IU should have hired Pearl. Imagine the excitement of Pearl and Cignetti
Auburn is #4 in hoops. Wtf
- Thread starter mcmurtry66
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Are you trying to say that Mens Basketballs are non binary now? I'm trying to keep up.
I'm pretty sure "Go Get Pearl" has been a theme on these forums for about forever.
Imagine if Sampson never got fired. IU has a way better track record of hiring football, women's basketball, and baseball coaches over the past 20 years than men's basketball: truly amazing.
That to me this is a big 'what if' in Indiana Basketball lore. Maybe right up there with had Scott May not broken his arm in '75. Had he been able to keep his nose clean, I think he would have overseen at least a decade or two of IU Basketball being consistently on the level of the other blue blood programs. Probably would have thrown in at least a couple Final Fours and a Championship too.
Sampson can coach, no doubt. The stuff he got in trouble for became legal like 2 years later. It's just incredible that IU can make good hires in sports that have had no tradition, but can't get basketball right.
The biggest what if: Larry Bird sticks around. That one hurts beyond what words can describe.
A personal 'what if' for me is if Jason Collier and Luke Recker could have stuck around and played the way Knight wanted them to play. Michigan State won the national title and IU had beaten 3 of the 4 Final Four in what would have been Collier's senior year/Recker's junior year.
Collier was all ACC his senior year and nearly averaged a double double for GT (without looking it up, 17 points, nearly 10 rebounds a game). We all know what Recker did at Iowa. I think 2000 could have been the year IU hung banner number 6, had it all shaken out right.
Losing Recker hurt. He was the type of in-state kid that belonged at IU and Knight had won with.
He left for no reason according to some. He says he "just couldn't afford it" but some on this board insist he was getting a "paycheck". Weird that he says he couldn't afford it...and then gave the "paycheck" back and went home to French Lick
I was advocating hiring Bruce Pearl when they hired Mike Davis full time. I saw his teams here in Evansville, dealt with him personally on a couple of events. The man is a bundle of energy, enthusiasm, optimism, etc. And his teams play hard.
But I knew even then that it would never happen. He's not a cultural fit -- and the culture of IU basketball is more sacrosanct to the decision-makers than winning is. This doesn't make sense to me at all. If your culture is an obstacle to success, you shouldn't be protecting it -- you should be actively changing it. And I firmly believe that this is the single biggest problem with IU basketball.
Changing coaches is fine. But sometimes a situation needs more than that.
The show cause he got hit with made it impossible to keep him here. But I'd be willing to bet that IU, had it been so inclined, could've pleaded to the NCAA to keep that from happening and kept Sampson here under the other sanctions.
It's hard to imagine any of that happening. And I'm not even necessarily saying that IU should've tried to do that. They screwed up by assuming Sampson had learned his lesson at Oklahoma and wouldn't be so stupid as to do it again.
The bigger problem with it is that the whole experience kept the IU brass in the straight-jacket. By that I mean...a guy like Bruce Pearl (or even Chris Beard) would be a non-starter. Why? Well, because of the Kelvin Sampson experience.
If they ever decide they want to value winning over hanging on to the old IU culture, they could do it. It's right there waiting to happen. But I don't think they ever will.
They'd rather be a mediocre has-been with great history than hire a guy like Auburn hired to turn them into a top 5 team.
Agreed on all counts. I have a friend who played soccer at southern Indiana. Said Pearl would run into soccer players and act like they were going to play in the World Cup. Just a gem
We graduate all of our players, we place a higher value on academics than other programs, we do things the right way, we don't hire coaches who are aggressive in recruiting, we're proud of the fact that we win championships without future NBA stars.
Basically, think of all the cultural things that Coach Knight espoused over the years. These things become part of your essence. And, to me, these things have been the single biggest reason our program has been mediocre (at best) since RMK left.
And, I should add, that an institution's culture is not just these tangible things. In other words, somebody might say "Hey, we are going after the 5 star guys who will be one and dones now...and we are doing NIL, etc." That's true, and they're steps in the right direction.
But that's the easy part. The harder part is the underlying sentiments.
Let me put it this way: I bet most IU basketball faithful would agree that we'd never hire a coach like Bruce Pearl. And they're probably right about that.
The fact that we wouldn't -- and we all know we wouldn't? That's our problem.
Most people would tell you that Kelvin Sampson is the worst hire the school has made since Knight's firing.
I'm among the minority who would say that he was actually the best hire we've made since Knight's firing. The IU brass just mishandled the whole thing.
I'm among the minority who would say that he was actually the best hire we've made since Knight's firing. The IU brass just mishandled the whole thing.
I wish IU was able to capitalize on a similar model Duke currently has. I know it's still relatively early in his career, but Jon Scheyer seems to be doing well at Duke. I'm not entirely sure how that would have played out at IU, but I think they way things are at Duke right now are the way some people thought/wished a transition from Knight to someone like Alford would have been.
I think that's a fair assessment and in hindsight, it's hard to argue. I'm not sure which hire post-Knight firing even has a case for being better than Sampson.
I'll always have a spot in my heart for Tom Crean. The man left a really good gig at Marquette to take on an abject mess of a program, under sanctions, with only 2 walk-ons coming back from the previous year....and this was before the transfer portal.
Given what he inherited, I think Tom Crean deserves our admiration and respect. Most established coaches wouldn't have touched us with a 10 foot pole in that situation. (And, yes, I know that "what he inherited" came from the Sampson debacle).
But Crean probably wasn't ever going to get the program any higher than he got it. And I firmly believe the Syracuse nightmare dogged him the rest of his time here. He just flat-out got outcoached by Jim Boeheim. And nobody was surprised that he did.
If you could just come around on tort law we could be best friends!!!!
Crean was soooooooo great. Love that man. His ridiculous pants. That lost stare. He’s the guy on your team who wore his team jacket to school every day and did so like that jacket was the pinnacle of all that he prided himself on. He was also the guy who was first at practice and left bloody. He was also the guy most likely to miss an open net to lose the tournament. Life ain’t fair
Sounds like some women I know where looks is more important than whether something works. 🤣
Craze, the IU culture, as you so elegantly describe it, fit the olden days culture of the student athlete.
Today with the NIL and portal recruiting culture the student athlete culture is long gone.
Some 70 years ago I had a long discussion about how important Big Ten sports were to me as a student attending college with a professor who taught at a college with only intramural sports.
Could it be the closest thing to the IU culture these days would be intramural sports with emphasis on the importance of a good education and attaining a high average grade point?
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