Indiana men’s basketball opened the 2025-26 season with a 98-51 win over Alabama A&M on Wednesday night at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Indiana.
It’s a new era in Bloomington with head coach Darian DeVries
coaching his first game with the cream and crimson. His team looked as advertised, scoring plenty of points on one end of the court and putting heat on the ball on the other.
There’s definitely a few things to talk about. Here’s five things we learned from the game.
- 3-point shooting is going to be one of this group’s strong suits. It’s a very welcome change of pace after so many seasons watching teams that wouldn’t, and couldn’t, hit shots from long range on a consistent basis. These Hoosiers went 10-24 from long range, good for 41.7%, with Lamar Wilkerson leading the way with four makes on 10 attempts.
- Sam Alexis will be an interesting change of pace in the frontcourt off of the bench. He was buried on a very, very loaded front line at Florida but showed what made him an interesting addition to Indiana this past offseason. He scored 17 points on 6/7 shooting from the field with two of those shots coming from long range, including his lone miss. He made his wide-open look but missed on his contested attempt, which was probably taken in light of Indiana’s rather large lead.
- Conor Enright doesn’t jump off the stat sheet, scoring no points but pulling down three rebounds while dishing out four assists, but he was present, mindful and communicative on both ends of the court in a way that this team is going to need as everyone settles into DeVries’ system. He has a role to play, and he did his job.
- Rebounding was a plus, with the Hoosiers winning the battle on the boards 42-19. Alabama A&M usually didn’t make much of an effort to chase down any of its misses and this’ll probably be one of the few times Indiana has a strong advantage in that category, but hey, take what you can get.
- Passing seemed a point of emphasis, with every Hoosier on scholarship who saw minutes recording at least one assist on the game.
