You're listening to the Back Home Network presented by Home
Field Apparel. Welcome back to Crimson Castle
and Javier joining you as we are during the first week of the IU
coaching search and already seems like it's been going on
for like a couple of weeks at this point, but it was plenty to
talk about with it. And so we wanted to start
bringing on some of the folks that we've talked with in the
past throughout the coaching searches.
We've got Tony Adronia joining us, who I think most of you are
familiar with either from X or from his work with Back Home
Network. Tony, great to see you.
How you doing today? I'm fantastic.
Yeah. I, I you should know me actually
from Crimson Cast, if you're a Crimson Cast man, this is, I
think this is year like 14 for me joining Crimson Cast.
So that's where I I got my start.
A lot of a lot of people are not O GS.
We have a lot of O GS in the audience, but we have a lot of
new audience. So I want to make sure that we
properly introduce you. But yes, Tony's been with us for
a long time and we've always appreciated his thoughts and
insights on things and he wrote a really fascinating piece,
which we're going to get to and kind of dive into that.
If you're if you're not subscribed to the assembly call
sub stack, I'd highly recommend you do that.
You can go back. You can see Tony's piece as it's
very pertinent to what we're going to be talking about
overall in terms of the IU coaching search.
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your inbox. Tony, let's go ahead and dive in
with things as we get started with the first full week where
we know that IU is going to have a coaching vacancy.
We've already started to see the narratives taking shape.
We're already seeing hot boards being put out there and and most
of them are not, we're really well thought out at all.
But we're not going to talk about hot boards today.
I do want to talk about narrative, though.
And one of the big narratives that I feel like more and more
now, and it isn't a new thing necessarily.
Like this is stuff that was being trotted out, you know,
even in the middle of the Crean era and certainly was trotted
out after he was fired, after Archie Miller was fired.
This idea of, you know, is there a problem with the IU basketball
program? Is there something about the job
that makes it unattractive? Is there is there something
structurally wrong with the program and and that's creating
the issues where I use constantly going back to the
well, trying to find coaches. Now those of you who have been
watching or listening to this show for a while, I think you
know where I stand. But I, I saw your piece, which
is titled Indiana basketball's problem Isn't institutional,
it's making bad hires. And I was like, oh, oh, good.
This is I, I feel like I'm, I'm no longer alone on this corner.
And, and to be fair, there's other people that feel this way,
but I feel like this has become almost a meme, Tony, that
somehow the IE basketball job isn't that good or that there's
there's something structurally at issue, whether it's with the
fans or whether it's with whatever people want to argue.
It doesn't really hold up to a lot of scrutiny.
But I did want to talk about this idea of, you know, IU
basketball being a a problem versus the people that IU has
hired being a problem. So let me start off with your
original thoughts or rationale as far as all of that is
concerned. Yeah, it's funny this this can
be more pertinent today because John Rothstein actually today
made this exact statement. Why is Indiana such a good job?
Since 1994, thirty one years ago, Indiana has been to the
second weekend of the NCAA tournament four times.
Mike Davis went once, Tom Crane three times.
That's it. 4 trips in 31 years. Is, is Indiana a great job or
did it have an all time coach in Bob Knight?
Is his thesis there? Or, or I guess it's question,
but obviously it's it's pretty obvious what he's insinuating
there as he says that. So, yeah, you know, it's it's a
narrative that we're going to see a lot.
You know, this won't be the first or the last time that that
we see that. And, you know, overall, I just
flat out do not agree with it. You know, when you look at the
resources that this program has at its disposal, you know,
that's, that's fan support. Obviously, you know, that's,
that's monetary support both to the institution and also to NIL,
which both are are vastly important hotbed recruiting
ground, national exposure. You know, all the things that
coaches look at, you know, when they decide, do I want this job?
So, you know, the overarching theme of like, is Indiana a good
job? Doesn't make a lot of sense to
me. And and maybe maybe pre NIL, you
could say it's losing its luster a bit.
But now with NIL being in the full in Indiana, seemingly being
a top five, at the very least top ten program in terms of NIL,
like I think it's very apparent now that Indiana is a very, very
good job. And I think, you know, when you
look at hot boards, that actually makes sense.
And, and most of them do not. I think the hot board this time
around versus the hot boards even last time around when they
hired Mike Woodson, again, for the two or three out there, that
actually makes sense. You know, this time around it's
it's bigger and better names, I think.
Yeah. I mean, there's a couple things
before we dive into the details that you laid out in in the
piece that I think are worth keeping in mind.
Like A, and I talked about this I think over the weekend, you
got to understand that in coaching circles, coaches love
to point the finger at everybody else when they don't have
success. And that isn't to say that there
aren't fingers to point or people to point those fingers
at. I'm, I'm not saying that all
coaches are wrong, But when coaches do struggle at a place,
you always hear, oh, it's the institution's fault or, you
know, it's this the athletic director didn't give them
support or they didn't get NIL. Like the NIL thing is one we
hear a lot about now where you know, you'll, you'll hear
excuses or you'll, you'll hear coaches without naming any names
or or giving any figures say, well, this guy was given like
this ridiculous offer. It's like, well, that, that it's
too convenient often times to point your finger that direction
so often. And the fact that it happens all
over the place, but yet there's no names dropped.
This is an old, an age-old thing where you'd have coaches
complaining, well, everybody's cheating.
Well, who's cheating? Well, I don't want to go into
details. Well, that's a problem because
how are we supposed to take that seriously?
Take your word for it. So that's, that's one issue.
Another issue though, is if the idea is that there's not support
at IUI, think all you have to do is look at what happened this
offseason where Mike Woodson was able very quickly to assemble a
large war chest to go out and get a bunch of really highly
paid players in the portal to reassemble a roster to cover for
the lack of recruiting success or or or consistency.
And that's not a that's not something that's going to happen
in a lot of other locations like the financial resources are
there. The one thing I do think, and
I'd be curious to get your take on that you could and then we
didn't necessarily say this is a a bad thing about the IU job.
But it is a factor that a lot of coaches now seem to be
considering is if I can go somewhere, have good resources
and a lot of success, but not have a lot of people necessarily
like passionately care about the success or failure of the team.
That's an ideal situation because I'm able to essentially
I can, I can stash a few bad seasons here or there.
There's not an expectation of like we're going to have to be
up at this high level. I, I don't know if I totally buy
it because it's like when I look at where a lot of coaches are
having success, yes, some of them are doing it at, at non
traditional basketball powers, but they're generating a lot of
sudden new expectations with the success they're having.
And the idea that that's that people just go quietly into the
night if they start struggling doesn't make a whole lot of
sense. You know, how much of that do
you really think factors in with Indiana where there's this
reception that it's a fishbowl, that, you know, you're going to
be constantly under scrutiny that the expectations are way
too high? It could be one thing if IU was
firing coaches after long, you know, streaks of of, you know,
tournament making the tournament and success in the tournament
and finishing in the top four of the Big 10.
But that's like fundamentally not what's happened in Indiana
over the last 25 years. But I'm but I'm curious like how
much of a factor do you think that actually is?
To me, I, I don't think it's one at all.
And honestly, like, let's pull all the candidates in and ask
them that, like, is this something that concerns you?
And any of them that say yes, like, all right, goodbye.
To me, that's, that's very much kind of a loser mentality and
not somebody that like wants to go win titles.
And I could be wrong in that that assessment, but you know, I
want a guy that wants the pressure.
Like, you know, they say pressure makes diamonds or burst
pipes and it kind of depends on how you, how you deal with it.
So you know, you, I'm sure there are people out there like that,
but to me, those aren't necessarily guys that have
national championship aspirations.
Those are guys that want to be comfortable.
And to me, that's not somebody that I necessarily want leading
the program. So is it a thing?
I'm sure it is with some guys out there.
But to me that's more of like a a mid tier kind of coach that
that necessarily doesn't necessarily have those those
championship aspirations, but. It, yeah, I know it is
interesting, kind of. I agree with you on it is
interesting. You look back at the last, you
know, I don't know, 15 or so national champions in
basketball. There aren't very many schools
that you wouldn't consider to, you know, have really high
expectations that have won those.
I mean, Virginia is up there. Villanova is kind of a special
case because it's relatively small.
But I mean, North Carolina, Duke, Yukon, Kansas, Kentucky,
Louisville, technically with an asterisk.
I mean, these are all programs where I think we saw this with
UConn, you know, they they won titles and then they had a coach
who won a title and then was struggling to make the
tournament. It's not like those fans enjoyed
that or were kind to the situation as it was happening.
So it is it is kind of an interesting thing because I, I
kind of agree with you on the mentality perspective.
Yeah, it's a lot more comfortable to be in other spots
perhaps, but there are only a finite number of schools that
you can really legitimately expect to win national titles
at. And I think it took until, you
know, it's been 100 years since the last title.
I think IU is probably going to be in that mixes of of schools
that you can do it at because five titles have been won here,
which is still among the most in the history of college
basketball. So kind of pivoting from that, I
think this is where looking at the coaches that you talked
about and the way that they were hired rather than looking at
some kind of 25 year continuum with IU basketball really makes
a lot of sense. Because one thing you could say,
Tony, is that there's been no archetype for hiring IU
basketball coaches. It has been very situational.
It has been very in the moment. It's been very much decided upon
by whoever happened to be in charge at the time or not as the
case may be in a couple of of instances.
And that has that does get lost in these kind of broad macro
evaluations of whether the job is good or not.
It certainly does. Yeah.
And you know, you look all the way back to, you know, the the
post night firing with with Mike Davis, he was very much kind of
that players coach, you know, the players had a voice in it
seemingly of Hey, this is the guy that we want.
And in that instance, when you have a fire a program legend and
you're trying to keep some sort of stability a foundation in
your program, especially back in in the year, you know, 2000 when
you didn't have the transfer portal to just remake a program,
like you're trying to keep some stability there.
So really, you know, you make the hire that you think is going
to do that and Mike Davis and you know, while while Davis made
his final four run in 2002, and that was, you know, a lot for a
lot of fans, like kind of the last time we felt a great sense
of joy in March. You know, he he flamed out
obviously. And and by 2006, it was a
similar, similar situation to kind of what we're facing now,
where it was kind of there was that aura around the program of
like, this isn't going to end well.
And, you know, finally there was an announced resignation at the
end of the year and and whatnot. So it it actually has some some
parallels to this season, except for that team did make the NCAA
tournament, which I don't think this one's going to, but but
yeah, so I think, you know, with that, you look at that job.
So what what I tried to get at in my piece was, OK, well, when
these people left Indiana, then obviously if if Indiana's just
this horrible program, well, then when they left this
fishbowl environment, you know, they thrived elsewhere.
And my point was, obviously that's not been the case.
You know, with in Mike Davis's case, he went to UAB, made one
NCAA tournament in six years. Then he went to Texas Southern,
which obviously not exactly a basketball powerhouse.
He found some stability there, was there about a decade, made a
couple tournaments as 16 seeds. And then, you know, kind of try
his hand one more time to get back into kind of the the higher
ranks of college basketball. Was a head coach at Detroit
Mercy, made his son almost the highest scoring player in NCAA
history. And then the year, his final
year at Detroit, you know, had one of the worst seasons in in
college basketball history with A1 in 31 season.
And now he's an assistant coach at Memphis.
So like looking at that, you know, obviously after Indiana
never never really found success at a high level that would have
proved that he was capable and had the coaching shops to kind
of lead this Indiana program to the heights that we'd all like
to see it get to. It was one of the complaints and
the concerns about the Davis move.
And I think it's important to miss.
You know, it was literally 25 years ago.
It's important for people to understand there were not a lot
of folks that were excited about Mike Davis being named head
coach. But it was a stop gap.
At least that's how I think it was viewed to keep the players
in place. You know, they had advocated for
either him or John Treelore, who was the other assistant.
The administration actually offered both of them the Co head
coaching job on an interim basis for that 2002 thousand and one
season. You know, and it it was always
the debate. Well, you know, Davis finished
that season. They were they were a four seed.
They lose to Kent State in the first round.
It was a pretty loaded roster, but that was the best seeding
that Indiana had had in a while. I mean, all the previous time
that Indiana had been seeded as highest 4th was 1993.
So, yeah, I mean, there were other things that went on behind
the scenes that made that hire what it was in terms of like
converting Davis from the interim coach to the permanent
coach. I certainly at the time I was, I
had just graduated from college. I was just about to, I was the
sports director at the radio station here.
I didn't think it was a good move because you just didn't
have a lot of evidence that Mike Davis knew what it took to
manage a program of Indiana's stature.
And, you know, IA lot of people at the time and and this I think
kind of gets into both a a group think problem, but also a
misdiagnosis of how a basketball program runs.
I think people at the time almost taking the exact opposite
of what this particular podcast is, is trying to talk about
assumed that Indiana basketball was going to run itself and that
you needed essentially a finisher.
And then, you know, Bob Knight had lost that capacity.
His teams had had not been to the Sweet 16 since 1994.
It had been a six year gap at that point.
You know, Davis seemed to connect with the players better.
And it's like, well, that's all that's needed because IU is
going to continue to get top players.
They're going to continue to get people coming in and, you know,
being able to play at a high level AI don't think people
really realized how good that roster was that Davis had his
first year. You have Jared Jeffries as a
freshman. You had Kurt Haston, who
actually ended up going to the NBA, you know, after that year.
You had Tom Coverdale, who had not played hardly at all the
previous two years but had stated in a media interview
leading into that season that he had really rededicated himself
to basketball. They kind of found his passion
again, and that clearly showed. You had Kyle Hornsby.
You had all these pieces alongside players like Jeff
Newton and AJ Moye who either hadn't played yet or we were
just getting to know. My point is like there was a lot
of scaffolding there that Mike Davis was able to step into that
allowed that early success. And then you saw it the
following year where they had, you know, it was an odd season.
They would they lose 10 regular season games.
They lose to Iowa in the second round of the tournament and
Davis's first full season. But they make the national title
game. And so many people I think
looked at that and said, we'll see.
Vindicated decision to put Mike Davis in control of the team.
But what was happening underneath the surface was that
the cracks were already starting to show in terms of the lack of
understanding of how to manage that type of a program and what
kind of recruiting you needed to do.
And also just all of the things that come with running a large
program in terms of interfacing with donors, interfacing with
alums and being able to set up a a culture that's going to
sustain. And I think so many people at
the time were excited that it wasn't Bob Knight and it was a
different culture and a different approach.
And I'm not saying fans were necessarily excited, but I think
people around the university were excited about that, that
they tended to be somewhat blind to the fact that even though the
team was having success in that first year or so, that it was
not setting up well long term. That really did manifest itself
over the next three years of Mike Davis's time.
And you saw him make mistakes, like you saw him, you know,
essentially throw his seniors under the bus after the loss to,
what was it, Pittsburgh? I think in the in the in the
2003 NCAA Tournament, you saw him have, you know, that
meltdown against Kentucky on the floor, which led to him like
charging onto the floor and like slapping his his head and ending
up getting thrown out of the game.
Yeah. I mean, there was things like
that where you, you, if you were paying attention, it's like this
is a potential problem, but by that point it was almost too
late because you would you would fully committed.
And, and this is where for a lot of people at the time, and I'm
not trying to re litigate the Davis era, but to to prove the
point, it's like it was just a bad hire.
Not that not that Davis didn't deserve a chance necessarily,
but that this is what happens when you don't know if someone
can handle that job is put into the job.
You end up with a situation where it starts to devolve.
And then you rapidly get into a spiral where it devolves very
quickly. And that's essentially what
happened for a lot of that tenure in the middle part of it
at least. Yeah, and like you said,
ultimately, you know, bad hire, which was was kind of the the
crux of what I was getting at. And then, you know, you make a
bad hire, It's it's, you know, post legend.
And so kind of making it an emotional decision and what not.
Whatever the case is, you put that to bed, you let him go
after 2006 and you know, you turn over a new slate and that's
when you get Kelvin Sampson coming into Indiana.
Now, Kelvin Sampson is the one caveat and all of these guys
post IU career that have had success at the college level
since being let go by Indiana. However, obviously there are
numerous caveats with that as a guy that was given a five year
show clause had to go rebuild himself as an assistant coach to
the NBA ranks. And he obviously he was a guy
that was in trouble when he got hired at Indiana.
He you know, you could re litigate it all and and you
know, should Indiana have have self reported essentially which
led to his downfall at Indiana? You know, in terms of the on the
court stuff, obviously there was some off the court question
marks that were happening as well under his watch.
But ultimately, you know, Indiana made a high risk move by
hiring Kelvin Sampson and it was a, a super high cost that they
paid. And, and so that's the one where
you could argue like Indiana, they went for like, you know,
the, the jugular, if you will, to, to get that guy right guy in
there that's going to take them back to the promised land.
But they did that at a high risk.
And you know, 1 1/2 years into Samson's tenure, he was let go
and and really decimated the program for quite some time.
Yeah, that one. And yeah, I think you laid it
out really well there. And I guess a couple things I'll
add to that. That was one of those where he
wasn't the choice of the athletic director at the time.
And I look, it was weird because, you know, obviously if
you'd followed college basketball up to that point,
you, you you saw Oklahoma constantly being successful.
So it wasn't like a complete out of left field higher in terms of
the success. It was out of left field in
terms of the fact that for an IU program that didn't really have
a lot of ironclad cultural elements as you came through the
Davis era. But one of the things they kept
too was like, well, we're not going to cheat.
And then it'll go out and hire someone who was under a a show.
Cause at that point, where are you had to go to the NCAA and
say, well, here's why we're hiring this guy.
And there's going to be extra institutional controls talking
in real politic. If you're going to hire that
guy, you're committing to the idea that he's not.
Again, and it it kind of goes back to the Davis thing where
it's like, oh, we think that IU is going to get players because
it's IU. The idea that we won't need to
do those things that IU because it's IU.
And then he goes and does those things and then you get the self
reporting. And that's less because of the
cheating as much as it is about people's horror at the cultural
changes that they perceive as happening within the program
that they're uncomfortable with. And again, whether or not you
want to argue that that was a good justification for making a
change, it took what had started off as a really promising
coaching tenure and it immediately turned it in a
different direction. And not.
And you know, I think the, this is where, if you're Indiana, and
if you're thinking about Indiana from a, a hiring perspective and
where these things go wrong, it's like you hire this person
knowing that this was part of their portfolio.
Was there no managing of that? Like what I've always found
weird about that. And, and it kind of fits into
some of the other things that have happened with IU hires and
IU managing a basketball program over time is you can't just walk
in one day and say, I had no idea all these, all these
impermissible text messages were being sent or I had no idea that
there were players that weren't going to class.
Like, how do you not know that? Like, there's got to be some
level what, what's the thing that the NCAA like their their
their backup. Whenever they can't completely
prove something, they always go for lack of institutional
control, right? That's the that's the
nomenclature. IU has struggled with this.
And that is to some degree, what's made a lot of these hires
not great is that there hasn't been a lot of control.
For better or for worse. Coaches are just been kind of
allowed to come in, do whatever they want to do.
But then I use like, oh, no, we didn't mean that.
And it's like, well, that's that's a problem because then
you needed to really you set those expectations at the
beginning. And I think the Samson and Crean
eras, for very different reasons, kind of end up in that
same boat. Samson, obviously, because you
knew what you were getting coming into that you should have
been able to manage it. And with Crean, the sequence
after Samson gets fired is what about, you know, they named Dan
Dockage as the interim. That doesn't go well.
And then Docket as the interim starts, you know, I think he
kicked one or two players off the roster in anticipation that
he was going to get the full time job.
He doesn't. They hire Crean, Crean comes in
and then Greenspan gets fired because there's an additional
lack of institutional control penalty that's put on IU, which
means now Tom Crean, who just got hired and is yet to coach
game goes in and asks for another extension, which
essentially insulates him from oversight and supervision to any
meaningful degree. It feels like at times.
And it's like, well, it's his program.
We're going to rise or fall with Crean.
What was it about Crean as a hire?
Like, you know, how do you, how do you evaluate that in terms of
how it fits within this paradigm of, of not potentially being
like the right guy for that particular situation?
Yeah, and and he's the one that I argued like he's obviously
since Bob Knight had the most sustained success, if you want
to call it that, you know, had a couple big 10 titles, had
Indiana back at at number one for the majority of the 2012
thirteen season. I actually, I think you could
make the argument that Tom Crean was a fine hire to kind of
reclaim your your status back in college basketball is like, you
know, program again. And and we're not just cellar
dweller like they were the first few years.
I think where you got into trouble with Tom Crean was that
there were signs by year two or three that, you know, this this
maybe was wasn't something that was going to be like this, this
smooth ride, like you were going to have a lot of ups and downs
and it's going to be this roller coaster ride.
And you know, that was kind of his demeanor even as a coach and
you know, you you get some weird stories about those things.
So but I do think that there was a lot of fan buying and I always
go back to him too. When people talk about the fans.
I'm like, man, Indiana was bad. And the fans had I mean, like
they knew what was happening. Like they were, they were trying
to will, you know, Kyle Tabor and Daniel Moore and and those
guys to wins in Assembly Hall and, and still were having nice
crowds knowing that it was probably going to end up in a in
a lopsided loss. But that's a that's an aside
there. But yeah, with Crean, the
writing was kind of on the wall. You know, even after that like
Syracuse debacle in 2013, you know, it's, it started coming
out that the guys were worn down and they had these long
practices leading up to that game and and then the
recruiting, well, started drying up.
So for Crean, I don't necessarily think it's like
this, this got awful higher than Indiana made, but I also don't
think that like them letting him go or him not finding sustained
success. There was, you know, this
indictment on the program and then again it that you look at
what did he do post Indiana? He went to Georgia had I think
he was 20 games or more under 500 at Georgia.
And now he's out of college basketball as a coach.
And and so that's one where, I don't know, Indiana didn't make
their long term hire. I guess if they were trying to
find the guy that was going to come in and be this level
headed, you know, you raise the floor and your ceiling is
national titles like that wasn't Tom Crean.
And so by them letting him go, perhaps even too late in some
people's estimations, that that was wise on their part and it
wasn't some institutional failure that was leading to Tom
Crean's demise. Yeah, I go back and forth on it.
I mean, at the time, IU was in an interesting spot because
there weren't that. This is the one time I think
there is some credence to the idea that this job was imperiled
as far as being a top job because no one knew what the
NCAA was going to do. And in response to the Samson
violations, which again, had happened under a show 'cause
that Indiana had agreed to abide by.
And that was basically going back and saying oops.
And then you had the additional sanctions that were likely
coming and and then you had the way that like the messy way that
Samson was let go. So I can't blame Crane for
taking the job and I can't necessarily blame Indiana
because if you if you're a top coach at that time, that does
look like kind of a dumpster fire to be bringing people into.
What what is interesting though, when you go back and look at
Crane's career pre Indiana, I don't know under normal
circumstances if he's the guy that gets hired because he made
five tournaments in nine years at Marquette.
He had Dwyane Wade for the year that they went to the final Four
and the rest of the years he was they were out in round one or
Round 2. They, you know, in the last
three years leading into the Indiana job, they didn't get a
seed above 6th in the Big East. And and they were they were a
decent team in the Big East. But I remember watching those
games. I know you do as well.
Like that was it was a program that was clearly like a step
below the top powers in the Big East.
And it's we think about those things very differently now in
terms of like, well, what criteria do we need as a coach
for you to really step into that next level?
So I I always do wonder like, if not for those particular
circumstances, is that the guy they end up going with?
They had talked about him in O 6, but they didn't settle on
him. He wasn't even one of the two,
you know, final guys considered from what I understand.
So that that is an interesting aspect to this that I think is
worth bringing up. Yeah, what's what I always go
back to with Kareem is that Marquette fans were not sad to
see him go. And and that's that's never
good. Well, that's the other thing.
It's like his last, the last five years he was at Marquette,
they lost 12 games, 12 games, 11 games, 10 games and 10 games,
which, you know, when we hear certain candidates being talked
about now and I look at their records and I'm like that guy's
got a lot of 91011 lost seasons in a row.
That's normally a little bit of a red flag.
It may not be a complete red flag.
There may be mitigating circumstances, but that's that's
not necessarily what you're looking for.
And, and your point about Crean at Georgia, it kind of recasts
the whole thought process. A lot of people have have taken
to looking back at the Crean era and I understand why and being
like, why don't we just rehire Crean because we had our best
successes there. But this is actually to some
degree to me almost a proof that the IU job is really good that
he was able to bring the players he was able to bring in to make
that 2 year run so successful and even that 2016 team.
But it didn't always fit. It didn't always come together
out outside of that. And you look at what his
recruiting look like at Georgia, the recruits were there, but the
results never were. And you know, again, I think you
you really make a good point. This almost feels like the the
one moment where there was equilibrium or perhaps coaching
team were bringing both each other up, but there was a lack
of sustaining there. And that's ultimately what you
have to have in any big job, not just the Indiana job.
Absolutely. And and, and yeah, I mean, 57
and 89 I think was his Georgia tenure record.
I mean, he he had Anthony Edwards on his team.
Like he, you know, like he's mentioned he it wasn't like he
just wasn't able to get guys there.
But but not sustained, not any success, to be honest, not even
not sustained. But you know, Indiana moves on
and really they went out and got the hottest name out there,
Archie Miller. I think what the time was a year
or two removed from the Elite 8, he had the coaching pedigree.
You know, the brother of Sean Miller, their dad was a high
school basketball coach for numerous years.
And you know, really from the start of his tenure, like
literally the first game of his tenure, Indiana State goes out
and hits what seemed like 50 threes and blows the doors off
Indiana. And I mean, he really never
never got it going anywhere near a level of Indiana fans being
like, all right, here we go like now we go.
Now his third season probably was going to make the
tournament. I actually looked back at the
bracket matrix matrix history and I think they were probably
pretty squarely in they had they just they.
Were a double digit. They were a double digit seed,
but they were. I was doing brackets at that
point. They were definitely in.
Yeah. And and so again, I also think
that's why this is also on the side that Mike Woodson and
Archie Miller, maybe the vitriol wasn't quite as heavy for Archie
in year 3 and 4 as it was for Woodson because the program
trajectories from year after year three.
Archie actually looked like he was on his way up, whereas
Woodson already looked like he was on his way down.
It's another side, but I wanted to know.
So Indiana hires the hot name and Archie Miller and just never
got it going. You know, he his last game of
his Indiana tenure was at Lucas Oil Stadium.
He's booed out of the stadium, was given four years, never made
the NCAA tournament, never be Purdue.
We know all those those things and then leaves Indiana goes to
the field of 68 for a season or for a year and then head coach
at Rhode Island has not found a lot of success there.
This is his, his best season there, but it honestly, like you
go back and look at Rhode Island's history, it's, it's
similar to like a Dayton where like they've had a lot of guys
that have been able to have success there and he's not yet
been able to get it going there. And, and that's a a fan base
that does expect, you know, NTA tournaments and things like
that. So I, I wouldn't be surprised to
find him on, on hot seat lists going into next season.
And and so again, that's another guy that Indiana hired couldn't,
couldn't find with him any success.
And, you know, outside of his Indiana job, he he's yet to find
it again. It's and it's a tough one.
And this is where, again, you're right, like you go back to that
cycle going, you know, coming out of the 2017 season and yet
people were pointing at Archie Miller, they were pointing at
Greg Marshall. Where where are both of them
now? You know that I mean, so these
things do you do get caught up in them.
I I've always looked at this higher and you got to be fair in
the moment. You look at what Archie Miller
had done with Dayton, four straight tournaments and a lead
8 to start that run, two straight 7 seeds, which for an
Atlantic 10 team is really good now, now that said, Dayton's had
a, a, a pretty good amount of success.
It's not, I mean, you look at what Anthony Grant, the one year
that the, the season got lost due to COVID, Dayton was
probably going to be a one seed that year.
So that was only three years after Archie Miller had been
gone. And that does I, I remember
thinking at the time that year, it's like, well, maybe this
wasn't that impressive of a run that Archie Miller had at
Dayton. And I think the biggest problem
with Archie Miller it, it kind of felt like, let's say they
were two big issues, at least from my perspective, Tony, it's
like actually, you know what? No, I'm going to say 3-1.
He recruited in the way a lot of people wanted him to recruit and
that he went after Midwestern kids he went after.
Inside out approach. Inside out approach you can't
blame him for that, but it's like he bet on the wrong horse
every single time you know, he goes out and gets Rob Phenisee
Rob Phenisee really struggles to transition to the college game
and I think he'd make an argument never really gets there
and and even when he transferred away he still struggled.
He goes out and gets Demisi Anderson again, you know, and
they had a chance that at a more prominent player who would
become a more prominent player who went to a different
institution. But it's almost like they got
they got impatient for that guy. So they go get Demizzy Anderson,
who never really gets himself acclimated to playing at the
college level. They had some bad luck.
Jerome Hunter was supposed to be a a key piece.
He's still playing in college basketball because he was
injured so often. He's had such terrible injury
luck, you know, and any guys like Jake Forrester and you
know, other players like that, like never really rose beyond
sometimes they never even got off the bench or they rarely
did. That was one issue.
Second, like his style of play, you you can't afford to play the
way that you play if you're a just an absolute lockdown
defensive team and they never got to that point.
You know, they were probably never going to be that beautiful
of an offensive team under Archie Miller, but the style of
play just never looked like it transitioned up effectively.
And then the third, he just never did a great job of
interfacing with fans. And this is with a similar
complaint that you could say about the latter years of Tom
Crean, where it's like that, you know, IU, as with most big
programs, there's some kind of connection between the fan base
and the coach. Archie never really got that
going. That Indiana State loss
certainly damaged the relationship early.
The Fort Wayne loss that happened later on that same year
by 20 at home didn't help either.
But even you can overcome those things.
But his personality was so kind of anti fame in a lot of ways.
It made it hard to feel like this was the guy that should
have been coaching. And then the actual results did
nothing to help him there either.
So it was like it just as much as it looked like a great idea
on paper going in, it just never synced up with reality.
It did not, and I'm looking back at Archie's tenure as a head
coach and honestly his for his first three seasons as a a
college basketball head coach, we're his best three seasons
offensively. He was #29 #28 #37 in terms of
adjusted offensive efficiency in the country at Dayton.
His time at Indiana, adjusted offensive efficiency was
92826570. Not great, not where you want to
be. Unfortunately.
It's where Indiana has been for for quite some time.
But but yeah, so Archie doesn't work out.
Indiana makes the move to fire him after Four Seasons.
It was it was very evident that's what Indiana was going to
do by the end of of that fourth season.
And so, you know, that leads us to 2021 where obviously there's
a lot of Brad Stevens buzz that was was going on.
Who knows how real or not that was, But you know, there's a lot
of buzz going on there. All the sudden once that was
gone, really the names that we heard were Porter Mosier, Mike
Woodson, Calvert Cheney. I remember was was talked about
as somebody that may be wanting to step into to that role and
and was getting real consideration.
I don't I don't really remember many others that were were true
in consideration names. I don't know if you do, Galen.
I mean, the thing about that search was it was kind of a
weird search in a lot of ways because it was still in the
middle of the pandemic. You know, it was it was, it
wasn't square in the middle of it.
You're talking about, you know, essentially March 21, like
vaccines were just rolling out at that point, you know, so I
don't remember being quite as engaged.
You know, there were the big names that were bandied about,
but it did feel like I you would coalesce around a couple of
names early. But it also felt like Indiana
like had a direction they were going.
That direction ended up being Mike Woodson.
And you know, there I remember our reaction was like.
OK, there must be something we don't know here.
And most people, and we, and this was talked about in media
as well, a lot of people were very skeptical of that being the
right hire. And that was a weird one because
it, it did like Woodson. The if, if you were going to
make an argument in favor of the the Woodson hire, it wasn't, oh,
the basketball coaching at the college level.
This is what it needs to be because there was no real
argument in favor of that. But there was the argument that
this guy understands Indiana basketball, that this guy
understands the fans of Indiana basketball, understands the
expectations, understands that, you know, we need to have all
the alums, you know, the basketball alums and everybody
else kind of point in the same direction.
And I actually think to some degree, you know, if I you won
the, the, the, the press conference or won the higher
amongst the fans, it was really on the basis of that and the
idea that, well, maybe these skills are transferable in terms
of having coached at the, the pro level versus here.
And the first two years, they went to the tournament two years
in a row and, and it looked like there was kind of a trajectory
upward. And so it's interesting because
you know, I'll be the first to say, like I thought at the
beginning of the third season, like, OK, great.
You know, the trace Jackson Davis is gone.
But I use kind of moving in this particular direction.
I think I understand what the what the plan and the identity
is. It's just disappointing because
there were warning signs and, and we've heard about some of
them and I'm sure we'll hear about some more ex post facto.
But a lot of what Indiana was accomplishing was probably under
accomplishing based upon the talent that was assembled and
what you could have been doing with it.
And then once that was gone, things started to fall off
pretty quickly. Yes, very quickly.
And, you know, I I think it's been talked about a lot now
that, you know, posts Trace Jackson Davis Indiana hasn't
beaten a ranked team. And I think we're we're seeing
how, you know, vastly important Trace Jackson Davis was to the
Indiana basketball program in terms of success.
But yeah, it's what sold me on the Mike Woodson higher was
bringing Thadmata aboard, bringing Dane Fife aboard.
I was like, all right, they're they're kind of insulating
themselves with some guys that understand college basketball.
They're going to get him up to speed and and so that, you know,
he can focus on kind of the XS and OS and figuring out
recruiting and the rules of the game and all that.
And then we'll go from there. You know, after year one,
Thadmata obviously was outgoing to be the head coach of Butler.
He fired Dane Fife and you know, he just hired his director of
basketball OPS. That actually came from the
Archie tenure and Brian Walsh. And so it was kind of like, OK,
you know, that's interesting approach here, but, you know,
we'll see what happens. And then year 2, you know,
they're they're a protected seed in the NCAA tournament.
So the trajectory of the program is in a much better spot.
So you're like, all right, you know, here we go.
And then, you know, last year it it just the wheels fell off and,
and recruiting got dry. Story started coming out about
skipping recruiting weekends and all that stuff.
And, and that's not uncommon for, you know, as things go
South, more and more comes out negatively.
And you know, then this season, as we know, has been pretty much
an unmitigated disaster in terms of of the the talent and you
know, the NIL investment. That's the one thing I've always
gone back to is that NIL is so important.
And Indiana has has really ponied up in that regard and in
the results of no been nowhere near, you know, the the return
on investment, it has been very poor.
So, Mike, you know, nobody's going to be beating down Mike
Woodson's door to go coach a college basketball program after
this is over. And that's kind of was the crux
of my piece. And they kind of put a bow on
that piece was again, it's another coach Indiana hired
didn't have sustained, sustained success and moving forward as a
basketball coach is likely not going to go lead some other
college basketball program to the promised land.
Yeah. I mean, so again, I, I think you
kind of look back at each of these and I guess the point in
just talking about all of it is I think it's important to
remember like what each of the circumstances were.
At no point do I look at any of those situations and say there
was a structural issue with IU that led to this coach being
unsuccessful. You know, each of them was
unsuccessful, I think for their own reasons.
Mike Davis was unsuccessful because he just fundamentally he
hadn't been a head coach at any level at that point, if I'm not
mistaken. He had really no idea how to run
the program and there weren't a lot of guardrails around to make
sure that he understood the program.
Calvin Sampson I, I still believe like thought what he was
doing was blessed by the people above them and then found out
one day that it wasn't. That's the one I think you could
maybe highlight. But then it becomes a larger
question of, well, is it a are you, are you doing a bad thing?
If you're giving the coach enough rope to to do whatever?
It's more the question of then we're going to change our minds
halfway through that becomes an issue.
And yes, there were some other things that were problematic
within that mix that shouldn't be shouldn't be, you know, slept
on. But again, that's the one where
I'm like, there needed to be more oversight here.
But all those people essentially got fired.
So, you know, I think Indiana self corrected to some degree in
that mix. And then with Crane, I think you
hit the nail on the head like it it was an OK hire on its on its
merits. And he was a guy who who wanted
to be here. But it also felt like this one
was a situation where the issue was Indiana almost gave him too
much runway down the end of things when it wasn't working,
rather than say, Hey, we need to move in a different direction.
There was this I remember there was that that Fred Glass article
or that interview was like, I'm bullish on Tom Crean.
It's like, what does that mean exactly, Fred?
It almost kind of felt like, well, we hope things turn around
and get better. And as we've learned, you know,
hope is not a strategy. But you know, with him, with
Archie Miller, with Mike Woodson, I think all three of
those coaches, to me, I just, I don't look at those things and
fundamentally say there's a structural problem with IU or a
problem with the fans. The fans weren't the problem
with any of those three coaches. That was the lack of performance
and we're not talking about, well, gosh, we made the
tournament eight years in a row, but we didn't make it past the
Sweet 16 or even into the Sweet 16 and we fired a guy.
It's like, well, we didn't make the NCAA tournament for five
years or four years. And and it's that's that's where
I think this this whole argument kind of gets off the rails that
I use somehow is the problem. We, and this is I guess the last
thing I'll say, Tony, like we've seen, for instance, like you
know, Nate Oates goes into Alabama, which is not a
historical basketball power. Prior to Nate Oates getting
there, they had been to the tournament one time in the
previous eight seasons and they had some pretty good, you know,
that Anthony Grant, who we've seen as a pretty good coach at
the Dayton level, they had Avery Johnson, which was a really
questionable hire. And then Nate Oates comes in and
after one year of getting things pointed in the right direction,
he's made four straight tournaments, including three
sixteens and a Final Four. You know, look at Auburn with
Bruce Pearl. Bruce Pearl's a great coach, but
that's, I mean, Auburn's not exactly a a great program.
It took Bruce Pearl four years to get them into the tournament,
but once he did, they've pretty much been rolling since then.
You know, Chris Beard, we've talked about a Texas Tech took a
program that had struggled to get into the tournament since
Knight had left. But my point is, like all these
other places, it's not that hard if you're a good coach to go in
and just start regularly making the tournament IU.
The idea that IU is so difficult that nobody can come in and do
that seems questionable. The, the much simpler answer is,
well, they're probably just hiring people who for one reason
or another are struggling to consistently do these things.
And that's that's where I guess the flaw lies.
And there has to be a clearer set of expectations and
understanding of what you need to hire in a college basketball
coach today in order to be successful.
And so I guess that's the one structural issue I'll point out
is the vetting and evaluation process up to this point just
hasn't been what it's needed to be for a program of I use
caliber. Yeah, the only time I've ever
heard of like things happening, happening institutionally that
have made me be like, huh, it's usually during hiring processes.
And so I think that that piece of it is, is important from all
indications I hear that, you know, Scott Dolson has full
control over this hiring process.
It's going to be he and Pam Whitten show, which I think is a
good thing. And the one piece I'll go back
to to kind of talk about your point of, you know, Alabama
basketball and Auburn basketball.
And if if you can win there with the right leader, like then, you
know, why can't you win at Indiana?
All you have to do is look across the parking lot of 17th
St. to see how important the head man of a program is.
And, and, and Indiana football, if you were going to talk about
it's too hard to win at an institution, you would look at
Indiana football as kind of the, the tell tale of like that is a
sports program that is destined for failure for several
different reasons. And nobody can win there.
And that's a hard job. And their resources aren't what
they should be, whatever the case may be.
Well, guess what? They get a top tier coach in
there in one year. They're in the College Football
Playoff. All the sudden the resources are
pouring in. And so, you know, when you talk
about institutional things, if Indiana football can get things
flipped and they get it flipped because they get the right guy
at the top of the program, then Indiana basketball certainly can
do the same. And and it's a lot easier to
flip a roster in basketball than it is in football.
So to me that that kind of all of its weight when you start
talking about institutionally, when you can literally just look
over at Memorial Stadium and see what having the right guy in
charge can do for a program. Yeah, no, it's true.
I mean. That's, that's going to be the
fascinating thing. And that's where my hope is.
And, and look, we'll see how the end of the Woodson era happens.
I think that Woodson's going to, I don't know that this is
necessarily going to be a clean break from a, a, a rhetoric
perspective. I think there's going to be a
lot of hurt feelings, but my hope is that IU can navigate
that while simultaneously really, really focusing on the
kind of traits needed to run a top level basketball program at
this time. And this is actually, it's
funny, like you go back to the early 70s when IU was in a
similar malaise where they had gone through a decade plus with
barely making the tournament, often times not being in the in
the Big 10 race. Like they went out and tried to
figure out like, what are the criteria?
We need to hire a coach who can lift us out of this.
And they ended up settling on a guy that ended up doing a pretty
good job of that for a long time.
And Bob Knight, when there were a lot of other candidates out
there that really would have liked the job or might have made
sense that that didn't match those criteria.
So it's it's an imperfect science.
And this is not this whole podcast was not necessarily
intended to be an indictment on people that have run the hiring
processes or been involved. It's a tough business.
You can make bad hires without it necessarily being anybody's
fault because as I think we saw with Archie Miller, any program
in the country and I use position would have done the
same thing and hired him and it didn't work out.
Was it foreseeable? I don't necessarily know.
I wasn't the one interviewing him.
He certainly resonated with a lot of people.
So it's easy to kind of get LED down a path where you think
you're doing what's going to be best and it doesn't always work
out that way. And so that's that's going to be
a key thing watching, worth watching moving forward is, you
know, what do you think the criteria are that Scott Dolson
really thinks are important for this job because he clearly
understood what was needed on the football side.
You hope that that carries over on the basketball side and you
hope that there's a centrality of vision rather than a bunch of
different voices coming in with their own agendas, pushing
particular candidates because they happen to like them or they
have a personal or prior coaching relationship with them
or what not. Yeah, and and also.
What is that timeline of when you should expect success and
in? I think that's something else
too, is like in today's day and age, like it used to be like you
need 4 years to get your guys in before you can really figure out
what somebody's capable of doing.
Well, obviously that's all completely flipped on its head.
So to me, I'm interested too is it's like you get somebody in
there and within two years, you know, and you're like, all
right, next. Or does that make you, you know,
institutionally inept and and you're never going to get a
coach in there, which is probably there's probably
something to that if you're firing within two years.
But you know, that's that's an interesting piece to all of this
with me too. Like I think back to the Pacers,
they they fire or they fired. God, I can't.
Nate McMillan, they hired Nate Jorkrin, he's horrible.
One year they let him go. Well, this is all kind of
professional sports now where in professional sports you see
those hirings and firings happen much quicker.
Like is, is that where a program like Indiana goes to now is
where it's like if you don't have success pretty close pretty
soon, like we're going to send you a package.
Well, yeah. And I think, you know, to kind
of wrap. It up.
I think that's, that is a really important key and it's less
about are you getting immediate results.
I think it's more about is this person operating in a way that
we can see is going to work culturally and is it pointing in
the right direction. And, and I don't know that
that's necessarily been a paramount thing for Indiana in
the past, but it should because Scott and I have talked about
this on the main show a bunch. You know, it's like North
Carolina when they hired Matt Doherty, I think they could tell
pretty quickly, even though we had a really good first season,
they could tell that that was going the wrong direction.
And he had a bad second year. But even with that rebound in
the third year, it was not working.
They went out and got Roy Williams.
They set out that on that pathway, Kentucky with Billy
Gillespie was the same thing. And you were Wyatt Ryan Walters
is a really great point and look, you know it.
What I always find fascinating is sometimes these are dice
rolls that you take on a hunch. I, and I think, you know,
people, it was fascinating the reaction to my little mini pod
yesterday about Matt Painter being the first guy that I, you
should offer. The one thing I'll say about
Painter that I find fascinating about his, his career is that if
you go back and, and look at his trajectory, he was a, he was a
Bruce Weber assistant. He was on Bruce Weber's staff.
He takes the Southern Illinois job.
So he does one year at Southern Illinois where, you know, he's
got Bruce Weber's team. And that was Bruce Weber's team
that had been to multiple NCAA tournaments in a row.
You know, in in 2002, they made the Sweet 16.
You know, he has one good season where he gets them to the NCAA
Tournament. And then Purdue, who's desperate
at this point because Jean Cady's career has fallen off the
Cliff, is like, we're going to hire Matt Painter at, what, 34
years old as our coach in waiting?
He'd been a head coach for exactly one season with somebody
else's team. He sits on the bench for a year,
and then they just launch him the next year as the head coach.
I mean, it's worked. And they deserve a lot of credit
for taking the leap. And I think they saw something
in Painter where they were like, he understands the culture and
we're just carrying that culture over.
It's a little different than IU because you're going to have to
build culture from scratch basically because of all these
changes over the last 25 years. But that pain or higher could
have gone really wrong. And I think, you know, Purdue
making that higher now everybody would look at them and say, what
on earth are you doing? There's no way that this is
going to work. So there is a certain element of
luck in this, I guess is the point that I'm trying to get
across. Yeah, I think that was.
That was similar to what Indiana attempted this past time around
was that was pretty unorthodox higher and a lot of people were
asking what on earth are you doing?
Unfortunately, that wasn't our Matt Painter hire.
Not so anyway. A lot more to talk about as
we'll move forward. Tony, go check Tony's piece out
on assembly call. And obviously, we will be
checking in with Tony regularly throughout the course of this
entire process. Tony, thank you for joining me.
Always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us on Crimson
Cast. Folks, we will catch you on the
flip side, more podcast action later on this week and Indiana
playing as you can state tonight on Peacock.
So godspeed with that. We'll catch you folks on the
flip side. Stay never gone to bring back.
Bless So everybody.