As the opening weekend of March Madness wraps up, Indiana men’s basketball finds itself watching the Sweet 16 from home, just like it has every year since Tom Crean last brought the Hoosiers there in 2015-16.
For a program with the material resources and fan support that Indiana has, not to mention its storied history and (debated) Blue Blood status, this is simply not acceptable. While Indiana’s struggled, teams like Alabama, Tennessee, Gonzaga and others have become staples in the Sweet 16 of late,
further accentuating Indiana’s fall from grace.
How did we get here? The simple answer is that Indiana hasn’t been good enough, which is both true and an incomplete telling.
Three coaches have come and three coaches have left since Indiana last made the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, with each failing and succeeding (somewhat) for different reasons. As much as it pains me to say, Indiana has been bad in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons, all of which deserve further attention.
So, without further ado, here’s an incomplete history of why we are where we are:
Tom Crean
Tom Crean, despite having not been Indiana’s coach since 2017, is singlehandedly responsible for all three of Indiana’s last three Sweet Sixteens. Had OG Anunoby stayed healthy in 2016-17, a season when Indiana reached No. 3 in the AP Poll, Crean could have done even more.
It’s easy and something of a Twitter meme to say that Indiana shouldn’t have moved on from Crean, in light of his postseason successes at Indiana and the ensuing drought, but reality is a little more nuanced.
Crean’s seat arguably started heating up following his second Sweet 16 at Indiana, when his one-seeded Hoosiers were upset by Syracuse. The following year, my first on campus, Crean went 17-15, missing the postseason entirely despite having Yogi Ferrell and Noah Vonleh, the latter being a first round pick in the NBA Draft.
Things got even dicier for Crean the following year, when his inability to land a Center led to Hanner Mosquera-Parea being the team’s starting center at an undersized 6’9”. Behind him on the depth chart were Emmitt Holt (6’7”) and Troy Williams (obviously a small forward).
Crean hit the jackpot with a class of Thomas Bryant, Anunoby, and Juwan Morgan, who, along with Ferrell and Williams, gave Indiana enough talent to beat Kentucky in the Round of 32 for the program’s last Sweet 16. Anunoby and Morgan were surprise talents, though, 3-star recruits who overperformed to help their team outplay expectations.
Crean’s ability to consistently land top talent, or any talent from the state of Indiana, was more the reason for his dismissal than anything that happened on the court. That the team collapsed following Anunoby’s injury was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Following 2017, he was out, and in came a young hotshot from Dayton.
Archie Miller
Personally, I would consider this the true dark ages for Indiana basketball, but it didn’t start out that way. Archie Miller came to Indiana as one of the hottest coaches in the country, primed to make the leap to a high major program after years of success at Dayton.
Fans who were sick of Crean’s inattention to defense were excited to see the fast turnaround Miller brought with his pack line system. Though it was reportedly hard to learn, Indiana’s defensive efficiency rating went from 104th nationally to 65th in one year.
Miller also made a splash on the recruiting trail when he landed Romeo Langford, part of a top-10 class that was supposed to provide the foundation for years to come. Supposedly he had the players to make his systems work like they did at Dayton. His guys.
For one reason or another, they never caught on at Indiana. He probably would have made one NCAA Tournament had COVID-19 not canceled it, but that lone appearance was not enough to outweigh the fact that he literally never beat Purdue and had squandered any program momentum his hiring brought.
Miller was fired after the 2020-21 season, prompting the Athletic Department look to a new direction: the NBA.
Mike Woodson
The groundwork for Mike Woodson’s failures at Indiana was likely established when he was hired as Indiana’s head coach, alongside assistant Dane Fife and advisor Thad Matta.
In theory, it may have seemed good to surround an NBA coach with a wealth of college experience. In practice, though, it seemed to create tension given that infrastructure lasted all of a year before the program parted ways with Fife and Matta took over at Butler while Woodson assumed the role of a very traditional college coach.
His NBA experience allowed him to attract elite talent from the high school ranks like Mackenzie Mgbako, Malik Reneau, and Jalen Hood-Schifino, while Trayce Jackson-Davis’ development under Woodson allowed him to attract elite bigs from the portal, like Kel’el Ware and Oumar Ballo.
With Jackson-Davis, Woodson took Indiana back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since the Crean era, then got the Hoosiers within a game of the Sweet 16 with Hood-Schifino added to the roster, before falling to a Miami team that advanced all the way to the Final Four.
Given the underlying tension of his tenure though, Woodson’s fate was sealed when the Hoosiers lost eight of 10 games down the stretch of the 2023-24 season, causing them to miss the Tournament for the first time in his tenure. When another such losing streak happened the following year, he announced his “retirement.”
In hindsight, there was something sort of funny about that 2023 tournament appearance. Indiana bowed out in the second round, yes, but that Miami team was nearly upset in the first facing an upstart Drake program led by
Darian DeVries
Like Miller before him, Darian DeVries appeared to try to win fans over quickly with a roster that addressed the weaknesses of the Miller and Woodson eras: poor 3-point shooting. Unfortunately, he neglected the importance of the inside game, which is what brought Woodson to the NCAA Tournament twice.
It’s been just one year, so there’s not too much to say about DeVries’ tenure, but that first year featured much of the same uneven roster building and inconsistent play that we’ve seen since Crean’s last season.
Now, to avoid a similar fate in year two, DeVries will likely need to recreate a portal haul at least as good as the one that Woodson landed ahead of his final season. Seeing as how that class didn’t save Woodson’s job, it would behoove DeVries to do better.
If he can’t, Indiana will have some decisions to make again. Will it be different this time?
