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Many Thanks to Scott Dolson

Scott should have fired Allen 3 years ago! No matter what it would have cost.
Then he wouldn’t have got cig. Look at twitter today, the entire country is talking about IU football. Scott hired the best coach IU has ever had it looks like.

You should gladly take an extra three years of loving each other for this. Sure looks like something special that a brewing in btown.

Real question is does he die or get caught looking like diddy first? IU can’t have nice things.
 
I credited Whitten during last season saying IF they released Allen, she'd be the force required to see it done. And I thought there was a good chance.

But she credited Dolson for handling the search and many other things. Seems I was wrong about him. (I hated that huge buyout extension for Tom Allen. Reminds me now of the Bears trading up so no other team could leap them for Mitch Trubisky. )

Good job Scott!
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Coming off two good seasons and bowl games? Yea right.

The extension was reasonable, only thing one could question in the extension is the buyouts were a bit much.
Allen wasn’t the reason for the two good seasons. He was in over his head. Him and Crean would make better cheerleaders than Coaches.
 
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I remember first time hearing Coach Cignetti...on one of those game day shows at JMU, and I said to myself that he would be a guy who could make things happen. Unreal that he's leading our program and anyone who played a part has my utmost gratitide.

I've been attending games since 1976 and as I get older, this just feels surreal...'all aboard ah ha ah ha'

Get your tickets to as many games as you can folks, get in the stadium well before kickoff, and stay afterward to enjoy the wins with the team and other fans.
 
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Allen wasn’t the reason for the two good seasons. He was in over his head. Him and Crean would make better cheerleaders than Coaches.
Although I used to complain about him all the time, in retrospect I don't have any issues with Crean anymore. He did better than the guys who came after him. Woodson is still working on getting to the top half of the Big Ten. Allen on the other hand started with a bowl team.

But neither Crean nor Allen had the resources to work with or admin support that the current coaches have. It wouldn't have taken Crean all those years to put a team together if you could pay transfers and there was no rule about sitting out a year.

Cig is looking like the best hire in a very long time but what he's doing this year wouldn't be possible before NIL rules or all the NIL $ he had to work with, IMO. He would end up being successful but it would take more time.
 
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I remember when she was hired/assumed her post that several articles noted her interest (dare say passion) in football.

The same was said about Herbert, and he's the reason we hired Samson.

I think what Whitten has done is give Dolson a free hand to do what he's needed to do and done whatever she can to assure he's got the resources necessary.
 
Unlike Herbert and the trustee(s) back then that pushed Sampson, or the current BoT President that probably pushed Woody, Pam and the BoT seemed to support the AD and left him alone for the FB fire and hire last year.

There is a lesson in there that is also management 101. Hire an AD you trust, let them do their job, and if the results are bad change the AD. Meddling and getting political with the AD's job of hiring/firing coaches will often create problems. The people meddling usually don't who to hire, it makes it hard to know who is accountable for the hire, it's not clear who the coach really reports to, and it's just an overall mess.

Whenever we hire another bball coach, hopefully IU just supports Scott and lets him make the call.
 
I don’t think Allen should have been hired in the 1st place but I also think he was replaced at the exact right time.
I think Allen was a good hire at the time and it should be noted that he's the guy who hired DeBoer and Womack. The results the first few years did not suggest at all that he was a bad hire. The problem was pretty simple it seems to me. He botched most of the hires he made in replacing those two. And he failed to replace Hiller when it was apparent to the rest of the world that the guy was incompetent. One of the primary jobs of a head coach is to find good assistants, especially coordinators. If you fail at that, you fail as a head coach. But hindsight is 20/20. I agree that the buyout was terribly structured and I never thought that it was necessary to keep Allen. He loved IU and would have stayed even if the buyout had been results-based ( as all buyouts should be). Some guys are just not head coach material.
 
Unlike Herbert and the trustee(s) back then that pushed Sampson, or the current BoT President that probably pushed Woody, Pam and the BoT seemed to support the AD and left him alone for the FB fire and hire last year.

There is a lesson in there that is also management 101. Hire an AD you trust, let them do their job, and if the results are bad change the AD. Meddling and getting political with the AD's job of hiring/firing coaches will often create problems. The people meddling usually don't who to hire, it makes it hard to know who is accountable for the hire, it's not clear who the coach really reports to, and it's just an overall mess.

Whenever we hire another bball coach, hopefully IU just supports Scott and lets him make the call.
When IU goes after its next basketball coach in the very near future, Dolson should use the same template he did for football: look at the elite basketball schools and see what criteria they used.
Former alums who never coached college basketball need not apply.
 
I think Allen was a good hire at the time and it should be noted that he's the guy who hired DeBoer and Womack. The results the first few years did not suggest at all that he was a bad hire. The problem was pretty simple it seems to me. He botched most of the hires he made in replacing those two. And he failed to replace Hiller when it was apparent to the rest of the world that the guy was incompetent. One of the primary jobs of a head coach is to find good assistants, especially coordinators. If you fail at that, you fail as a head coach. But hindsight is 20/20. I agree that the buyout was terribly structured and I never thought that it was necessary to keep Allen. He loved IU and would have stayed even if the buyout had been results-based ( as all buyouts should be). Some guys are just not head coach material.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I like many or at least some on here were disappointed that we hired an assistant with only hs head coaching experience. Allen was given a team with some of the best overall defensive talent behind the line (lbs and dbs) that I remember. After those players left the defense struggled under Allen. He also took over a team that had been to 2 bowls in a row and it took him 3 seasons to return to a bowl.
I don’t think Allen had a clue about offense so his offensive staff was critical to his success or failure. Hiller and Bell were terrible choices to begin with and even worse to stay with. His inability to evaluate adequate offensive coaches and his stubbornness to stick with them proves at least to me that he’s not head coaching material and a poor choice.
 
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