It hasn’t all been bad, but the last few decades have not been kind to Indiana men’s basketball.
After parting ways with Bob Knight, who won 11 Big Ten titles, made five final fours, and hung three banners, the Hoosiers have appeared in just one Final Four and won the conference three times over the last 25 seasons.
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There were some false-starts there that prevented the Hoosiers from building something long term, be it Mike Davis’s early success with Knight’s players or the Kelvin Sampson saga, but the program got a clean reset ahead of the 2008-09 season with the beginning of the Tom Crean era.
Since then? Indiana fans have been treated to a certifiable house of horrors, with inferior opponents, poor coaching, and a pandemic all intervening to keep Indiana from reaching its storied heights once again.
There have been some highlights, but far more lowlights as Indiana has cycled through the last three coaching tenures. We recap five of the scariest here, in the spirit of the holiday:
Syracuse 61-50 Indiana, March 28, 2013
Indiana spent 10 weeks on top of the AP Poll in the 2012-13 season, finally showing fans that the team could move beyond the shadows of its legendary coach. Hiring Crean was something of a gamble, but this season was proof of concept with The Movement landing Indiana a 1-seed in the NCAA Tournament. Bloomington was the center of the basketball universe, once again.
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Then Crean ran into a Syracuse team running the same zone defense that Jim Boeheim built his career on and it all fell apart. The lack of preparation or adjustments to a scheme that everyone saw coming planted the seeds of doubt for Indiana’s best coach of the modern era.
Indiana 78-75 Penn State, January 18, 2017
Picking a game that Indiana won feels a bit odd for these purposes, but this one stands out more than any of the mess that followed. The 2016-17 season was consequential though, the third time in the Crean era that it looked like he really Had Something, especially coming off a Big Ten title run. The season was shaky, but the Hoosiers had reached No. 3 in the AP Poll with a win over Kansas. For three games, it looked like they could beat anyone. Then, well, Fort Wayne. Then…
Despite Indiana winning, this was clearly the game where the wheels fell off for Crean and Indiana. Eventual first round pick OG Anunoby suffered a season-ending knee injury that, even then, felt like the fatal blow for a team experiencing a rollercoaster of a season. Indiana lost seven of its next nine games, blowing a shot at the NCAA tournament and costing Tom Crean his job.
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Purdue 74-62 Indiana, February 8, 2020
Archie Miller did not hit the ground running as Tom Crean’s replacement, but was having the best season of his Indiana tenure by far in 2019-2020. He got his signature win January 7th against Michigan State, then started to slip a little bit with a three game skid that brought Indiana to 5-6 in Big Ten play.
Help was on the way though. With Purdue – who Archie never beat as Indiana’s head coach – coming to town, Bob Knight made his first appearance in Assembly Hall since he had been fired, seemingly giving the program the blessing to go on winning under Miller’s watch. That would not happen, sadly. Indiana came out flat, stayed flat, and got blown out in one of the more significant home games of the millennium for the program.
Indiana 89-64 Nebraska, March 11, 2020
I’m gonna be honest, this one is just on here because I thought I was watching Fred Hoiberg succumb to a then-poorly understood respiratory illness on live television in front of me. Instead, I was watching the effective end of the Miller era, as the COVID-19 postseason cancelation prevented him from ever earning an NCAA Tournament bid. That and never beating Purdue.
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Indiana 74-66 Louisville, November 20, 2023
Another win? Well, this one’s extra special.
Indiana, seemingly on a climb back to true respectability in the national college hoops landscape under Mike Woodson, received an invite to play in the Empire Classic at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It seemed fitting, Woodson returning to his old stomping grounds an- oop they are facing a UConn group that will go on to become one of the very best teams of the 21st century. Indiana gets blown out.
That’s fine! Many (much) better teams will suffer a similar fate. Now what’s really scary? Why, the bottomless chasm on the other side of the bracket, of course. Yes, a weird Texas team survived a battle with Kenneth Victor Payne’s Louisville Cardinals. Now, instead of a fun MTE, Indiana faced the horror of a loss to the worst high-major coaching hire of the past decade.
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The game itself was anxiety inducing. Indiana mostly held firm until struggling in the second half, giving Louisville an opportunity to win and become the sport’s new laughingstock. Thankfully, Woodson reached deep into his bag of tricks and pulled out a zone that confounded the Cardinals’ offense, saving the day and generating one of the greatest postgame quotes.
Iowa 85-60 Indiana, January 11, 2025
It was hard to pinpoint the exact end of the Woodson era, given the obvious flaws with even his best teams. He immediately improved Indiana with a talent upgrade and some scheme tweaks that ended the NCAA Tournament drought, but didn’t exactly bring the Hoosiers up to speed with modern basketball.
His seat was warm prior to the 2024-25 season, so he went out and got the best portal class he could get to help stave off criticism. The team went largely untested through the preseason and early Big Ten slate, but appeared to be on the right track before getting absolutely smoked in Iowa City by a team that also cost Fran McCaffery his job.
