Sunday was another day full of BigTen basketball where the Purdue Boilermakers walked away with an impressive win and the Indiana Hoosiers got beat by a team they probably should have beat at home.
I'm an irrational Indiana basketball fan and I'd like to take a minute to be rational.
Indiana started the year as a ranked team, the favorite to win the BigTen, and still with scars left from a program that didn't get it right immediately after running a really good coach out. There has been a great amount of talk in regard to "getting over the hump". From the media, the fans, and most importantly, the Head Coach. Coach Woodson seems to talk about needing to get these guys over the hump on a weekly basis. And that's great! I think it serves as a good visual metaphor for the idea that they are building up to something. The question that seems more important is, what's the hump? Is there any clarity on what the hump actually looks like? I think in this case the hump is probably a "we'll know it when we see it" type of thing. And unfortunately, that's the case a lot of the time. I think the issue is the fact that the majority of IU fans somehow believe the hump is a National Championship. I halfway joke about a National Championship and Final Fours when things are going well because that's fun. That's just what you do as a fan. I crowned Trayce Jackson-Davis MOP of the Final Four in early November and I'm sticking to it. But I don't think that's what Coach Woodson means when he mentions the hump. However, I do think setting the expectation for the hump would go a long way.
The Hoosiers seem to be in a little bit of a rut coming off of the break. It was long and that tends to happen. Unless you are really, really, really good, you're going to have a little bump in the road at some point. And even the really, really, really good teams have them they just bounce back quicker. January and February are hard months in the college basketball world. It is truly a grind and it doesn't feel like there is an end in sight. That makes these ruts even more difficult to get out of.
It's really easy to point the finger as a coach and as a player about where the blame is because you are there every day, fully in it. It's SIGNIFICANTLY easier to do that as some clueless fan sitting in his apartment writing about this team because he loves them and needs a hobby. What I'm getting at is I don't have any right to be finger-pointing. So, I'm not going to point the finger at anyone. Controversial.
Look, the reality is Iowa can score in bunches and winning on the road is hard to do. The reality is also that playing from behind all game against Northwestern at home is a tougher swallow. It's difficult to have your fans standing after every bucket that cut the lead to 11 all half just trying to will a comeback effort. And it came up just short. Trayce Jackson-Davis having 18, 24, and 8 while Jalen Hood-Schifino gives you 33 in a loss is hard to comprehend. It's very noteworthy to mention IU is playing without their veteran PG and 4man in Xavier Johnson & Race Thompson. Sometimes things are just off. And that's hard to deal with in college athletics. Whether fans believe it or not, the guys lacing them up for our entertainment 2 times a week for months out of the year have real lives and interests outside of that game too. They try to win every game they play in. They try to make every shot they shoot. And at the end of the day, sometimes they lose games. Professional athletes, CEOs, the Starbucks Barista making your coffee at 7am, and even you reading this wake up somedays and going to work that day is harder to do so than it was the previous day. Bad days can compound. And that's just reality. So expecting 18-22 year old college students to be on every single day is asinine and unfair.
The moral of what I am attempting to say is, I think there are countless reasons a team can struggle outside of just not making shots, playing hard, or whatever coaching reason you want to throw in there. I don't know what the issue is. I'm not in practice or in the locker room or watching hours of film in the office. What I am though, is fully confident that the staff and players have a far better idea of what's going on than I do. I also think they are 4 games into BigTen play and that they will be alright. On top of that, I know having a nervous breakdown this early in the conference season after 2 losses is significantly better than what we were all doing a couple years ago.
The Hoosiers last won the National Championship in 1987 and I will say it until my face turns blue... It's really, really hard to get it done in March. I mentioned earlier that there are still scars from running a good coach off. We as IU fans still believe they should compete for National Championships every year and got frustrated with a coach who was doing things we would love to do now simply because he got beat in the tournament earlier than expected. Say whatever you want about Tom Crean, but he was great for Indiana Basketball. He was competing year in and year out for BigTen titles but the early years were also brutal. If you are lucky enough to have a coach who has your program in a place to compete every year and the reason you move on is because he isn't getting it done in March... you better have a guy lined up that you know will. IU swung and missed and it takes time to build back up from that. There are without question times when it is an obvious spot to move on and I get that. But you have to get it right to keep pace with where you were without taking any sort of dip. Unfortunately, that didn't happen and here we are tasking Mike Woodson and these guys with clean-up duty. And it was dirty.
The Hoosiers have 2 big ones this week. I expect them to take care of business and get back on track. I'm being rational today, so I'll hold off on my Elite 8 tweets until Saturday around 4pm after the Cream and Crimson finish the week 2-0. I'll see ya then.
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