There are legitimately hundreds of sports adages floating around out there in the ether regarding the fleetingness of opportunity and the importance of taking advantage when a chance presents itself. Run a quick search for any of them and I’m quite sure that wherever you land will have something wholly applicable to the Tom Crean era at Indiana.
Indiana is a mess, both on and off the court
Tom Crean is under fire in Bloomington this week, but his defenders would likely be much larger in number had he taken advantage of his situation two seasons ago.
Jim O’Connor-USA TODAY Sports
Two years ago, Crean was on top of the college hoops world. He was the conquering hero who had revived Hoosier basketball from the lowest low that a majority of the fan base had ever experienced. He was the head coach of a team with two potential All-Americans and the perfect mix of experienced upperclassmen and talented youth. He was the man in charge of the most talented college basketball team in America, and the group most likely to cut down the nets in Atlanta five months later.
There had been problems along the way, of course.
Indiana fans had expected some hard years in the wake of the Kelvin Sampson debacle, but Crean’s first three teams going a combined 28-66 and 8-36 in Big Ten play had tested the patience of even the most resolute Hoosier. There were off the court things, too. Eli Holman broke a potted plant in Crean’s office after a conversation between the two about Holman’s transfer went sour, Austin Rivers tweeted that Crean was “a joke” while his brother, Jeremiah, was playing for the Hoosiers, and Crean was hit with a secondary violation for having illegal contact with eventual Michigan State star Gary Harris. It was all stuff that made the Alumni Hall faithful go, “it happens.”
What Indiana fans couldn’t and haven’t been able to shrug off is what happened at the end of the 2012-13 season: Tom Crean didn’t cash in.
Despite heading up a team that included the eventual No. 2 and No. 4 selections from the 2013 NBA Draft, Crean’s 2012-13 Hoosiers failed to win 30 games and dropped a 61-50 Sweet 16 game against Syracuse in which they looked totally intimidated by the bigger and more physical Orange. A 17-15 hangover season later, and suddenly the recruiting swings and misses aren’t so easy to brush off. Suddenly losing your top assistant to Louisville feels like a huge deal. Suddenly the jokes about the the Sweet 16 shirts and cutting down the nets after a home loss sting a little bit more than they did at the time they were first conceived.
Suddenly, the off the court stuff is being used as justification for calling for the head coach’s job.
On Saturday, Hoosier forward Devin Davis was seriously injured when he was struck by a car driven by freshman forward Emmitt Holt. Davis is 19-yeard-old and Holt is 18, but both players had been drinking. Less than 48 hours after that black eye, Indiana announced that sophomores Troy Williams and Stanford Robinson had been suspended four games (including two exhibitions) for failing a drug test. Toss in the fact that junior forward Hanner Mosquera-Perea was charged with OWI in February and that both Robinson and star point guard Yogi Ferrell were cited for underage consumption in April, and the onslaught of unwanted attention being tossed at Crean and IU on Tuesday becomes both predictable and understandable.
But what if Crean had made it to Atlanta in 2013? What if the Hoosiers hadn’t felt like underachievers all season? What if they hadn’t looked shaky against Temple in the Round of 32 and terrified against Syracuse four days later? What if Crean was, at worst, the guy who had gotten Indiana basketball back to the Final Four? There would be criticism, sure, but there would also be a whole lot more folks in Bloomington tossing out statistics regarding underage drinking in college and pointing to the unpunished failed drug tests at other major programs.
It’s hard to call for the head of any coach who has put themselves in a position where they will be leaving a program in a better place than it was when they inherited it, and that’s certainly going to be the case whenever Crean and Indiana do part ways. Having a moral fortress gives people who feared the backlash of railing against a coach’s on-the-court performance the opportunity to yell the loudest. Those types of people made enough of a statement during Crean’s radio show Monday night that IU athletic director Fred Glass felt the need to address it.
“There was some real vitriolic stuff (on the radio show),” Glass told The Indianapolis Star of the call-in portion of Monday’s show. “But still, people are upset about it. I’m upset about it. I understand it. I’m upset about it. I don’t like it. Tom doesn’t like it. But I’m confident Tom is the solution, not even part of the problem.”
Despite this strong show of support, the rumor mill has run rampant Tuesday with rumblings that several other higher-ups at Indiana aren’t as thrilled with the face of their men’s basketball program. This talk is unlikely to subside anytime soon.
Crean now prepares to enter a season in which most expect him to miss the NCAA Tournament for the fifth time in his seven seasons at Indiana. The off-the-court stuff is embarrassing for Indiana, there’s no escaping that, but if Crean wants more people to defend him as the solution and not label him as the problem, his second Hoosier revival act is going to have to be more successful than the first.
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