Indiana and Purdue will face each other in men’s basketball on Sunday for the 220th time in a rivalry that has never in the modern era looked more lopsided than it does right now.
On one hand here’s Purdue, the picture of sustainability and sensibility, showing up as a Final Four contender darn near every season. On the other here’s Indiana, a program whose expectations and vibes have been hijacked for two decades by a fan base that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know and never quite seems to learn.
Need an example? A little more than a week ago, a not-so-insignificant portion of the Indiana fan base believed there was actual momentum behind the idea Brad Stevens might willingly leave his job running the world champion Boston Celtics to coach at a place whose last 20 years on paper look a lot more like, say, Florida State, than one of the sport’s blueblood programs. Never mind the whole NIL and transfer portal dysfunction, which is pretty much a nonstarter for anyone who has a well-paying, stable job as an NBA coach or team president.
Stevens is much too smart for that and said so to Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman, which was actually the best gift he could have given Indiana athletics director Scott Dolson, who no longer has to operate a coaching search with his entire fan base huffing the highest quality hopium.
But the important thing is that one year from now, somebody besides Mike Woodson will be coaching the Hoosiers when they face Purdue and Matt Painter, who has seen five counterparts at Indiana come and go since his first season in 2005.
Think about the staggering dichotomy there: As Painter churns out winning team after winning team, culminating with Purdue’s trip to the national championship game last year, Indiana cannot escape the never-ending cycle of overhype to disappointment to anger that has occurred with predictable regularity since Bobby Knight’s unceremonious exit in 2000.
What has gone wrong since then? Well, a lot.
The initial burst to the national championship game and inevitable fall of Mike Davis, who was in a brutally tough position replacing Knight. NCAA sanctions under Kelvin Sampson, as insignificant as they seem in retrospect. Tom Crean getting Indiana back in the mix, but only to a point, failing to advance past the Sweet 16 in his nine seasons. Archie Miller being unprepared for the intensity and glare of a high-profile Big Ten job. Hiring a 63-year old alum in Woodson, who never coached in college before and squandered massive sums of NIL money on rosters that never fit together.
And now it begins anew, with Indiana’s fan base waiting on the next savior, the next big name, the next hot up-and-comer.
But the focus of Indiana’s fan base should not be limited to the unrealistic (Stevens), the unlikely (Michigan’s Dusty May) or the ill-fitting (UCLA’s Mick Cronin) simply on the basis of name recognition or connection to the state of Indiana.
The Hoosiers’ coaching search should have a simple focus: Maximum competence, minimum drama.
In other words, they should aspire to be a lot more like Purdue and less like, well, themselves.
Now, to be fair, nobody knew Painter was going be rolling into his second decade with five Big Ten coach of the year awards when he was named Gene Keady’s successor off one season as Southern Illinois’ head coach.
Tom Kubat, then a columnist at the Lafayette Journal & Courier, wrote at the time that the 33-year-old former Purdue player was a “rookie head coach with training wheels” and thought it might be too early to give him such a big job. He was proven wrong over the long haul, but that wasn’t a hot take at the time. Purdue got very, very lucky.
But there’s this idea at Indiana that Knight’s nearly 30-year run encompassing three NCAA titles and five Final Fours makes the Hoosiers a top-tier job when there is now a lot more evidence suggesting that star coaches in great situations are more likely to pass.
And guess what? That’s OK!
If there’s one lesson to be learned in college basketball this year, it’s that identifying a baseline level of competence is the key to making a good hire, not whether some coach got lucky one time and made a deep tournament run or how well the name will resonate at a news conference.
You know who’s happy with their new coach? Kentucky’s happy with Mark Pope. Vanderbilt’s happy with Mark Byington. Louisville’s happy with Pat Kelsey. West Virginia’s happy with Darian DeVries.
Why? Not because those fan bases really knew what they were getting on Day 1. Not because people watched them coach their mid-major teams to an upset-fueled Sweet 16 or Elite 8 run. Not because they had a lot of flair and flash.
What those four hires had in common, though, was a lot of winning at places where it’s not easy to win. A lot of competence and substance, proven over multiple years and sometimes even multiple programs.
And if Indiana is as good of a program as Indiana thinks it is, shouldn’t that be enough?
Let’s do a thought experiment. What would the reaction be in Indiana if on April 1, they announced that Clemson’s Brad Brownell had been hired as the head coach. Spoiler alert: It probably wouldn’t be good.
Why? Because Indiana fans don’t watch Clemson basketball. Because Brownell is kind of boring. Because he’s missed the NCAA tournament more times than he’s made it.
And yet, we’re talking about a guy who has won more than 450 games in his career, taken three different schools to the Big Dance and kept an ACC job for 15 years at a program where it’s historically tough to win. He has a defined, physical style of play that opponents hate. He knows what he’s doing.
To be clear, I have no idea if Brownell is on Indiana’s radar or if he’d be interested in going there. The point is, he’s the type of maximum competence, minimum drama coach that would stand apart from the wild home run swings Indiana has taken in its recent coaching searches.
Sometimes a nice, solid double is the right play. Indiana should try it, even embrace it.
After awhile, they may even end up looking a bit like Purdue. Would that be so bad?