It was about 25 minutes after Indiana had beaten No. 18 Notre Dame in overtime that this question was presented to coach Archie Miller during the postgame press conference:
“Coach, I know you're focused on today, but in 48 hours you play Fort Wayne, who beat Indiana last year, and about five or six years ago, you had a great game with them at Dayton. I was wondering what your thoughts were on Fort Wayne.”
Which means the delight over beating the Irish had an even shorter shelf life than you think. It ended long before IU absorbed another embarrassing defeat Monday night at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall.
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Who could have imagined, though, the honeymoon period for Miller would end so soon?
Oh, they’re mad at Miller in Indiana. A dozen games into the rebuilding project he was hired in March to commence — games that were jammed into a period of just 38 days, with three against ranked opponents, seven against high-majors and three on the road — he is getting tattooed throughout the media for the Hoosiers’ dismal performance against the Mastodons.
The Hoosiers allowed 92 points to a team that only beat that figure previously by scheduling NAIA and Division III opponents. They gave up 17 3-pointers and 52 percent shooting from the field. They committed 18 turnovers. Worst of all, they were obviously challenged in the first half and responded not by acknowledging they’d need to play harder to win — but by capitulating and being outscored by 21 points. Having Fort Wayne on the schedule just two days after such an enormous game was not ideal scheduling, and it showed in just about every way.
All of that is inescapable, and Miller made no effort to escape it. “It wasn’t close in terms of the approach coming out of halftime. So, really disappointed, again, and have to be better. Coach has to do a better job. Clearly coming off of some of the performances we’ve had this season, I think we’re clearly a much better team than we played (as) tonight.”
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There’s a reason Indiana can go from competing ferociously against Duke and losing the grip on the game in the final minutes to losing by 14 at Michigan, from battling for an OT win against the Irish on a neutral floor to performing dismally at home against Fort Wayne. It’s the same reason the administration chose to change coaches after last season and opted to bring in Miller from Dayton: The Indiana program has not looked a lot like Indiana lately.
In fact, it really hasn’t looked a lot like Indiana for 20 years. There have been moments when it looked like IU again: Mike Davis’ run to the 2002 NCAA championship game, the 17-1 start in 2007-08 before the walls closed in on Kelvin Sampson, the inspiring battle under Tom Crean for the 2013 Big Ten Conference championship. Always there was some sort of calamity waiting to spoil the fun.
Losing to Fort Wayne by 20, or by any margin, is only that sort of circumstance if Indiana allows it to be, if those who are supposed to understand how this works misinterpret the result and assign it any greater importance than a 20-point win over Fort Wayne would have warranted.
IU didn’t need to lose that game to understand it needs more talent, more depth, more shooters, more commitment, better point guard play — or, more to the point, any point guard play at all. Those areas weren’t covered last season, when the Hoosiers finished 18-16 and missed the NCAA Tournament.
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If Indiana had been in terrific shape there would have been no need to make a coaching change; Crean is an accomplished coach with a 2003 Final Four appearance and two Big Ten titles this decade on his resume. The Hoosiers he left behind surely weren’t going to be improved without the addition of an elite recruit — and with the subtraction of three of that team’s four double-figure scorers.
There is a vignette in John Feinstein’s excellent book about ACC greats Mike Krzyzewski, Dean Smith and Jim Valvano called “The Legends Club” that recounts the night when Coach K’s Duke squad lost to Virginia and Ralph Sampson 109-66 in the opening round of the ACC Tournament. Later that evening, Krzyzewski and some friends escaped the team hotel — and some disgruntled boosters gathered there — to grab some food at a Denny’s in Atlanta.
Tom Mickle, Duke’s sports publicist, raised a glass of water and offered a toast: “Here’s to forgetting tonight.”
Krzyzewski lifted his glass and corrected Mickle: “Here is to never forgetting tonight,” he said, with a curse word mixed in there.
That game occurred in March 1983. That was at the end of his third season as coach. He’d gone 11-17, a one-win improvement over the previous season. That is what the bottom looks like, and we know this because Krzyzewski recovered to win 24 games the next year and another 947 games since.
Losing by 20 to Fort Wayne? No fun, to be sure, but the process of making Indiana look once again like Indiana has only begun.
