to sit in his chair. Next season there will be a seventh, because Woodson and the university have “mutually decided to part ways.” He got fired, in other words. These days at Assembly Hall, the chair throws the coach.

The Hoosiers were 14-9 on Feb. 7, when Indiana announced the change was going to come. Since then, they are 5-3 and have a reasonable chance of getting into the NCAA tournament. They are 10-10 in Big Ten games and beat Ohio State, 66-60, in Assembly Hall on Saturday. They’re not great, but they haven’t dropped the rope. Woodson was both defiant and emotional after that final home game, remembering that “my whole life was shaped in this building” and also saying that “maybe I’m leaving too soon.”

This would be Indiana’s third NCAA trip in five years. In the four years before Woodson, when Archie Miller was in charge, Indiana sat out every Dance. But the pressure was doubled because this year’s Hoosiers were ranked 14th in preseason by Blue Ribbon Yearbook, which also ranked Kansas No. 2, Baylor No. 8, North Carolina No. 10, Auburn No. 12, Florida No. 18 and Michigan State and St. John’s not at all.

Indiana had lured big-name transfers like Myles Rice from Washington State, Oumar Ballo from Arizona, Kanaan Carlyle from Stanford and Luke Goode from Illinois to accompany co-Big Ten Freshman of the Year Mackenzie Mgabko and promising sophomore Malik Raneau. But it’s not like baking a cake. A round resume can’t always fit into a square vacancy. Ask Kansas, which has struggled mightily with a raft of famous expatriates. The difference is that Bill Self has two national championships, and Woodson is two games over .500 in Big Ten games.

It’s also difficult when you have a full house of aging nostalgists who remember the undefeated NCAA champs of 1976 as if they played yesterday. A whole lot of yesterdays have passed since the last time Indiana was relevant nationally. Indiana’s most recent Final Four trip was 2002, when Mike Davis’ squad lost to Maryland in the NCAA championship game. Before that, you have to go back to 1993 to discover the last Indiana team to reach a regional final, a Knight-coached team that lost to Kansas.

It gets worse. The 2013 Hoosiers were No. 1 nationally in preseason and wound up No. 4 at season’s end, after they lost a Sweet 16 game to Syracuse. That team had Victor Oladipo and Cody Zeller. And it is the only Indiana team to finish in the AP poll’s final Top Ten in the past 32 seasons. Yet Indiana fans still think the program is a “blueblood.” Instead, only the skin is turning blue.

Knight won three national championships. His first successor was assistant coach Davis, who took a fifth-seeded band of Knight recruits on an unexpected run to the final game. When IU missed the next two tournaments, the moving vans showed up, and Davis resigned in February of his third year (and made the tournament, losing to Gonzaga in the second round).

Then the Hoosiers made an unassailable call, hiring Kelvin Sampson from Oklahoma. That’s the same Sampson who has resurrected Houston basketball. But he was gone in two years, primarily because he made too many phone calls to recruits. This was back when the NCAA had something called “rules.” Dan Dakich, who played for Knight in the 80s and later became a fairly loose cannon on ESPN and on talk shows, took over during the 2008 season, and IU made it to the tournament, losing to Arkansas.

The next Messiah was Tom Crean, whom Dwyane Wade had taken to the 2003 Final Four at Marquette. Crean appeared to be the strongest limb on the Tom Izzo/Michigan State coaching tree. He inherited a tattered program and won only 28 games in his first three years, but eventually won two Big Ten regular season titles. But when he suffered an 18-16 season, he was gone, too.

Crean’s years seemed like a Golden Age compared to Miller’s four seasons. Miller began strongly, signing high school legend Romeo Langford of New Albany. That was a sugar high for IU fans. Langford was so famous that his hometown named a basketball court after him, before he left high school. But Langford left Indiana for the NBA after one season, and is now playing in France.

Indiana might have gotten into the 2020 NCAA tournament, but Covid-19 took care of that. Miller couldn’t survive a 12-20 record in his fourth season.

Judged by all of that, Woodson, 66, should walk tall into retirement or his next NBA gig. Early NBA entries wounded his chances, with one year of Jalen Hood-Schiffino and one year of Ke’tel Ware. Trayce Jackson-Davis, now with the Warriors, did stay at IU all four years, and Woodson never could seem to find the right outside-inside balance. Steve Alford, or shooters like him, don’t seem to live here anymore. And if they do, they are Braden Smith (Westfield) and Fletcher Loyer (Homestead) and they go to Purdue, which has been on top or near the top of the Big 10 during most of Indiana’s wanderings, and lost to Connecticut in last year’s championship game. That, of course, has amplified the mutterings in Bloomington.

Not that college sports were ever expected to be fair, but one has to feel for the Hoosier players who didn’t ask for all this tension and weren’t born when Knight berated the last detractor in his path. College fans, administrators, boosters and media types insist on excavating ghosts and perching them on the shoulders of unsuspecting youth.

UCLA was far more successful than Indiana was but can’t rationally be called a blueblood anymore. This is the 50th anniversary of John Wooden’s final game and the Bruins have won one NCAA title since. Georgetown’s brief moment at the mountaintop was extinguished after 2007, when John Thompson III coached the Hoyas to a Final Four. Louisville was 11-49 in ACC play for the three seasons that preceded this one. Notre Dame has forfeited its relevance. North Carolina State just fired its coach, Kevin Keatts, 11 months after the Wolfpack’s magical mystery tour to the Final Four.

It is hoped that Indiana is doing its diligence when it comes to 2025-26. Already The Field of 68 website is reporting that Michigan’s Dusty May, one of Knight’s ex-managers, is not interested, and neither is former Butler and Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens. The Hoosiers would be wise to call Brad Brownell, who has coached Clemson to 26 wins, tying a school record, and was in the Elite Eight last year. Brownell is from Evansville and went to school at DePauw, in Greencastle.

A few years ago Auburn’s Bruce Pearl was heading into a game against Indiana and remembered how it once was his “dream job.” Those quotes have been dredged up and serve as catnip for the Hoosier faithful, but Pearl never dreamed that he could get Auburn to No. 1 in the country and is in the midst of an 8-year, $50.2 million deal.

And some fans are calling for UCLA’s Mick Cronin, who is from Cincinnati, coached the U. of Cincinnati, and is known for insisting on the defense that the Hoosiers rarely play anymore. But Cronin’s emotional maturity has cracked after some losses. After Minnesota came back to beat the Bruins, Cronin chided the home crowd (of 7,523) for groaning when UCLA missed foul shots, instead of clapping in encouragement. He would need a severe skin-thickener to prosper in Bloomington.

Just because Indiana’s blood is closer to 0-negative than to blue doesn’t mean coaching candidates won’t bleed to get the job. The person who leads the Hoosiers back to the One Shining Moment will be a holy man, ready to baptize his followers in the Wabash. Why, even Norman Dale won over the skeptics of Hickory when he actually started winning games. He is not a candidate either, although his adopted state prefers Hollywood endings to cinema verite.