Fall From Grace!

"Old News"

I’ve enjoyed seeing the Hoosiers at the bottom of the Big Ten rankings with a 3-9 conference record and a 12-13 overall nose dive. It’s exactly what they deserve. This was a program that completely took recruits and its former players for granted. They never once thought that they would be the worse team in the league because of their storied history. Well…let me tell you something. High school recruits have one question, “What have you done lately?” They don’t care about the fact that you’ve won five national titles because they weren’t alive to see any of them. The last title that IU brought home was ’87.

All-time NCAA Wins!

 Although I couldn’t stand Bobby Knight he was effective. He was a firecracker and was always sitting on the edge of the envelope. He cared nothing about what people thought of him or his philosophy but most importantly he made Indiana basketball relevant. The late Myles Brand couldn’t see that when he ran the guy out of town. At the minimum, he could have broken the NCAA wins record (880) once held by Dean Smith at IU instead of at Texas Tech. Like I said, I couldn’t stand the guy but he kept IU on the national college basketball map.

The Hoosiers didn’t have sense enough to fire the guy at the end of the season. They got rid of him two weeks before the season started which was the worse thing that could’ve happen. That showed more arrogance than I could handle. Brand and the university, with that move alone, told the basketball world that we’re bigger than any one coach or potential recruits and that simply wasn't true. So they were forced to promote Mike Davis, who was a complete joke,  to head coach when he wasn’t ready. How do you give a guy the keys to the Bentley that doesn’t even have a license to drive?

The program has been in a complete tailspin ever since. Now they made in my opinion a great move in hiring Kelvin Sampson because he was an excellent recruiter. He consistently won twenty ball games at Oklahoma and built his program off of junior college players. That wasn’t Indiana’s style and the good old boys in Bloomington couldn’t accept the difference.

They fired the guy because he was text messaging recruits more than he should have. Are you kidding me? Everyone that is winning is pushing the envelope and in many cases simply ripping it up.  How do you think the guy landed Eric Gordon, who by the way had already committed to Illinois? When Sampson left, so did his team. Arrogance gets you nowhere IU.

Tom Crean is doing the best he can with what he has and from the looks of it he has pretty good recruiting classes coming in for 2011 and 2012. Let this be a lesson to you Indiana, when a guy is winning leave him alone. Being the doormat of the Big Ten and living in a hole isn’t fun for anybody, especially your once proud alumni. Hopefully, in couple of years we can show up on the first day of the NCAA Tournament and wear our t-shirts at the sports bar and talk trash like everyone else. What’s your opinion?

Jay Graves

jaygraves@thejaygravesreport.com

Follow me on Twitter: @jaygravesreport