Appreciate the kind words and the history lesson but I am not younger than 30. I grew up watching IU during the Corso and Knight eras. Been to pretty much every bowl game and countless NCAA games as a byproduct of parents who were alums and big supporters of both major sports.
Knight pretty much owned Jud and apart from the 79 season when they had Magic, Jud was second fiddle.
However there were some glaring mistakes by IU administration in the early 90s that put us where we are today.
Take Wisconsin, for example. They found footballl success and then up pops the Kohl Center and two good coaching hires in Bennett and Ryan and suddenly the tables were turned. IU opted to put everything on cruise control, hoping to ride previous basketball success and others began to catch up and then surpass IU while making investment in facilities.
I’m not so sure that IU is a better job than MSU in the present day. I mean, after Davis, we had a prime opportunity to go after a big name and we bring in Sampson. Maybe politics were involved but at least some turned us down. Why couldn’t IU draw a big name then? The dynamics of the conference have changed greatly. I think in the minds of IU faithful they confuse passion or hysteria for hoops with results. And the results have not been good overall going on 2 decades.
I’m not here to argue that IU won’t recover. IU has averaged 5th place finishes over the span of 20+ years, so the rebuild will take longer than most would like.
MSU has 7 F4 appearances under Izzo. They are established more than people like to think. This won’t decimate them. Sure, a few down years may follow but they will be back right on top with a semi-competent hire.
Wisconsin - too early to tell with Gard but my bet is they don’t wither away and we still can’t beat them.
We’ll have to just disagree that MSU is not on solid footing or IU is a 10x better job. They sell out their arena too. Their fans are passionate too. It’s not like IU has some “copywrite” on basketball enthusiasm.
If Archie doesn’t have IU in the NCAAs in 3 years, the natives will be getting very, very restless. And I like him....but he cannot take 5 years to rebuild this thing.