When I remember that the 2002 Mike Davis led team was leading in the NCAA championship game with less than 10 minutes left and look at IU right now, I must ask the question what happened? No, I am not advocating the return of Mike (although he has the second highest winning percent in IU history), but I am wondering where we would have been today had he stayed. He recruited good kids, kept them pretty much out of trouble, took them to church, fielded competitive teams, and was almost always a Big Ten contender. Since his removal (a lot of folks might be glad now that Alford did not replace him), we have spun our wheels at best, have now deteriorated and are in the worst doldrums that I can remember. Blame coaching or a lack of talent if you want. Blame a lousy AD if you want. But please ask the question why did we destroy the continuity the Davis had with IU history (Knight connection) especially when yes, he almost won the whole thing and his kids graduated. Isn't that what we want?
A decline since Mike Davis
- Thread starter Rotonda Jim
- Start date
Is that the same Mike Davis that skipped the Iowa game in his final year because he was ...(ahem)...sick?
Mike's last two teams at IU were turrible.
The problem isn't that CMD is no longer here. The problem is the hirings since then. All have been failures (for various reasons) and sunk the program deeper and deeper.
If you honestly believe that he was not sick, then we have nothing to discuss. Like you probably have heard, there were rumors floating around of harm being done to Mike if he showed up that day. I have no idea if these rumors were based on fact, but I heard them and if true,yes, I might have stayed home too.
Shouldn't have fired Sampson. Shouldn't have turned him in. The guy isnt squeaky clean but he isnt Pitino either. Hes a damn good coach though.
Point taken. What's not a rumor, though, is that Mike's last two teams were no shows...
Once RMK's recruits were gone and the teams were 100% CMD , IU's success started to decline. Bracey and Strickland were both high end recruits and neither seemed to develop at all during their time in Bloomington. Watching Bracey chuck line drive 25 footers with 2 seconds on the shot clock, during his junior year....was painful. His freshman year, the talk was Bracey having a short stop in Bloomington on his way to the NBA. 2 yrs later and he's leaving early for a career in D league and Euro ball.
Don't get me wrong, I think Mike Davis is a very good man and did the best he could under insane pressure and an impossible task at hand. At least he seemed to run the program cleanly during that time and was a man with dignity. He was, unfortunately, a deer in headlights (like any first-time NCAA head coach would have been in that situation).
Don't get me wrong, I think Mike Davis is a very good man and did the best he could under insane pressure and an impossible task at hand. At least he seemed to run the program cleanly during that time and was a man with dignity. He was, unfortunately, a deer in headlights (like any first-time NCAA head coach would have been in that situation).
Mike Davis was a bad hire - the first in a series of them. I was floored when they gave him the job full-time. He was (and is) a fine guy. But his stock as a coach was nowhere near where we should’ve been looking.
And I’m really beginning to think that IU basketball will never again, in my lifetime, be anywhere close to what it once was. And that would really be sad.
The IU brand was still top notch when Knight was fired. They could have hired any coach in the country at the time. Should have let the players who were threatening to transfer if Davis wasn’t hired walk. It would have saved 19 years of crap.
I don’t think I agree that they “could have hired any coach in the country” after Knight’s firing.
But I do think they could’ve hired somebody who had at least been successful a head coach (or a head coach at all!).
It’s water well under the bridge now. But, still, that’s where things started going wrong. It was a jaw-dropping decision.
Shouldn't have HIRED Sampson.
Bringing a guy to IU who was in hot water with NCAA was when IUBB stopped being IUBB.
Our athletic department has had terrible leadership and made consistently bad decisions. I mean we have a world class bad athletic department.
Is this a serious post...?
You are really misremembering the latter half of the Davis era if you think Indiana should have retained him as a head coach.
He was an unmitigated disaster re: coaching and roster management, and had all but killed in-state recruiting. He could't even last at UAB.
He was a garbage coach.
You know things are going bad when people start pining for Mike Davis & Kelvin Sampson.
The year that we went to the title game and lost to the Terps, we were 19-10 going into the tourney. IIRC correctly, we were ranked 25th in the Nation. We were a 5 seed.
"What followed was a surprise run to the National Championship game", according to Wikipedia. It's revisionist history to suggest that we had an elite team that year.
That run was more about a group of players forged through the fires of adversity than a great coach in Davis. Davis was in over his head from day 1.
We didn't need Davis to stay longer, we needed the opposite. Had we lost to Duke that year, Davis doesn't get the big pay raise, his tenure is ended sooner, we never have to try and fail at cheating (hire Sampson), we never need to settle for Crean, etc. We would have had a home run hire in 2003 when ANYONE would have taken that elite job.
Davis should have never been more than an interim coach. We should have then conducted a proper search and hired a slam dunk elite coach. We easily could have.
"What followed was a surprise run to the National Championship game", according to Wikipedia. It's revisionist history to suggest that we had an elite team that year.
That run was more about a group of players forged through the fires of adversity than a great coach in Davis. Davis was in over his head from day 1.
We didn't need Davis to stay longer, we needed the opposite. Had we lost to Duke that year, Davis doesn't get the big pay raise, his tenure is ended sooner, we never have to try and fail at cheating (hire Sampson), we never need to settle for Crean, etc. We would have had a home run hire in 2003 when ANYONE would have taken that elite job.
Davis should have never been more than an interim coach. We should have then conducted a proper search and hired a slam dunk elite coach. We easily could have.
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Small time universities behave like small-time amateurs. This goes back even to the days of Ralph Floyd. No investment in facilities kept with the mindset of keeping Bloomington like a small quaint “hamlet”, isolated and no-growth. This carried on while conference brethren built new arenas and practice facilities. Importantly, those foes started going outside the school’s embedded culture to make bold new coaching hires and transform their athletic departments.
IU choose to continue the “good old boy” system by keeping so many of these people who were entrenched and had tunnel-vision in opening up to change.
IU basically chose to be “Bloomfield, Indiana with a Campus”
There are a lot of factors at play here but most of the hires have had endorsements from many of the same BOT people who want to continue with the ways IU has always done things.
Quite frankly, the university is lucky to be included in this conference when the way they run things is more akin to a Kent State instead of Michigan State.
Yes.......I was at the Duke game at Rupp that year. What a great game....probably 13000 IU fans, loud, improbable comeback........I was on Cloud 9 after that game. What a steep price we paid for that win!!!!
I was at the Duke game. Beyond cool.
I remember when he was asked how we won that game...or it may have been another win...but, he said that he didn't know.
Coverdale, Jeffries, Fife, Odle, Newton, Hornsby, A J Moye...A J Moye...all were a riot to watch during that stretch.
I like Mike Davis. But just not as head coach.
Bloomington doesn't have the cool viaduct Bloomfield does
For all of his flaws, Mike Davis got his teams to play hard and play defense. That's more than we can say for Archie (so far).
In all fairness, Lafayette and West Lafayette are not Madison or Columbus, Ohio. They are just a shade above Mayberry as well.
He is thirteenth is you count guys who coached one season or two. Here are the stats of our recent guys and he fairs very well. Just saying:
Everett Dean* 1924–1938 162–93 .635 3 – –
Branch McCracken* 1938–1943, 1946–1965 364–174 .677 4 4 2
Harry C. Good 1943–1946 35–29 .547 0 0 0
Lou Watson 1965–1971 65–60 .520 1 1 0
Jerry Oliver 1969–1970, 1971 4–17 .190 0 0 0
Bob Knight* 1971–2000 662–239 .735 11 24 3
Mike Davis 2000–2006 115–79 .592 1 4 0
Kelvin Sampson 2006–2008 43–15 .741 0 1 0
Dan Dakich 2008 3–4 .429 0 1 0
Tom Crean 2008–2017 166–135 .552 2 4 0
Archie Miller 2017–Current 28–24 .538
Fairs very well...?
How did he "fair" once all the Knight players were gone and he was forced to build his own roster?
This is a ridiculous premise. Mike Davis was fired (actually he resigned) for a myriad of reasons that have been discussed ad infinitum on this board and others.
Reminiscing about the good old days isn't going to change the fact that he was a garbage coach and should have never been hired in the first place.
Just saying...
It was a joke not a troll, don't be so delicate. Somebody mentioned Bloomfield and I have a friend from there.
Both campuses are better than OSU's IMO. Campus anyway if not the towns.
Well, I'm not even sure Alford would've taken the job under those circumstances.
And, given how things have turned out for Steve's coaching career, I'm also not sure we'd really have wanted him. But I will give him this much: he'd have been a better hire than Mike Davis was.
But, really, why are we rehashing all of this? We need to stop focusing on the past -- whether the good parts or the bad parts. We've got enough to worry about in the present and future.
15 -14 and 19-12 were his last two records. Not exactly disasters and pretty much where Crean took us and Miller is taking us.
You came around when the team is crashing and start posting like you're a long-lost buddy.....get lost.
Well Crean was fired and many already want the same for Archie, but somehow you're excusing Davis...so...what was your point again...?
Oops, I meant to say his last three seasons were terrible, not the last two. 14-15, 15-14, 19-12. Yes, I realize 19-12 isn't terrible, but I'm doubling down anyway.
We are a joke of a program and that is just a fact. Anyone who thinks we are a blueblood lives in some sort of a fantasy world.
The city of Bloomington has the same mindset- fight all progress and development and keep the community stuck in the 1950s. Any building proposal over three stories has to pass extra hurdles before approved, if it’s approved. Real estate developers talk about how hard it is to build anything here, which is a big reason why housing is so expensive. We need a new mayor, university president, and board of trustees.
Mark Kruzan was a good mayor but John Hamilton sucks. I hope he gets defeated in the primary this year.
For the money that IU was paying and continuity
CMD was the best decision for the program.
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