Welcome to The Hoosier Insider, our weekly insider roundup of the latest IU basketball and football news, notes & recruiting. Let's get to it:
Jordan Wells / Basketball Beat & Recruiting News
Just a few notes this week.
Stu Jackson / Basketball Beat & Recruiting News
Touched on this a bit in my recap from the Purdue game, but that contest was a missed opportunity for IU in terms of improving its NCAA tournament resume.
As of Friday morning, Indiana's RPI sits at 81 with six games left in the regular season. Of those six games, only two (Northwestern and Purdue) fall within the top 50 of the RPI.
In short, Indiana is running out of chances to improve its tournament resume and impress the selection committee before selection Sunday.
Going 0-9 against Top 50 teams since beating North Carolina in November makes these final six games even more critical. IU has its work cut out for itself.
We won't know much about IU's projected seeding until next week when most of the brackets are updated. Prior to the Purdue loss, though, most national analysts and experts pegged the Hoosiers as a No. 10 seed or lower in the tournament.
Putting the final six games into further context, Indiana has never won more than one game in a Big Ten tournament in the Crean era. For it to be in the best shape on Selection Sunday, it needs to do as much damage as possible as the regular season comes to a close rather than depend on those Kansas and Carolina wins and a run in the conference tournament.
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Sam Beishuizen / Football Beat & Recruiting News
This weekend is a big one in terms of recruiting for Indiana, as it marks the first of two junior day sessions.
To learn who's visiting, click this link and read up on who is expected to be in town. Note that this could change, and there might be a few more names to add. But it's a working list for now as the Hoosiers work toward building their 2018 class and beyond.
Tom Allen and company handed out three scholarship offers to 2018 prospects on Thursday. Instead of making a separate post, I'll include some information on them here.
Kolin Demens, an outside linebacker out of Michigan, picked up an offer. He's a three-star prospect with offers from the likes of Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Missouri, Nebraska and Wisconsin. That's an impressive list of competition.
This past season, Demens picked up 66 total tackles, 38 of which were solo. Among those stops were 3.5 sacks. The 6-foot-2, 200-pound prospect also picked off one pass.
Telly Plummer was another offer. He's an unranked cornerback out of Georgia. The 6-foot, 185-pound prospect has quite a few other offers from the likes of Arkansas State, Colorado State, Louisville, Marshall, Purdue and Virginia Tech, just to name a few.
Plummer registered 36 total tackles and defended seven passes as a junior.
The third of the offers was Jaycee Horn, a cornerback out of Georgia. He comes from Alpharetta, the same high school as current IU quarterback Austin King. So there's a history of players from that area coming to Indiana, albeit a short history.
Horn has offers from the likes of Duke, Georgia Southern, Maryland, Missouri, NC State and Syracuse, among others.
Indiana also formally announced the hirings of offensive line coach Darren Hiller or Nick Sheridan, but Hiller was at the Indiana basketball game on Friday. It was apparently his first night in Bloomington.
We'll be in touch with the 2018 prospects who visited Bloomington this weekend early next week. So keep tuning in.
And if you're sad about Indiana basketball losing to Purdue, just follow the silver lining from IU kicker Griffin Oakes:
Jordan Wells / Basketball Beat & Recruiting News
Just a few notes this week.
- Rob Phinisee - Junior guard attended Indiana’s tilt against Purdue last night. We currently have Phinisee at the top of our hot board and I feel good about where things stand with IU, but keep in mind he’s also made a number of visits to other schools. Still, four trips from Lafayette down to campus and back this year shows an obvious level of interest. He recently told us he wants to make a decision after this July’s evaluation period. The 5-11, 155-pound guard from Lafayette (Ind.) McCutcheon is ranked as the No. 134 player nationally in 2018.
- Jordan Tucker - Senior forward that was down to Indiana and Villanova has scaled back his decision a bit, and seems to be considering Georgia Tech and Oregon. If you were Indiana you had to feel really good about this one going into that late January/early February timeline, but the longer this lingers on the more questionable it feels. Beyond the two new schools in the mix, really to be determined what happens from here. The 6-7, 200-pound forward from Marietta (Ga.) Wheeler is ranked as the No. 54 nationally in 2017.
- Mark Smith - Senior guard’s recruitment is blowing up, as he’s now added offers from California, Utah and Butler to his growing list that already included Indiana and Kansas State. The 6-4, 215-pound guard from Edwardsville (Ill.) High received a four-star ranking from Rivals and is ranked as the No. 78 player nationally. Initially a baseball commitment to Missouri, he’s backed off from that and switched to hoops, and is far from making any type of college decision for that. This is a recruitment that will go on into the upcoming months.
- IU signees - We got some new video of Justin Smith (link) and Clifton Moore (link). Neither happened to have great outings in the games we had reporters at, but you can see some of Smith’s athleticism in his video, and given how limited video of Moore is we even included his halftime shootaround (not a bad shot for a 6-10 guy.)
Stu Jackson / Basketball Beat & Recruiting News
Touched on this a bit in my recap from the Purdue game, but that contest was a missed opportunity for IU in terms of improving its NCAA tournament resume.
As of Friday morning, Indiana's RPI sits at 81 with six games left in the regular season. Of those six games, only two (Northwestern and Purdue) fall within the top 50 of the RPI.
In short, Indiana is running out of chances to improve its tournament resume and impress the selection committee before selection Sunday.
Going 0-9 against Top 50 teams since beating North Carolina in November makes these final six games even more critical. IU has its work cut out for itself.
We won't know much about IU's projected seeding until next week when most of the brackets are updated. Prior to the Purdue loss, though, most national analysts and experts pegged the Hoosiers as a No. 10 seed or lower in the tournament.
Putting the final six games into further context, Indiana has never won more than one game in a Big Ten tournament in the Crean era. For it to be in the best shape on Selection Sunday, it needs to do as much damage as possible as the regular season comes to a close rather than depend on those Kansas and Carolina wins and a run in the conference tournament.
------------------------------------
Sam Beishuizen / Football Beat & Recruiting News
This weekend is a big one in terms of recruiting for Indiana, as it marks the first of two junior day sessions.
To learn who's visiting, click this link and read up on who is expected to be in town. Note that this could change, and there might be a few more names to add. But it's a working list for now as the Hoosiers work toward building their 2018 class and beyond.
Tom Allen and company handed out three scholarship offers to 2018 prospects on Thursday. Instead of making a separate post, I'll include some information on them here.
Kolin Demens, an outside linebacker out of Michigan, picked up an offer. He's a three-star prospect with offers from the likes of Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Missouri, Nebraska and Wisconsin. That's an impressive list of competition.
This past season, Demens picked up 66 total tackles, 38 of which were solo. Among those stops were 3.5 sacks. The 6-foot-2, 200-pound prospect also picked off one pass.
Telly Plummer was another offer. He's an unranked cornerback out of Georgia. The 6-foot, 185-pound prospect has quite a few other offers from the likes of Arkansas State, Colorado State, Louisville, Marshall, Purdue and Virginia Tech, just to name a few.
Plummer registered 36 total tackles and defended seven passes as a junior.
The third of the offers was Jaycee Horn, a cornerback out of Georgia. He comes from Alpharetta, the same high school as current IU quarterback Austin King. So there's a history of players from that area coming to Indiana, albeit a short history.
Horn has offers from the likes of Duke, Georgia Southern, Maryland, Missouri, NC State and Syracuse, among others.
Indiana also formally announced the hirings of offensive line coach Darren Hiller or Nick Sheridan, but Hiller was at the Indiana basketball game on Friday. It was apparently his first night in Bloomington.
We'll be in touch with the 2018 prospects who visited Bloomington this weekend early next week. So keep tuning in.
And if you're sad about Indiana basketball losing to Purdue, just follow the silver lining from IU kicker Griffin Oakes:
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