It's that time of year: College coach carousel!

I'm not sure. Indiana : Basketball :: Notre Dame : Football?

 

Fairfield must have a hell of an endowment.

 

That's what people always seem to like to say about the jobs that are perceived to be the best jobs. Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Carolina etc... Indiana hasn't made a decent hire since Knight was fired. I know Davis got to the title game, but he was a pretty shitty coach who got lucky.

He has no tie to IU other than the fact that he lives and works in the same state.

There are a lot of coaches who made the jump from a mid-major to a major who have failed pretty badly. For a guy who has been at Butler for about a decade, he's probably considered a God there and isn't going to have some insane fan base comparing him to Bobby Knight.

 

I think Stevens would be welcome at IU because he's a guy who embraces Indiana basketball culture. He'd do well there.

Having said that, I think Indiana will be patient with Crean given the EXTREMELY sorry state the program was in after the Sampson debacle. I don't think he needs to go 24-8 next year to retain his job, but he probably needs to be above .500.

 

I just read where it said that Stevens' dad used to take him to IU games as a kid.

Crean is a good coach and he's recuited well. I don't know what the hell is going on at IU. I understand rebuilding seasons, but not like this past season. That was insane.

 

His dad played football at IU, and had season tickets for basketball during Stevens' childhood/teenage years. He grew up a huge IU fan. I don't know if that would make him see the job differentl, but I don't think it's accurate to say he has no ties to Bloomington.

 

Mizzou, remember how bad they were in 2010. The only player they had coming back was a walk-on. They literally started from scratch. On top of that, the history of embarrassments going back to the last years of Knight is now long enough where IU's good name is sullied a little bit for kids growing up.

Top players won't automatically go back to IU now that it seems (maybe) to finally have competent, sane leadership. It might take a while.

 

I still think that NCAA run IU made under Davis was the worst thing that could have happened. If they had lost in the first round, they could have gotten rid of him and brought in a decent coach. They hung with him way too long and then made the matter worse by hiring Sampson, which I will never understand.

 

Crean has successfully built a recruiting wall around the state for the next couple of years. Whether that leads to a significantly improvement in on-court performance remains to be seen. I'm not overly optimistic, based on many reasons including his performance at Marquette, his actions here, and the fact he has never been good at developing players, especially big men.

Many, many IU fans agree with this. Never thought I would consider a Final Four run - with a really great group of kids - to have hurt a program in the long run. But to think that IU retained Davis after missing the tourney and having a player flunk out when Thad Matta was a possibility in 2004, and the hiring of Sampson out of the blue . . . it's still tough to think that even "the right hire" could bring IU back.

 

I think Davis' hanging around had less to do with the NCAA run and more to do with the general state of turmoil the athletics department at IU was in from 2001 to 2008. I also blame the Sampson hire on the mess that was going on there. From 2000 to 2009 IU had five different athletics directors.

 

Didn't Davis get a pretty sizable extension after making it to the finals? I seem to remember him complaining about his contract at a press conference and thinking the guy came across about as badly as I've ever seen a coach at that level come across, meltdowns notwithstanding...

 

Was that the year Iowa beat them in the Big 10 championship game? I seem to recall people saying the time that Davis would be fired after that and they would take a run prying Alford away from Iowa.

Wish they had...