Kdug

XJ checks in. Glad that he’ll be able to finish his career playing instead of hurt.

Good start, we’ll see if we can keep it up.

Yeah, beard’s coaching abilities aren’t the question. But if it weren’t for the legal troubles, he wouldn’t be available. So kind of a catch 22. If we do end up in a coaching search, I’ll be interested to see who the candidates are. Pearl’s age would be the biggest downside, but he feels like as close as a sure thing as you can get compared to other realistic options. I know a lot of people like Dusty because of the IU connection and what he did last year at FAU, but that feels like a risky hire, granted with huge upside if it works. Hiring Pearl feels like what the Woodson hire should have been. Bring in a guy who you’re confident will succeed in the short term, even if they’re not the long term solution due to age. Then the next time around you’d have the prestige, money, fan support, and now recent success to attract a good long term option.

Underwood left the B12 for Illinois and Willard left the Big East for Maryland. On the flip side, a coach rarely willingly leaves the Big Ten for any of those conferences either. Only one I can think of recently is Shrews leaving PSU to ND - which I think had almost all to do with lack of support at PSU and ties to Indiana.

Yeah, I agree with your overall point that we should be way more competitive than this. Just didn’t necessarily agree that we had that many individual players performing at or above their “star ranking”.

A fringe starter as a senior is essentially the definition of a 3 star, and that’s not meant as a knock at Gallo. But he’s tailor made to be a 6th man type who brings energy off the bench and isn’t asked to carry an offense like he’s been asked to do for IU this year. And I don’t think Cupps has looked like a 3 star at all. I’d consider a 3 star talent roughly a top 150 player in their class. Using Torviks PRPG! ranking - which is essentially offensive rating weighted for usage and minutes - he has Cupps ranked as the 445th out of 452 freshmen who have played at least 20% of their team’s minutes. A lot of freshman struggle more than you think they would, so it’s not like he can’t get better next year. But he hasn’t looked like a player who was ready for college level basketball.

I don’t really agree with your assessment at all outside of Ware. Granted, I think a lot of that is guys aren’t being put in positions to succeed. I do agree that we’re playing well below what we should be based on the level of talent on the roster.

Defense has been the bigger issue recently too. Each of the last 4 games our opponent has score more than 1.1 points per possession, which essentially means our offense would need to score 75-80 points just to have a shot to win in a normal tempo game.

What’s wrong with that take? That was the difference in the first half. There is no commentary on what we should or shouldn’t be doing vs a team like PSU.

Source? Or are you just trolling?

Exactly. I like Woodson as a person, but he doesn’t deserve anything in terms of coaching into the future. All of that is earned, and he’s heavily compensated to be the coach. I’ve said it in a different thread or earlier in this thread, but ultimately Dolson needs to do what’s best for the program. You see it in pro sports all the time where a coach gets fired who didn’t “deserve” to (I.e. the Cubs and David Ross), but those teams are doing what they think is in their best interest. With how much money goes into IU basketball, they need to start acting like a big time/pro organization.

Honestly, they should be more optimistic. They’re popular enough that they represent the fan base to a certain degree, and I think they do that reasonably well. I wouldn’t want a popular IU podcast to constantly be pessimistic. Even now I think they do a good job of communicating the disappointment without coming across like they’re just trashing the program.

Each of the last 3 games have theoretically been the easiest games left on the schedule, and we lost all 3 fairly convincingly. I’d bet we still win one more even though we’re underdogs the rest of the way, but I think we finish 15-17.

Missed free throws and lack of threes on offense. Penn State getting basically whatever they wanted while IU was on defense. We’ve seen this exact same game on repeat for most of the season.

Even though Mbako missed, I loved that last play. I just don’t understand why we don’t see more of that

You’re on fire today. I got a good chuckle out of both of those comments.

Yeah, but that virtually never gets called. Not a smart play by Ware to put himself in that position with no benefit, but that’s never called a foul. And Baldwin threw his head back for no reason which is the classic sign of a flop.

That one was a pure flop. I like that he didn’t pull him with 3 though.

As a percentage, the free throws are actually relatively even, which is a win for this team. PSU just has one extra possession from committing 3 fewer turnovers minus the 2 extra offensive rebounds we have. The threes, as usual, are what is killing us.

Absolutely, but I’ve just given up on that. Seems like that’ll only happen if we’re absolutely forced to

Yeah he had the auto bench too, but I was ok with it for him in this instance because it forces us to go a bit smaller, and he wasn’t playing particularly well. Ware was dominating the game on both ends.

IU was up 27-25, Ware picked up foul #2 and we had the auto-bench, Penn State outscored IU by 9 the rest of the way. Feels like we’ve seen that same story many times this year

There will always be other programs hiring coaches, it doesn’t matter if it’s this year or a future one. There will also be brand new coaches who pop up as popular candidates every year (Dusty May was just starting to pop up as a hot coaching name this time last year). What Michigan and Ohio State do doesn’t concern me in the slightest, and should have very little if any impact on what IU does IMO.

One last point, this isn’t just a down season, this has been a historically bad season. That’s what makes me more frustrated than I otherwise would be. IU this year is scoring 72.8 pts/gm and giving up 74.9 pts/gm, for a net avg margin of -2.1. If you go back all the way to the 1970/1971 season, there are only 3 seasons with a worse margin than this. 2008/2009 (-10.5), 2009/2010 (-5.3), and 2003/2004 (-2.7). That’s 54 seasons, and this is statistically the 4th worst, with 2 of the other seasons that were worse being heavily influenced by sanctions. This season isn’t over and is trending in the wrong direction, so 2003/2004 could still end up better. A step back from last year was expected, but this has been much more than a step back.

Those schools are where they are because they have a culture, identity, and their administration/new coaches did a good job of carrying that over from their great historical coaches. IU has none of that. It has nothing to do with firing an underperforming coach like Archie, or fans being upset that this year’s team is ranked outside of the top 100. Purdue and Wisconsin would also not accept those types of performances, but they’ve put themselves in a position where those performances don’t happen.