And yet there I was, getting all goosebumpy as John Laskowski nervously interviewed Rivers at halftime. Rivers talked about his son, Jeremiah, his (Doc’s) excitement on his son’s announcement that he was considering Indiana as a destination, and his desire to just be a parent during IU games. He even had the IU hat on. It was pretty cool. And it was probably the most noteworthy thing about IU’s relatively lackluster win over USC-Upstate Monday night.

This year’s Hoosiers present a weird paradox. They’re not last year’s team, as much as Devan Dumes might wish they were. They’re definitely better — you can see the heightened level of play almost immediately, from Rivers to Christian Watford (man, is it nice to have an athletic big man with touch in an IU uniform again) to Derek Elston to Maurice Creek, who might just become my favorite player on this year’s team.

But this year’s Hoosiers are not a good team. There is a long way to go from “better than 6-25″ to “good.” And so while last year a win like Monday night’s might have been cause for minor excitement — IU led by 20! IU scored 69 points! — this year, it feels harder to process. So, am I supposed to be excited that IU seems borderline competent again? Or should I be depressed by the fact that an 18-turnover game at home against USC-Upstate has me considering excitement? See what I mean?

It’s hard to know how to feel about these Hoosiers in the same way it’s hard to know whether or not any of them are good. It’s too early to know. Gauging college basketball teams early in the year is always a foolhardy proposition. Gauging a team that will play four freshmen and a transfer significant minutes is especially difficult. But here’s what I noticed so far:

• There’s a reason Christian Watford was such a big-time recruit. Imagine this guy in high school. He’s tall, athletic, he has touch around the rim, he can — gasp — dribble. I can just picture the rows of scouts drooling at his NBA workouts in (let’s hope) four years. But for all of Watford’s natural talent, bigger, stronger players are going to dominate him in the paint. He’s weak. He’ll get stronger; I hear IU has a pretty nice new weight room. In the meantime, though, tougher opponents are going to beat him up. You can already tell.

• I really like Maurice Creek. It helps that my roommate’s girlfriend goes by Mo, so we can call now start calling her Maurice Creek instead of Maurice Jones-Drew. It also helps that Creek has a pretty complete game, including a three-point stroke that’s just mechanical enough to reveal some serious coaching on the part of someone very dedicated along the line. Creek is like a way, way better version of Dumes: He doesn’t hesitate and he doesn’t rush. He knows what he’s supposed to do and he does it.

• Jeremiah Rivers is maybe a little shakier than you’d like. Rivers is a solid defender and a great passer, but other than that he’s a little more careless with the ball than a lock-down point guard is supposed to be. For a second there, I thought I was watching Daniel Moore.

• Hey, is that Daniel Moore? I didn’t recognize the long hair, man! Good to see you again!

• IU is still not in shape. This will come, but for now the Hoosiers are all about pushing the ball up the floor until the time comes to get back on defense. Transition defense is sloowwwww. It looked almost as bad as Kentucky, only IU doesn’t have an insane John Wall to bail them out of embarrassing home losses. (Or a third of the talent. But who’s counting.)

• Gus Johnson doesn’t yell for just anything. A few times I was hoping Johnson would let loose with some of his trademark hysteria, but not today. He was in full workmanlike Johnson mode. The man has range, people.

• Jordan Hulls could overtake Moore’s spot as IU’s most adorable, scrappy, lovable little white dude. It helps that he’s way better at basketball, too.

• Pritchard is still Pritchard, still sluggish around the rim on offense, still frustrating to watch in the pivot, still a surprisingly effective rebounder. He should be a good counterpoint to Watford’s streaky athleticism, but who knows, right?

• Tom Crean did not go to the dry cleaner this week. Come on, Tom. A gold and blue tie? Pulling from the back of the closet in the discarded Marquette collection already? For shame.

• But hey, at least he wore a tie. USC-Upstate’s coach rocked an open brown shirt with brown slacks and a brown coat. Tremendous look, really. He may have liked the way he looked; I did not.

• Oh, and one more thing: College hoops is back. Like, officially. Feels good, right?

By far the most satisfying part of the season has been watching Tom Crean, watching him both on and off the court. Watching him handle his business, watch him coach every game like IU has a Final Four shot, watch him prod players along without showing even the slightest hint of frustration, watch him work a Chicago crowd into a veritable frenzy. All the while, his former team, Marquette, has been running roughshod over the best conference in college basketball; they might get a No. 1 NCAA Tourney seed. Until last night, it was a question as to whether or not IU would win a single game the rest of the season.

Ah, but win they did. Ryan predicted it (he downplays his predictive abilities, but the man has a gift), as did Devan Dumes and Tijan Jobe (whose new nickname should be “prophet.”) It felt like it was time, didn’t it? An awful Iowa team playing Indiana at home. Indiana seeming to, in its last few games, pull things together a bit more. Last night was the night.

It’s not about us, really, but I’m curious: After the game, how did you feel? Excited? Relieved? Anything? I’ll be honest and say that I wasn’t overjoyed or thrilled or cathartically relieved like I assumed. I thought I would be jumping up and down, or something. Instead, I was just kind of pleased — glad to know the Hoosiers won’t go the entire season without a Big Ten win, that Crean’s and his players’ hard work was rewarded, at least for one night. Not overjoyed. Just happy. That’s good enough.

Of course, though the result was the same, there was plenty about the game that had 2008-09 Hoosiers written all over it. Let’s take a look:

SHON MORRIS

Just kidding. I’m not going to write about this dude anymore. The only thing worse than having to listen to him ruin a perfectly good IU win with non-sequitors and weirdness is stressing it too much the day after. Forget it.

TOM PRITCHARD, CORRELATION, AND CAUSATION

In all of IU’s Big Ten losses, Tom Pritchard played at least 24 minutes (and usually around 30), scored at least eight points, and, with the exception of IU’s loss to Northwestern, attempted at least eight field goals. Usually more. Last night, he played 14 minutes, attempted two shots, scored one, and that was that.

There’s no question Pritchard has been IU’s best player. This means nothing. It’s curious and funny to look at and it caught my eye this morning when I was looking at stats, but as they say, correlation does not equal causation. Pritchard playing few minutes last night was not why IU won. That would be funny, were it true. Alas, it is not.

(Note: Not that anyone actually thought this. Just pointing it out.)

DEVAN DUMES

Devan Dumes is Rex Grossman. Remember the “Good Rex, Bad Rex” thing he had going on in 2006, where he would be utterly brilliant for one game and then put up some of the worst, most incomprehensibly bad numbers the next? That’s like Dumes, except he does that every possession. Last night, he strung a really efficient, smart, incredibly well-shot game together, and he only turned the ball over twice. If he can re-create even a facsimile of that — maybe missing a few times, coming back down to Earth, whatever — and still protect the ball, he may have turned a corner. Maybe “Bad Devan” just needed a few games at the Big Ten level to get gone forever.

TEMPO-FREE IS THE WAY TO BE

(I don’t even know what that means.) Key to victory: Making shots and not turning the ball over. Seems simple enough. But usually IU is awful at both of those things, which is why they only score 91 points per 100 possessions (and that number is probably way lower during Big Ten play). Last night, they scored 1.7 points per possession, their best mark of the year and one so good that they didn’t need to really clamp down defensively. They allowed about as many points as they usually do. That mark will be difficult to keep up, but again, for one night, we’ll take it.

That’s my motto for Feb. 4, 2009: We’ll take it.

So yeah, the past few weeks — the Michigan game, then the Illinois debacle, and so on — have been pretty depressing. It’s enough to challenge one’s sanity. Why am I watching this team? What’s the point? Do I really not care about Indiana basketball?

Of course I do, and the Hoosiers’ game against Minnesota proved why: They’re getting there. It might not happen on the road, and it might not happen soon, but IU will win a Big Ten game, and it will be awesome.

Until then there’s not a lot to analyze, really. The Hoosiers are just as bad as they look. They’re inefficient offensively because they turn the ball over like crazy. They allow far too many open looks, they don’t have the size to match up, they’re inexperienced, and so forth. There are only so many ways to write that brilliant batch of analysis you just read without getting sick of writing it, let alone reading it. But at one point, I now feel confident in saying, the stars will align, the opposing team won’t knock down those shots, the game will come down to the last few plays, and the Hoosiers won’t turn the ball over, or miss a free throw, or do something utterly erratic that boggles the mind and makes one throw a pillow at the opposite couch. They’ll complete that pass; they’ll make that shot; they’ll avoid weirdness. And they’ll win.

It will be short-lived and it might only be one game. But like I said: It will be awesome.

BRIEF, UNIMPORTANT MISCELLANY:

Without this turning into one of those gawd-awful notes columns some writers still do (Unfortunately Mike Downey retired from the Chicago Tribune; I so miss his wacky observations about American Idol and kids these days!), some random periphery stuff:

– The Indy Star’s always-interesting, always-verbose (really, though, who am I to talk?) Terry Hutchens is asking today why Devan Dumes wasn’t in the game down the stretch, even with his foul issues, which was hard not to notice during the game. It was made more obvious by Dumes taking that last three, which appeared to be a play set up for Matt Roth on a double screen. Roth was too slow getting around, Minnesota defended it well, and it was left to Dumes to take one of his wild-but-somehow-still-occasionally-goes-in 3-pointers. So, where was Dumes? And to a larger point, as a commenter noted under Alex’s wrap yesterday, are Tom Crean’s substitution patterns a teensy bit unreliable?

I don’t really have an answer, not only because it’s not something I’ve really noticed but I’m sort of hesitant to question how Crean could better maximize this team’s limited human capital. There’s not a lot of wiggle room there; they’re just bad, and he knows it. Tinkering too much with the Hoosiers’ lineup is a little like a fly adjusting its above-highway flight by a few inches. Recalibrate all you want, but that truck’s windshield is still coming.

– People actually showed up! To the game! And wore the right color shirt! And got to keep that shirt! And the shirt had a Winston Churchill quote on it! This is a win-win for everyone; as long as tickets remain $5 and t-shirts remain plentiful, maybe the Hoosiers can keep that attendance ticking in this, our year of recession (both athletic and economic).

Lowering cost, matching price to demand — sounds like a smart business strategy to me. But then my only business course was in sixth grade, when I played Lemonade Stand on my Apple IIE at study hall.

In the interest of staving off those existential demons, let’s get positive for a few paragraphs here, shall we? Cool. As there is no Shon Morris to take any rage out on this week, it’ll hopefully be a little easier.

(First, let’s do a musical interlude, something to help the mood:

WHOA OH OH. WHOA OH OH. Man, I’m ready now. Let’s do this.)

Ryan touched on much of “The Good” last night, but at least one of his points deserves to be hammered home: Verdell Jones is an improving basketball player. The freshman was set behind by an early season injury, but he seems fully recovered. What’s more, he seems to be learning. His direction of the offense (which at times against Ohio State’s matchup zone stretched the good-faith use of the term “offense”; standing overloading one side of the court doesn’t work if the overloading duo are standing right next to each other) was, as Ryan wrote, competent. His ability to get to the rim is a welcome sight. Jones isn’t a conventionally quick player. He glides, swoops to the lane, takes long jump stops before settling in to his mid-range jumper. He’s far from a perfect player — his defense is a long way away, among other things — but having someone who can both distribute the ball and command the team and also, you know, shoot the ball from time to time (cough Daniel Moore cough) is big.

What else? Well, fortunately for IU, last night’s loss could have been a lot narrower. I suppose that isn’t fortunate, since IU ended up losing anyway, but it should be noted that Ohio State shot the ball exceptionally well. Like, almost-off-the-charts well. Their effective field goal percentage (which accords an extra half percentage point for three point shots made) was 65.1 percent. Their season average is 51.1. And, though IU has had its woes in guarding the perimeter this season, they’re holding opponents to 52.7 percent eFG% on the season. What does all this mean? It means that while IU was probably worse than usual in defending the three, they played a team that was also very hot from the field, especially in that first half.

Anyway, for a little more statnerdness, below is a chart with Dean Oliver’s Four Factors; you’ll notice the eFG discrepancy immediately.

Ohio State misses a few of the shots and well, who knows? Actually, I know: IU still would have lost. But the loss wouldn’t have seemed so bad, and we would be talking about how the Hoosiers bounced back well from the Illinois loss, etc. See what I mean?

Let’s see, what else was good last night? Oh, yeah: Steve Lavin and Brent Musberger.

Because IU isn’t very good this year, it will likely be the rare Tuesday that I get to watch the Hoosiers play while the dulcet sounds of Brent Musberger ring in my head, but Brent, if you’re out there, just know that I love you. Your verbal flubs and occasional senior moments are totally fine with me. For whatever reason, your gravitas is like Tom Brokaw’s — you could fail miserably at your job and I’d still think you were awesome, just because your voice is so great. You and Brokaw were the televised soundtrack to my childhood. Keep trucking, Brenty.

And as for Steve …

Some people may get tired of Lavin’s schtick. Some people might get irritated when he says “pepper-pot,” or get confused at any of his one-off coined phrases that he invents and then discards like so much detritus. They’d have a perfectly reasonable preference. I could understand such a belief. But I do not share it. Rather, Lavin was the highlight of my night last night, the only guy that makes things interesting. And it’s not just the schtick, either — he’s a genuinely reasoned, well-thought-out dude, and he makes smart points both about the nuts and bolts of the game and about the larger situation, in this case, the ongoing rebuilding saga surrounding Our Indiana. I thought he and Brent killed it, and that was, as I’ve noted, a very good thing.

Lastly: We have to invent some sort of weekly award for Tom Crean. Maybe we can put it in the end of TMA, maybe not. But for a guy coaching dudes who are not only outmatched physically but who are routinely outsmarted and outplayed, he never — ever! I’ve been trying to catch him! — shows overt frustration. He only goes so far as the same level of frustration other coaches have with their players regardless of talent. He could be coaching the Harlem Globetrotters; his face gives nothing away. I can’t maintain the same, and I’m sitting at home on the couch with my laptop out. This man deserves the Nobel Prize. Or at least something we can cook up.

Anyway, that’s The Day In Indiana Positivity. Fun, right? Let’s see how long this one lasts.

As R, Alex, and my friends yesterday could attest, I racked my brain for a while thinking of things to say about this game, and I really don’t have much. Some blowouts you can analyze; some are deceptive. There was nothing deceptive happening Saturday. Illinois was just so much better in every facet of basketball it was simultaneously boring and engaging. That doesn’t happen often.

In any case, this is your Monday open thread. Discuss whatever you’d like, whether it’s Saturday’s game, or when you predict IU will win its first Big Ten contest, or whatever. It’s all you.

I have one thought to hopefully get the discussion going. Not only was IU bad on Saturday — just skillwise, in matchups, that sort of thing — but it was the first time this year that it seemed like they weren’t even trying. Transition defense was unusually slow; Illinois was able to get into their secondary break, make one pass, and have a wide open jumper waiting for them before IU even matched up man-to-man or picked up the nearest player. I understand being drained after the Michigan game. That’s fine. But the one positive constant about the Hoosiers this year has been their energy and commitment to their coach, and Saturday was the first time I didn’t see it.

Also, one more: Did Illinois fans even enjoy that? Wasn’t that sort of like working out all summer, getting big, hoping to fight the bully that terrorized you last year only to see the bully come back to school in a wheelchair? I mean, you can punch the kid in the face if you want … but it’s not going to be nearly as satisfying.

Haha, just kidding! That wasn’t fun at all! That was precisely as much fun as a rusty ballpeen hammer to the eye socket, only less violent, so long as you don’t count “throwing an empty can of whatever stupid health drink I’m swilling these days across the f–king room” as violence. The only thing that could have made last night’s second half less fun was if Tom Hamilton and Shon Morris were screaming and rattling off stupid one-liners, respectively, throughout the entire godforsaken telecast. Oh, wait. They were.

F–K.

I mean, really, where to start? With IU’s brilliant, peerless, unbelievable and unlikely first half? With Michigan’s inversely horrible one? With the Hoosiers’ slow descent in the second half? With the way Michigan gradually edged their way back in the game — not at all once, but with the methodical surety of a team absolutely confident of their superiority?

Instead I’ll start (this is sort of a start I guess; the actual start, as you likely noticed, was the angry diatribe at the top of the post) with halftime. Right in the middle, before the flood. IU was winning by a margin I’d honestly rather not recount. A few seconds after the buzzer sounded for halftime, I found myself doing something peculiar: clapping. To myself. This isn’t exactly rare; it happens every time I get even marginally excited about beating some snotty Brit in FIFA 09. But I did catch myself, and stop for a second, and pay attention to my computer again, and think, and that’s when it hit me:

The Dread.

I knew — could feel — that at the very least, Michigan would come back. It wouldn’t last, this success. Michigan would start hitting shots and IU would start missing them and the weird little turnovers Michigan was making would stop, and John Beilein would ramp up the 1-3-1, and whether it happened slowly or quickly or sooner or later the 2008-09 Hoosiers would play like the 2008-09 Hoosiers and bad things would happen. And they did.

Such is life as an IU fan this year. No lead is safe. No success is unblemished by the potential of future failure. And when the Hoosiers do win a Big Ten game, it won’t change this season’s general trajectory. (It will be bloody fun, though.)

———–

I had a whole bunch of little stats and observations I was ready to share, as if to lend some insight, but really, what insight is there to lend? It’s not a marginal thing you can dissect. IU played really, really well in the first half. They made shots. They made so many shots they still turned the ball over a bunch and it didn’t really matter as much. They shot and passed and worked the ball and Michigan didn’t do any of those things, and that was awesome. And then in the second half, they didn’t entirely stop doing those things, but gradually so, and man, you watched the game, right? You saw it.

(I’ll just add, as a general observation, that I’m starting to love Tom Pritchard, and that Devan Dumes is by far the most frustrating player I’ve ever watched, let alone rooted for. You can see the talent there. You know it exists. And every time he does something good, whatever demon sits on Dumes’ shoulder that tells him, “hey, Devan, you know what would be cool is if you ran at the hoop with reckless abandon right now, or shot that stupid 25-foot three, yeah, do it Devan go GO GO DO IT WILL BE FUN,” and Dumes listens. Devan: Stop. Think. Take like one-eighth of a deep breath. Give the demon time to talk himself to death; trust me, he doesn’t need long. After that, do what you must. That’s all I ask.)
———–

No, instead, I’d like to say a few words about Big Ten Network broadcast partners Tom Hamilton and Shon Morris. First, Hamilton:

Tom, hi. Eamonn here. Can I ask you a favor? Just between you and me, and the people that read this blog? Cool. Stop shouting. Stop thinking everything is awesome. When Gus Johnson does it, it’s great; when you do it, it is quite possibly the most annoying thing in the world. Even in the first half, when my favorite college basketball team was playing better than they have played (or might play) all year, you were ruining my experience. A little turnaround jumper is not AN AMAZING SHOT. Michigan’s comeback was not INCREDIBLE. It was to be expected, at least in some regard, and if you didn’t expect it you were broadcasting a game featuring two teams you knew nothing about. Which is worse?

Shon. Hey, Shon. I’m not even going to make fun of your name, dude. I’d prefer to focus on the merits here, and I’ve got to be honest: You occasionally said some insightful things last night. Occasionally. Unfortunately, you liked to punctuate them with what seemed to be prerehearsed lines — and if they seem prerehearsed, they probably are — like “100 percent? I can’t even get 100 percent on a blood test!” Oh, man, the jokes to be made here, Shon. But look, I’m refraining! I assure you, it isn’t easy.

I’m holding back, because I want to be your friend, Shon, and that’s why I tell you this: Stop it with the shtick, and don’t say silly things. There are guys that pull of the college basketball shtick, and there are guys that don’t. Look at Jay Bilas. Dude has no real charisma to speak of, but he’s solid enough and so people don’t mind when he’s covering their games. You don’t need shtick (“Onions!” “Baybee!” etc.) to be a good color guy. Just talk hoops, and be good at it. (Hint: It doesn’t help to tell IU fans that IU will be a Top-3 home court team in the Big Ten this year. I like to remain optimistic, but c’mon, dude.)

Cool? Cool. With my advice, I have no doubt you guys’ll … still not be very good at broadcasting. But this is the Big Ten Network. “Not very good” would be a huge step in the right direction.

———–

Funny, but that last sentence goes for IU, too. Not very good. I’d take that. For a half, we were very good, and it gives me hope. But 20 minutes of “very good” does not a program make. As we found out last night, if you couple it with 20 minutes of “horrible,” it doesn’t even win you a Big Ten game.

It’s not as though I had given up on the season in any sort of meaningful way. Actually, I’d given up on the season, in the way most people use the phrase (i.e. forgetting about any sort of end-term success prematurely) well before the season started. Whatever illusions I had about surprising a few people are long gone. Whatever hopes I had for a mid-Big Ten finish vanished somewhere in the Lipscomb box score.

Still …

Saturday’s game showed something. It showed that despite all of IU’s truly serious flaws, despite their disadvantages in talent, and despite their inexperience and sometimes strange behavior … they can compete. They can be competitive. Even if it’s against Iowa — a team that might feed on the bottom of the Big Ten this year too — it shows that if IU defends well, rebounds, and does all the very fundamental things that coaches try to instill before anything else, they can put in a respectable performance.

Let’s not forget what happened here. Just days after losing to Lipscomb — Lipscomb! — IU went on the road as 14-point conference underdogs and had a chance to steal the game on the last play. I’ll take that. This year, please believe I’ll take that.

A STUDY IN BALANCE

For most of the season, IU has relied on … well, now that I write that, they haven’t really relied on anything, because they haven’t really won anything. But for the sake of comparison, the Hoosiers have been reliant on Tom Pritchard rebounding a bunch on the offensive end, and on Devan Dumes hitting threes and various other ill-advised shots and scrapping together some transition buckets, and so on. Maybe that’s not the best description of what they do, but it’s a rough approximation. It’s in the ballpark.

The point is that IU has not ever really been a balanced team. They rely on a select few players to do the bulk of the scoring and rebounding. And yesterday, in what I’d argue was their best performance of the season, this was decidedly not the case:

That is a balanced performance. Even Devan Dumes — who was erratic and wild and goofy all day — made a contribution by getting to the line. If he wasn’t so inefficient with the ball, he’d be even better.

Anyway, the point is that, whether wittingly or not, the Hoosiers were offensively and defensively balanced yesterday. For a team with nothing like a star on the team, that’s a welcome development.

BUT, ALAS, SOME MORE OF THE SAME

That positivity aside, the Hoosiers still did the same bad things they always do. They turned the ball over, though only 11 times, which is serious progress. They committed a fatal number of fouls — 25, to be exact. And they did all the weird little things they always do — running at the hoop, losing the ball in transition, throwing up wild shots, missing layups, and so on. Dumes was the most noticeable problem in these regards, but not the only one, and at the end of the game Daniel Moore sealed the deal with a really poor play. Under no circumstance should Moore find himself dribbling to the corner on that last play, and under no circumstance should he pass the ball with anything less than 100 percent certainty it would be received by a fellow Hoosier. And that, as they say, was that.

Anyway, that happens, right? This is the team they are. I’m willing to accept the positives from Saturday’s game, and ignore the negatives. It’s progress, at the very least. Like I said: I’ll take it.

IU is not a very good basketball team.

IU is not going to be a very good basketball team.

IU is not even a decent basketball team.

IU is probably — probably — not going to be a decent basketball team.

Tom Crean is a God.

That’s about all I have at this point. Last night, watching the game with Ryan, I was trying to think of how I could write The Morning After about a game so poor, a team so painful to watch, that didn’t repeat itself so much. There are only so many ways R and Alex and I can come up with to say “IU is not very good. Tom Pritchard is solid. The Hoosiers turn the ball over too much.”

This is what happens every single game. Tom Pritchard rebounds well and finishes around the hoop and proves that he would be a pretty good four on a team with an athletic five and some skill at the guard position, which IU doesn’t have. Pritchard is not a star or a shoulderer of heavy loads the way D.J. White was; Pritchard is a complementary player that could be awfully good if he didn’t have to anchor a team with zero size and athletic ability.

As for the team itself, turnovers. My God, the turnovers. Some of them come at such strange times, don’t they? Like, Daniel Moore will be catching an outlet pass and it will go too far ahead of him, and he’ll wildly throw it back even though there are no defenders around him; or Kyle Taber will back into the post, think better of it, and try to hit an open shooter for three but will just inexplicably miss wildly. These aren’t fast-break turnovers. It’s elementary stuff, and they’re things IU has to — has to — clean up if they want to be even nominally competitive the rest of the way.

I’ll be honest. This is sort of depressing. Losing that badly to Kentucky, then turning around and losing to Northeastern at home. These are the times that try Indiana basketball fans’ souls. Which is why Tom Crean is so impressive to me. He hasn’t said word one in complaint about the talent he has this year, hasn’t once even hinted — not even in body language or tone or any of the other mechanisms Tim Roth uses to detect liars in that new show on Fox — that he’s exasperated with this team, even though he has to be. I am. And I’m not around all the time. I’m not responsible for trying to make a ragtag group of freshman and transfers and castoffs into something that doesn’t utterly depress everyone.

He seems to be taking it much better than I am.

But, of course, the reminder, which I’ll probably have to start chanting to myself: This is basketball. Like pizza and sex, even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Good thing … because this basketball is really, really bad.

The second half? As ugly as it was, and as much as I winced, and as openly as the ESPN studio clown mocked it — after the game, he said something like “They won’t be submitting that footage to the NCAA!” — IU undeniably played better than at any time this year. It was still ugly, sure. But there were signs of something underneath, too, a baseline level of competence, athleticism, and defensive ability that the Hoosiers had yet to showcase in their young, fitful season. It was nice to watch.

The point is that no matter how bad TCU is, or was supposed to be, IU has played its fair share of bad teams this year already (Chaminade, for one) and barely come out with a victory. Next to Cornell, and the first 20 minutes of Wake Forest, this was still IU’s most impressive performance to date.

I’m typing this from my apartment this morning as I rush out the door to an end-of-year corporate meeting that I didn’t know I had, so I won’t go too long with it, but a couple of things I noticed:

TP, OG: Tom Pritchard is a skilled big man. It took me a while to realize this — at first, I basically just wrote him off as a slightly-better version of Kyle Taber. He didn’t impress me. But he did last night. In a game against a team with no post presence whatsoever, Pritchard did what he was supposed to do: he had 15 points and 11 rebounds, and he controlled the interior for large stretches. Many of his buckets were the result of a) good positioning on the offensive glass or b) catching the ball in good spots and finishing easy baskets.

Pritchard may never be a star, and he might get eaten up by bigger, more athletic Big Ten forwards, but for now I’ll take him. He is a smart big man. He gets things done. That’s really all we can ask.

Verdell Jones, please come back: As much as I like Little Daniel Moore — “Little Daniel Moore” sounds like the protagonist in an Irish folk song — he has some key flaws. For one, his size; no amount of skill can overcome being smaller, and also less athletic, than D-1 college players. So Moore forces his dribble into places it shouldn’t go, and then loses it. He did this a couple different times last night. He is also a huge liability defensively, and he almost refuses to shoot, which reduces IU’s options on the offensive end. He’s a nice player, sure. But he’s not what he could be.

Which is why we need to get Verdell Jones back in the lineup ASAP. The two will complement each other nicely, I think, but asking Moore to carry the point guard load on his own is way too much to ask.

Finally, turnovers. Turnovers. Sigh. Turnovers. Even in the best IU games, turnovers are still an issue. IU had 19 turnovers last night. TCU, for what it’s worth, had 21. IU turned the ball over on 29.5 percent of its possessions. TCU turned it over on 32.8 percent. IU had, by all accounts, an incredibly sloppy night. To be honest, a better team — or maybe even a less turnover-prone TCU one — might have beaten IU. Maybe not. But with this game comfortably in our rearview, let’s take the one abiding lesson we know from our first foray in Indiana basketball:

If these turnovers continue, this season will not improve.

It’s just true. A team like IU gives up so much already — size, experience, speed, wile, athleticism, skill. All of the things that make up raw basketball talent, IU doesn’t have. So no one is expecting IU to win much in the Big Ten, and that’s fair. But to compete in the Big Ten, to compete on Saturday, IU has to stop turning the ball over. Has to. At the very least, that TO rate has to come down out of the stratosphere. The Hoosiers are too far behind in too many categories to just give the ball up to superior teams. We’re already playing with the short deck; we don’t need to forfeit any more cards.

Fortunately, Big Blue Nation likes to cough it up, too. So we’ll see how it goes.

1. Me talking about basketball in a barely informed fashion, including but not limited to offensive sets, efficiency, tempo-free/possession-related statistics, and how irritating it is when people take too many bad shots, or

2. Why the Big Ten Network sucks.

3. Why Player X is incredibly interesting to me, even if that player isn’t particularly effective. Last year: Eli Holman.

You get the idea. Even better if you’re a regular reader, you know the idea. Unfortunately, today’s TMA will not look much like the idea.

Why? Let me tell you about my Wednesday night.

I got off work, which was sort of busy but not too busy (which could describe just about anybody’s work day four times out of five), and I got on the train and went to the store and then to Starbucks and then I walked home. I sat down, got on my computer, approved a bunch of live blog comments, and watched IU play Wake Forest in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. I saw a scrappy, well-disciplined, seemingly focused IU team hang on for about 10 minutes or so before getting blown out. I approved some more blog comments. I whined about ESPN a bunch. I ate some pad thai. I approved some more comments, and watched some more basketball, and winced as IU got torn to shreds by a team that was barely even trying, barely even sweating. I approved some more blog comments. And then the game ended.

Somewhere in all that, I got a little bit sad. Not too sad. It’s just basketball, after all. I didn’t get overwhelmingly, crushingly, end-of-Where-The-Red-Fern-Grows sad. Like I said, it was just a little bit. But it was sadness all the same.

What happened? I’m not too sure, but this is what I think. I think I realized, for the first time, just how bad this team could be. I realized that no matter how well-coached this team is, how hard they try, or how much they care, they are going to be inferior in nearly every way to nearly every team they play against, and with few exceptions, they will lose.

It took me a little bit to get there. I knew they would be bad, sure, but how bad? How to gauge it? The first few games, against supposed cupcakes, don’t tell us anything; they’re as useless as preseason football. I didn’t get to see much of Maui, because I was on vacation. I saw scores, but I didn’t see the games, you know? I couldn’t actually witness it with my own two eyes. Last night, I could. I did. And it was way, way worse than I thought.

I know I’m being overdramatic here. It’s bad, but it’s not that bad. There is some talent and potential scattered throughout IU’s lineup. It’s not desolate. But it is bad.

Which is why I’d like to make a humble proposal, both to myself, and to everyone else who made it this far down the page, because I’d imagine you care about this stuff more than you probably should, like me:

Don’t be cynical. Allow yourself a soft spot. Enjoy the means, and not the end.

What do I mean by that? Let’s see if I don’t butcher this analogy.

ESPN is an annoying network. It’s filled with people that irritate me viscerally, with people that attempt to appeal both to the lowest common denominator and to the casual fan, because they know the hardcore people will stay no matter what. This is a place that continues to allow Chris Berman to crack the same jokes, over and over, time and again. It’s a place that took a great thing, SportsCenter, and stuffed it full of nonsense and screamers and people whose idea of football analysis is to laugh uproariously at things that aren’t funny. In almost every way — but of course not every way — ESPN annoys me.

This includes ESPN’s “I Wish” segments. You know the ones. They take the little kid and put Vaseline on the lens and do these sappy, supposedly heartwarming stories about children that are sick, and who get their one big wish thanks to the benevolence of ESPN. I don’t know. These shouldn’t bother me. They’re innocent enough. But they always feel creepy, like a small, insidious form of exploitation. If I was a little kid, the last thing I’d want to do is have the best day of my life filmed by ESPN. But that’s just me. I’m cynical like that.

So it goes for the saying “they play hard.” It shouldn’t bother me. It’s innocent enough. But I hate that saying. It’s so condescending and wrongheaded. Everyone plays hard, OK? With few exceptions, you can’t be a legitimate college basketball player or team or whoever without playing hard. I hate when people throw that around. I hate it like I hate ESPN’s soft-focus segments.

But I allow myself one exception to the ESPN soft-focus rule. His name is Jimmy V. Every year, I watch that speech, and I allow myself to be inspired. To be idealistic. To understand that yeah, you know what? That’s damn right: Every day is a gift, and we forget it too often. Cherish it. Work for it. Always do your best. Keep trying. Don’t give up. Never give up. The whole deal. It rips me to shreds every time.

So I’m going to try to apply that exception to this year’s Hoosiers. Will I get sick of hearing, constantly, as we did last night, that IU is disciplined and focused and gutty and gritty and hard-working, but gosh, if only they weren’t barely a mid-major in the talent department, they’d be good? Shucks, this team is just bad! Yes, I will grow tired. Very. But instead of getting angry about every time, instead of getting annoyed, I’m just going to suck it up. I’m going to avoid cynicism. And I’m going to remember that the whole point of watching is never just about wins and losses, that the means are often as much fun as the end, that every day — even a day as mundane as going to work and coming home and watching college basketball — is a gift.

At the end of the day, it’s still college basketball. It’s a gift. We might as well enjoy it while we can.

I’ll admit it: After about five minutes last night, I had to admit something to myself. I didn’t know who was who. It’s sad, I know, but I doubt that I’m alone here, and I hope it’s not too bold of me to admit it. It took me a second to figure out that Verdell Jones was No. 12, that that wasn’t Devan Dumes, that Dumes was the off-guard wearing No. 33, and who is that little dude with the Rip Hamilton facemask on? That’s not Finkelmeier, is it? And oh my God is that Tijan Jobe?! It took me a second to figure it all out, and it required me whipping out the laptop and keeping the roster handy. I’m not afraid to admit it.

Because of that, a lot of stuff blurred together, but plenty stuck out, too. Off we go, then:

THINGS TO BE SLIGHTLY, CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT:

Effort: This is going to be a theme all season, so let’s just get it out of the way early. This team is going to be very likable. They are going to play hard. They are going to have good attitudes. All of that. Even when they’re not playing with a good attitude it will seem that way, because you can’t have worse attitudes than last year’s team, and as long as Matt Roth doesn’t smoke a crack pipe at midcourt and punch a cheerleader in the face, pretty much anything will seem like an improvement. So after every game, the chorus will be the same: These guys sure play hard! Man, they sure seem to care! Bless their little hearts, huh? This is going to get incredibly annoying. But last night? It was true. They did play hard. And they did seem to actually care. Credit where it’s due, both to the team and to Tom Crean for getting them to buy in. The best basketball coaches are salesmen, and Tom Crean could sell me a ticket to Kelvin Sampson: The Broadway Musical. He’s done the same sales job on his team. Effort will not be a problem this year, at least not anytime soon.

Devan Dumes: When I hear Northwestern State, I immediately think “last-second shot over Iowa in the NCAA Tournament,” and then I get a big smile on my face. But after I think of that, I (perhaps wrongly) think of the stereotype of a mid-Major — scrappy, unathletic, hard-nosed, heavily reliant on three pointers. Northwestern State wasn’t really like that at all. They were just sort of bad, especially on defense, where they were genuinely awful in the full court press. So I don’t want to get too excited about Devan Dumes’ night. But it is encouraging, at the very least, to know that the team contains some semblance of offensive talent that can score when allowed to do so. Dumes’ night was like that — impressive, but not overly so. Just solid. But I’ll take solid if it puts the occasional point on the board.

Verdell Jones: I might actually be more excited about Jones than I am about Dumes. For whatever reason, I really like Jones’ game — he’s lanky, deliberate, he sort of glides around. His arms are long enough to make him play bigger than his listed size. Having that kind of athletic ability at the point is a real luxury … even if Verdell has a lot of things to figure out about the position. On a team with minimal size, um, everywhere, Jones is a boost. (He also had kind of a crazy line last night: 18 points, five assists, three blocks, three steals, three turnovers, 10-13 from the free-throw line. That’s like a mini-Josh Smith-on-the-Hawks line. I love it.)

Daniel Moore: It took about five minutes last night before the the friends I watched the game with were already calling him the second coming of Errek Suhr. Fortunately — and no disrespect to Suhr — but I think it’s clear Moore is a much, much better player. I’m sure I missed something, but I don’t know if I saw Moore make a truly bad decision all night. Despite his size deficit, he gets around people in the open floor. He can make open shots, and he’s a great passer. So maybe he’s not a point guard in the Big Ten, but you can do much, much worse coming off the bench than Moore. That’s a great walk-on right there.

Tijan Jobe: Haha. Just kidding. Nothing to be optimistic about here.

THINGS THAT ARE BASICALLY AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER:

The Frontcourt: Speaking of Tijan Jobe, oh boy. The frontcourt. Where to start?

I don’t want to be too harsh, because Kyle Taber seems like a pretty cool dude. Relaxed guy. The kind of kid you’re hoping is your roommate when you move to school — plays video games, probably, not too rowdy, doesn’t do hard drugs in plain sight. (Everyone knows that kid freshman year. He is to be avoided; he won’t last the first semester.) So I think I like Kyle Taber as a person. But as a basketball player, as the captain of this team? Eesh.

Last year, Taber made a living off of one thing: playing opposite D.J. White. White would shoot it, and defenders would crash to him while Taber snuck in, grabbed a rebound, and either tipped it back in or passed to a guard and restarted the offense. He was perfect for that. But when Taber is the supposed to be your “best” big man, well, you’re going to get killed on the interior all season. Just murdered. And it already started last night.

For example: Northwestern State had 27 — 27! — offensive rebounds. Eight Northwestern players had at least two offensive rebounds each. Northwestern State had eight blocks, which doesn’t seem like that many, actually. I would have thought, oh, 30 or so? That’s how it felt, anyway.

As for the non-Taber members of the frontcourt: Tom Pritchard is like Kyle Taber, except left-handed. He might actually be a bit more talented, thank God, but he’s certainly not more athletic, or bigger; he just seems to know how to get the most of his limitations. And Tijan Jobe. Oh, Tijan. Tijan Tijan Tijan. God bless him. He looks incredibly interested in playing hard basketball, in rebounding, that sort of thing. That’s probably the nicest thing that can be said about his basketball ability right now.

THINGS WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT:

Pretty much everything else. But there’s IUPUI Tuesday night, and so goes the season. Another game, another batch of info to learn. And then? The Road to the Final Four. We’re going all the way! 1-0! WOOOO!

This could be a long season.

It’s over. The speculation, the rumors, the top five lists for coaching candidates — it’s over. Tom Crean is IU’s next coach. And really, I think it’s a great fit. I was infatuated with Tony Bennett like the rest of you out there; I was hoping for a big splash name too. But Crean falls somewhere in the middle of that. He’s young at 42. (Who else is relived we didn’t land Lon Kruger or Mike Montgomery? Phew.) He’s got Big Ten experience under Tom Izzo at Michigan State and recruits Chicago and Indiana. He doesn’t have to get set up for recruiting in the Midwest; he’s been doing it for years.

His coaching philosophy should fit the Indiana mold as well. His defense is tight-nosed in the half court (think of Dominic James giving some great on-ball pressure) and his offensive sets are varied and complex. (Hey, we might actually have plays and stuff!) This is not to say he’s going to succeed at every turn. That would be foolish. And it’s not to say he’s not without flaw. His NCAA tourney record might not jump out at you (5-5) and he’s only won one game in the Big Dance since Dwyane Wade left the program in 2003. He’s been to the NIT quite a bit too. But hey, he can’t come up all roses.

So first thing is first: the press conference later this morning. Crean will hopefully etch out why he made the move and what he plans to do. Then his next mission is to get a hold of Jamarcus Ellis, Armon Bassett, Terrell Holloway and Devin Ebanks. From how Ellis talked to the IDS tonight and touted how much of a recruiter Crean is, I’m hopeful we can score three of those guys back. Ebanks is probably a lost cause. From there, onwards to win over the university, boosters, fans, the state of Indiana. Think Kelvin Sampson’s barnstorming tour from a few years back.

Speaking of Kelvin Sampson, we have a guy in Crean that’s run a clean program up to this point. As far as we know, he has no problems using the telephone. After the NCAA rules in June, we hopefully will no longer be on pins and needles wondering what current setback is going to befall our Hoosiers.

So rejoice. Sit back. Relax. It only gets better from here.

College basketball seasons are long and dynamic things. They’re not like college football seasons, which require drilled excellence from the outset and where a midseason loss can kill your chances at winning a truly screwed-up national championship. They’re not like NFL or NBA seasons, where each team is basically what they are starting in training camp. They’re not baseball seasons, either, where the playoffs are such a comparably small sample size that all a fan can hope for is a division title — the rest feels like a crapshoot.

Instead, college basketball teams, the ones that compete in March, have similar blueprints: They roll the balls out in October, look terrible in November and December, coalesce in January, fade slightly in February, and, if they’re really good, peak in March when the games matter most. This blueprint hits close to home; just look at Michigan State this year. Or North Carolina. Or any of the teams still playing basketball next weekend. Or any of the 20 or so teams that lost last weekend that deserved to win. That’s the blueprint you’re supposed to follow.

I wish we could look back at IU’s season, as this TMA intends to, and say they followed the blueprint. A loss to a good Arkansas team under those auspices would have been OK. But we can’t say that. Instead, they didn’t push to the finish, or peak in their late games. They quit. They just quit. And for some reason, I’m not even mad.

What can you be mad about? Not at the players. I’ve said this before, but it’s like mom (IU) and dad (Sampson) divorced in the middle of high school. College basketball players aren’t so removed from their teenage years. How did you think they’d respond? How would you have responded?

You can get angry at the administration for bungling the situation on about 100 different levels, but you can’t really get angry at them for firing Sampson in-season. Fans were calling for his head, and to save their own face and improve the prospects of a top-flight coach coming to IU in the next few weeks, they had to act quickly and decisively. Sampson had to be gone. You can’t blame them for trying to end a bad situation as soon as possible.

If you want to get angry, don’t blame the players, and don’t blame the administration. (At least not for this. Fall break — now that’s an issue to get mad about.) Blame Kelvin Sampson. He ruined everything, not only for himself, but the players he claimed to love, and for the university he devoted himself to. He had the balls to sit in the office of the winningest coach of all time — a coach with his own flaws, but with high standards, too — and merely pay lipservice to the notions many fans hold dear to their hearts. But he didn’t get it. It’s not just talk. It can’t be, not at IU. That Sampson didn’t understand the difference, that he was simultaneously so audacious and dumb as to assume his words were nothing more than a pacifier to his constituent public — well, that’s why he deserves scorn.

He made the season a sad footnote, made Dan Dakich an ineffective interim babysitter, made the players wonder where their father was. That’s where the anger belongs, if you believe it belongs anywhere: at Sampson’s feet.

Me? I’m not mad at all, like I said above. Anything positive that would happened after Sampson’s departure would have been a bonus. What’s the point in being all pissed off about a season that ended eight games ago? All you can do is gear up for the coaching search, throw your support into one corner or another, enjoy the rest of the tournament, and move on. Here’s trusting IU won’t make the same mistake twice. Here’s hoping they get the right guy. And here’s saying goodbye to everything that came before, where we — because this is sports, and not real life — can say without a drop of cynicism that a new day is dawning. And who could be mad about that?

– As for Arkansas, there’s not a whole lot to add. Eric Gordon (more on him below) didn’t suddenly start hitting shots again; IU didn’t suddenly start defending again; Dakich continued to force them to play man-to-man, a style at which they were never adept. It was the same sad story as every other post-Sampson game. IU gave up 86 points — 86! — on 66 possessions, and though their offense was OK, it’s very, very difficult to win when you allow 1.3 points per possession.

Positives? They’re hard to find. Maybe Lance Stemler hitting a couple of shots? Maybe, um … I don’t know. That was probably it, and even that felt kind of bitter. (Stemler waits until now to start shooting. Fantastic.)

– Friday’s loss meant saying goodbye to both Eric Gordon and D.J. White, and I’d assume that most fans have remarkably different opinions of the two players. We all know D.J. White’s story, and we all know that he was really the only player on the team fighting for anything down the stretch, or at least the only player having success doing so. White’s legacy will be one of loyalty and devotion and unfulfilled promises, but he will be canonized in Hoosier lore in very positive ways. In four years of tumult, he was a constant. He deserves credit — and every IU fan’s best wishes for a profitable pro career — for that.

But what about Eric Gordon? What legacy does he leave?

I think it’s safe to say, as the year closes, that Gordon is still vastly overrated in a variety of ways … but not as overrated as the last few games would make him seem. It’d be easy to jump on without remembering that Gordon is a freshman, and that freshmen are prone to injury, wear and tear, streaky shooting, and turnovers. We saw all of that in Gordon. We also saw some remarkable potential that he can fill, potential that might yet make him a slightly bigger version of Ben Gordon. The shame is that we won’t get to see what Gordon might have done with a year under his belt, what his progress as a sophomore might have been, if he could have competed for national awards commensurate to his obvious ability.

His legacy is mixed. It’s a shame — though an entirely justifiable one — that it’s also so short.

– As for the rest of these players, I’ll be the first to say I’m glad Jamarcus Ellis is going to come back, and I’m glad he seems to be saying the right things in regard to dealing with a new coach. Next year is Ellis’ shot — as a Juco guy, he only gets two — and he’d do well to make use of it. Same goes for DeAndre Thomas. Thomas needs to continue to shed pounds and to work on his vertical jump and strength in the post. He could be a valid contributor next year.

Armon Bassett was perhaps this season’s most pleasant individual surprise. He unveiled a truly consistent outside jumper, showed lots of defensive progress, and developed as a “true” point guard. Here’s hoping the new coach does enough to win him over before Bassett is swooned by a big program in need of a dead-eye shooter.

Lance Stemler was Lance Stemler. Lance was always asked to do things he had never done before in his life, so I will always appreciate his willingness to do so to find a spot at a higher level. If only he had been the shooter we were all promised; turns out, he was a volume guy, and there was no reason to give Stemler volume, like, ever.

Jordan Crawford was also a pleasant surprise this season. Crawford is a much more typical freshman than Gordon or Derrick Rose or any of the other super-frosh heading to college these days, but a few years ago, when the rest of those players would have gone pro, Crawford’s game would have been even more highly touted. All told, he’s a good shooter, a creative offensive player, a decent, if turnover-prone, passer, and a really bad defender. In other words, he’s a freshman. It’d be great to see him blossom over four years, but you couldn’t blame Crawford if he found somewhere else that recruited him a year ago. He has a bright future ahead.

Farewell, Mike White. We hardly knew ye.

Kyle Taber found a home this year. So long as he never, ever shoots the ball outside four feet — something Taber understands well, which is refreshing — I’ll be glad to have him back.

Eli Holman says he’ll be back. Please, Eli — harness that athleticism. Please.

And everyone else: It was a season. It was OK at points. Bad at a lot of others. But like I said above, a new day is dawning. Let’s try to have some fun with it.

Editor’s Note: You can read more of PostmanE’s take on college basketball at the Dagger on Yahoo! Sports.

Bad decisions from the three-point line. Bad decisions in the post. Bad decisions on defense. Whatever bad decision Jamarcus Ellis made in between now and last Wednesday. Most especially, bad decisions in the final minutes of overtime, a time when inside buckets could have helped keep the Hoosiers afloat. Bad decisions when IU opted for three-pointer after three-pointer. Bad decisions that neglected D.J. White too often and made IU look too little like the team it could have been on the eve of the Big Ten Tournament.

– The optimist in me wants to ignore the various deficiencies today. Instead, it would be just as easy to chalk this game up to late-season fatigue and apathy, similar to the ugly first 30 minutes of Wednesday’s win over the Tubby Gophers. Sunday’s first half was a display of rampant sluggishness, followed by a second half of disorganized frenzy. Both halves yielded very few made shots for IU. Neither of those things are necessarily an indictment of the team if they happen once or twice in a row, but now, since Kelvin Sampson was fired, they have happened five straight times.

We’ve been over this before, but let’s look at it again:

– Win at Northwestern, in a game that makes NU’s gimmicky offense and Kevin Coble look like UNC and Tyler Hansbrough. Lucky that Northwestern’s defense is just incompetent enough to keep IU in the game throughout.
– Win over Ohio State at home in a game that, as you were watching, felt like the Hoosiers should have been playing far more convincingly. That’s gut-feeling stuff and admittedly not very tangible, but you know what I’m talking about. (Though with Ohio State’s win over Michigan State, at least the Buckeyes look like a tournament team again.)
– The drubbing at Michigan State. Let’s not review that one again.
– Ugly 30 minutes vs. Minnesota. Eventual win thanks to briefly revived offense.
– Sunday’s loss.

See what I mean? There’s a trend there, a trend of serious systemic defensive problems, of sporadic offensive lapses, and of playing down to the level of the opponent. To chalk that up to bad shooting is to do a disservice to just how mediocre IU has been over the past three weeks. Three in a row is a trend. What does that make five?

– With that disclaimer aside, IU did shoot really, really poorly. In a game that saw IU chuck up 33 threes, even a slightly better performance — an extra two or three shots — would likely have assured victory. Instead the Hoosiers went 7-33 for three (including 1-7 in overtime), a performance that doomed their chances.

What’s especially frustrating is not that IU missed a lot of shots. That happens. What’s worse is that after the first two halves, IU still felt it necessary to take most of their shots from three. One would think that 40 solid minutes of perimeter futility would encourage a team to get their All-American center — who was 8-11 Sunday — a few more touches. Apparently not.

– Despite the disappointing result (“Disappointing result?” This stuff is making me write in boring coachspeak) there were a few positives. Chief among them: With another five or six or 15 touches, D.J. might have had a career night. After a few weeks of shaky shooting, Eric Gordon found, at least for a time, his shooting touch. And most of all, Kyle Taber was the role player IU needs. Finally. He exists.

Taber has been doing this for a while now, but it was on display more than ever Saturday. He rebounded. He kept plays alive. He defended the off-post position well. He was everything Lance Stemler was expected to be over the past year and a half.

What’s the difference? Taber has an extra inch or so of height on Stemler, but he isn’t stronger, can’t jump higher, and isn’t more skilled. Why is he effective and Stemler (usually) isn’t?

My quick, maybe half-baked theory on why Taber works in this role and Stemler doesn’t: Throughout Lance Stemler’s basketball upbringing, he was a shooter. His three-point shooting at the JUCO level was not only impressive, it was prolific. When he came to IU, he was supposed to be an outside shooter with a dash of hustly role player to boot. When it was clear that Stemler wasn’t hitting the open three’s he was brought on to hit, Sampson converted him almost entirely to an off-post role player. (This is after Ben Allen made it clear he had no interest in the job, though Sampson bungled Allen’s handling in equal measure.) Anyway, Stemler became the role guy in his first year of Division I basketball.

Lots of players have to make this adjustment, but Kyle Taber isn’t one of them. For two (three? LOOK UP) years now, he’s had a few things hammered into his head in practice. It’s your job to rebound. it’s your job to tip balls and keep them alive. It’s your job to defend. It is not your job to shoot or contribute in any way offensively besides wide-open, putback layups.

Some players are cut out for this role. Kyle Taber appears born for it. Stemler never really quite got it. The differences are obvious.

– There’s Big Ten Tourney analysis to be done, but the time is not at the end of this particularly long piece of drivel. Heads up for that. In the meantime, enjoy your thoroughly tempered expectations. And as always, thoughts in the comments.

Moreover, those of us watching at home got to feel the pangs of senior night, but it’s not like this is the last time we get to see D.J. White suit up. There’s Penn State on Saturday, then the Big Ten Tournament, then the NCAA’s, then, if you really want to get devoted, you can become a fan of whatever NBA team takes White in the late first round. (And Eric Gordon in the lottery.) So no matter which way you slice the thing, last night’s game was a little boring. It was emotional without being heartbreaking, important without being dire, and interesting without being enthralling. It was IU-Minnesota on
March 5. Apathy ruled the day.

– Of course, it didn’t help that the Hoosiers were so sluggish for the first 30 minutes of the game. If we were nonplussed, what were they? D.J.’s three aside – at least he got that under his belt as a Hoosier – was there a single exciting moment in the first half?

Part of that is the situation: March 5 vs. Minnesota. But part of that seems worrisome. Since Dan Dakich took over as head coach, he’s done the following:

• Barely beaten then-0-13 Northwestern in a defensively horrid performance.
• Barely beaten a bubble-scrounging Ohio State team at home; again, not a great defensive performance.
• Gotten absolutely blasted out of the gym against one-time offensive force of nature (1.5 PPP!) Michigan State.
• Played sluggish, ugly basketball at home against the 8-8 Minnesota Gophers and Tubby “How long do I have to be mediocre before people stop calling me great?” Smith.

In each of the above games, the defense regressed while the offense has improved. If I remember correctly, Dakich claimed at the beginning of his tenure that he planned to keep the offense in place, but that he would tinker with the defense. Maybe four games is too small a sample size to judge, but note to Senor Dakich: STOP TINKERING.

Put down your tinker toys. Stop touching the tink. De-tink yourself. Whatever it is you’re doing – playing more man-to-man, adjusting rotations, whatever it is – stop it. Stand there on the sideline, call the occasional inbounds play, and get the hell out of the way.

– Now is the time of the year when people are sincerely focused on seeding, bubble position, and Bracketology. If the Hoosiers were seeded today (according to ESPN bracket pointy brain Joe Lundardi), the Hoosiers would be a No. 4 seed. That position needs a little improving – those 4/13 and 5/12 games are usually rife with upsets. So while the impending Big Ten Tourney is an after thought in IU’s tourney hopes, winning the thing and getting up to a No. 3 or maybe (but probably not) a No. 2 would be spectacular. That will require IU to play defense, though; let’s not hold our breath.

– Finally, a last note about the seniors. Our game wrap alluded to it last night, but is there a bigger trooper in college basketball than D.J. White? In high school, recruits like White are promised the world. They’re promised a national title shot, conference wins, NBA money, and, if they’re Memphis recruits, who knows what else. But most of all, they’re promised – or they should be promised – stability. A father figure. Someone to watch out for them when they’re out and away from their cocoon for the first time in their lives.

D.J.’s never had that. He got to IU as a raw prospect and suffered through two .500 seasons under Mike Davis. When Davis finally pooled some post talent together, D.J. and Marco Killingsworth were set to dominate the Big Ten. After Killingsworth’s incredible performance against Duke – I’ll never forget the sound Assembly Hall made when he dunked on that fast break – he broke down, and just as soon as D.J. recovered from his injury he was hurt yet again.

And then Mike Davis got fired. And then his best friend, Robert Vaden, left. And then he put his trust in a new coach – decided to stay at IU – only to have that trust revoked because Sampson couldn’t find it in his power to keep his damn hands off his cell phone.

Yet there D.J. was, last night, banging down low, hitting mid-rangers (something his game used to sorely lack), dropping a three, rebounding, and, yes, smiling. D.J. was promised a lot at IU, and has received very little in return. He deserved every cheer he got last night, and every single penny of the money he’ll get this summer.

The first interpretation relies on the notion that IU has some hand in everything that happens to them on the basketball court. As a rule, this is true, but there are exceptions — a team gets inconceivably hot, for example. Which is what happened Sunday. The second interpretation is that, for at least one day, Michigan State became an unbeatable, impossible foe, caught in a shooting flurry that took off in the first minute and lasted until the 40th. This requires the idea that no matter what IU team showed up yesterday, even one performing at the 99th percentile of the Hoosiers’ ability, Michigan State would have trounced them.

As antithetical as that idea is, it was hard to watch yesterday and think it wasn’t true. Observe:

Both teams took the same number of shots, but look at the outcome: Michigan State made 37 while IU made 27. Michigan State shot a 71.3 effective field goal percentage, which is insane for anyone, let alone for a team that averages 53 percent a game. IU shot 50 percent. On 70 possessions, MSU scored 104 points, a rate of 1.5 points per possession. The Hoosiers scored 1.1. By all offensive measures, IU performed to its season averages. Michigan State performed out of this effing world. What, exactly, can be done about that?

– Better defense would be a good start, of course. Something to consider here is that Dan Dakich has said he’s leaving the offense alone, but plans on tinkering with the defense. No amount of “tinkering” is going to be responsible for giving up 1.5 ppp, but at the same time IU seemed to be peaking defensively a few weeks ago. If the last few games are any indication — especially that shootout with, of all teams, Northwestern — the defense is now regressing.

Even against a really hot shooting team, the defense was exposed yesterday. Transition buckets came way too easily. Dunks were too frequent. Pick and rolls were defended so unsoundly, I was reminded of the team’s first few games this season. Michigan State outran IU, out schemed them, and made the Hoosiers’ defense look as bad as it has all year. Let’s hope the defensive ugliness is an aberration, and not the rule under Dakich. Because 1.5 ppp against is the fastest possible way to get sent home in March.

– Still, it feels like there isn’t much to write about this game, because it was an aberration. It was. It had to be. Think about it: After the end of the first half, Michigan State was on pace for 120 points. 120! In a 40 minute basketball game. To over analyze this, or proclaim this team dead, would be to ignore just how ridiculous yesterday was. If it happens again, fine. Call the season. But in the meantime, the wise approach here is to laugh this game off, suck up the likelihood that the Big Ten crown isn’t headed our way (and really, who cares that much about winning the Big Ten?), and refocus for March. One torrential Michigan State performance, no matter how off the charts, doesn’t automatically spell doom. Not yet, anyway.

I think we can chalk most of last night’s game up to bad shooting. Look at the numbers: The Hoosiers shot far below their season average effective field goal, putting up 43.4 percent. Their season total is 10 points higher than that, at 53.6 percent. The turnovers were about even with their season average and the points per possession weren’t wildly different — IU just shot poorly. Fortunately, the Hoosiers rebounded well on the offensive end and held off a weirdly inconsistent Buckeyes team.

It’s hard to get a good feeling for where the Buckeyes stand. In their first 12 minutes on the floor, they looked disinterested, sloppy, outwitted, and boring. In their next 20 or so minutes, up until and after the half, Ohio State looked focused, efficient, and driven. The real OSU probably falls somewhere between that mix, which isn’t likely to be good enough to get them in the NCAA tournament.

– I’m pretty sure I saw a comment — lots of comments, actually — in the postgame thread last night complaining about Eric Gordon. That’s partially justifiable: Gordon had a bad game last night. A really bad one. 17 points in 40 minutes is not exactly stellar, especially given the awful shooting and the seven turnovers. Gross.

I think it’s safe to say now that this is what Eric Gordon is. He’s flawed. He’s a good shooter prone to off nights without much of a mid-range game. He’s fantastic at getting to the basket but isn’t always under control when he gets there. He plays fast and loose and hard, but his ball handling is the weakest part of his game. He turns the ball over. A lot.

He also gets to the free throw line more frequently than anyone else in the conference and makes 86 percent of his shots while there. That, as it did last night, is perhaps his most important and valuable trait, one that sustains his game when everything else is broken. This is the player we recruited. This is the player we have. Complaining about it now is almost pointless.

– I love Steve Lavin and Brent Musberger, but they have a funny habit of taking the wrong side of every issue. Just last week, in their broadcast of IU’s win over Purdue, Musberger was openly lobbying to keep Kelvin Sampson around. He never really provided justification for his opinion on the matter — either he didn’t think Sampson cheated, or didn’t deserve the punishment for his crimes. Either way, it didn’t make a lick of sense.

Last night was no different. It was Lavin, this time, providing horrible advice to IU’s administration: Consider hiring Dan Dakich. It’s a comical notion. Dakich is a palatable, keep-everybody-happy interim coach that will likely do a fine job keeping the team intact over the next few weeks. Maybe he’ll even make a tournament run! But regardless of his success, the chances of him keeping this job are absolutely zero.

What was even funnier than Lavin’s suggestion was the circular way he went about justifying it. At Bowling Green, Dakich posted a 156-140 over ten years. That’s pretty middling, and usually, “middling” at a mid-major doesn’t earn one a top job in the country. You have to be Sean Miller good, or Mark Few good. But according to Lavin, Dakich “honed his craft” — whatever that means — and would be a good fit thanks to his Bob Knight ties. Also, Lavin compared Dakich to Joe Torre, which is laughable not only because Torre is probably a better manager of people than Dakich will ever be, but because managing in baseball is so much different than college basketball it’s not even worth a comparison. Baseball managers take the talent they’re given and manage it to the best of their abilities, and most studies point to the idea that managers have a relatively negligible, or at least statistically undetectable, impact on the game. Take Joe Torre: Torre is known as a Hall of Fame manager because he won four titles with the New York Yankees, but anyone that watches baseball intelligently realizes that the Yankees were the highest-paid, most-talented organization in baseball for almost all of Torre’s tenure.

Unlike Torre, after this year, Dakich’s talent reserves would be dry. He’d be responsible for recruiting his own talent, not having it handed down by a front office, and the thought that Dan Dakich is somehow the right coach for IU for the long-term future is just laughable. Even Dan Dakich knows this. So Steve Lavin, please stop saying otherwise. We love you too much to see you be wrong so often.

But these are not normal circumstances. The past two weeks have been strange, ridiculous, odd, crazy, emotional — they’ve veered into apathy, to anger, to resignation. A group of young men lost their father figure. Their father blew his shot at one of the best jobs in college basketball. And an assistant coach that looks a lot like a high school gym teacher — in a good way! — took over despite the threat of a boycott by his All-American center. These are not normal circumstances.

Those circumstances will linger for a while. They’ll give things meaning that might not normally have them, like D.J.’s hug for Dan Dakich last night. Any other time, that’s a hug merely of exhaustion. Last night, it was the ultimate sign of solidarity, acceptance, and a willingness to soldier on. That undercurrent will be there for a while, but if last night proved anything, it’s that there’s life after Kelvin Sampson. Basketball players play; coaches coach. That’s all it is, really.

So last night’s win was a relief. It was pure: basketball as it should be. Ball on court. Defense on offense. It was a shoddy defensive effort, a sloppy offensive one, and an all-around ugly game portending defensive weaknesses for IU. And I’m not even mad at all, because basketball is back.

— Last night’s main issue was predictable. Because Northwestern runs a junk-style backcut offense, it’s important to prepare for them carefully; they’re like no other team on the schedule. Friday, in the midst of a drawn out, clusterf— of a resignation announcement, several players boycotted practice. Later, they took a walkthrough, but even if that walkthrough was the most productive, insightful walkthrough of all time, it was but one walkthrough. Northwestern requires more prep than that. The Hoosiers didn’t get it.

And that’s why you saw the poor defensive effort. Giving up 82 points to Northwestern on 66 possessions is way, way too many. Northwestern comes into every game ready to backcut you to death, and the minute you figure out the backcut, they start chucking threes. IU clearly wasn’t ready, or if they were, they executed like they weren’t. Threes were open and were falling (Northwestern’s 58.7% effective field goal percentage tells that tale), and IU failed to contain penetration. It was an ugly performance.

– Fortunately, Northwestern’s defensive performance was much worse than their offense. They allowed IU, a team that averages 1.1 points per possession, 1.3 (that’s 85 points on 66 possessions!). They gave up a 67 percent effective field goal percentage to a team that averages around 53 percent. For as good as Northwestern’s offense was, their defense was worse, or IU’s was better — whichever you want to believe. Given the season averages, it’s fair to say Northwestern’s inability had plenty to do with it.

– After last night’s game, as well as two close wins over Illinois, I think it’s fair to say that IU is one of those teams with a knack for keeping lesser teams in the game. Fortunately, they also have an apparent ability to win those close games. (Wisconsin is excepted here, because Wisconsin is good. And that Butch three was garbage.) I’m not sure if this bodes well for the tournament or not, though obviously the ability to win close, intense games bodes well for the postseason. The unfortunate part is that it’s easy to see IU getting into one of those early-round games with a lesser talented team — say, a No. 13 or No. 14 seed — and failing to pull away until it’s too late. It’s a trend worth watching.

– The Big Ten Network’s lack of announcing prowess has been discussed here in the past. It’s unfortunate, really: Snagging a few decent color men (Bill Raftery? Jay Bilas?) would have been a way to validate the Network’s existence. It would have proven that BTN is there for more than a cheap cash grab that leaves huge segments of a rabid consumer base unserved. Some enjoyable broadcasting would have lent some legitimacy.

Instead, we get … Shon Morris. Let me count the ways in which Mr. Morris fails as an analyst:

• His idea of analysis is often entirely shallow. Rather than analyze, he’ll fall into the time-worn trap of narrating the replay as it’s happening. “Watch right here … there’s the cut … and the basket.” Thanks, Shon!
• His desire to play up the meathead-ignorant stereotype of sports fans. My favorite example last night was his scoff at soccer, saying “In soccer that’s a slide tackle — don’t you get a yellow card or something? Heh!” Soc-cer? What a confusing, silly game! Idiot.
• It’s clear Morris watches plenty of Sportscenter, as his desire to pepper his analysis with pseudo-cultural references and lame puns is constantly apparent. Talking about D.J. White, Morris went the CBS route: “You get the ball to D.J. down there, and you better call CSI — there’s gonna be a body bag!” Ugh. At another point he referenced Twister, which was a pretty popular game when I was like eight. Also, Cannonball Run? WTF?
• Ah, blogger hate. It’s always fun to rip on bloggers, as if the stereotype of us being basement-dwelling, underwear-clad is at all relevant anymore. When bloggers co-opt that stereotype and use it as a joke — when bloggers like Ariana Huffington and Andrew Sullivan are political kingmakers — you know it can’t be too biting. And yet Morris is convinced the average fan believes that about bloggers. His comments last night about the rumors and innuendo surrounding the program originating from blogs, well, it showed that Morris really wasn’t even following the news coverage at all yesterday. If anything, most rumors came from the newspaper beat reporters, national media like ESPN, and local television stations, and guess what: There’s nothing wrong with that! Everyone was trying to get the story, and IU’s athletic department bungled the delivery. You think, at some point, people are going to start speculating? Anyway, Morris’ desire to pin the rumors on bloggers and toss in a throwaway comment shows a pretty incredible lack of knowledge about the current sports-information landscape, an unforgivable offense for someone who works in sports broadcasting. Get with it, Morris.

Really, Morris’ greatest sin is that he brings nothing to the game. Broadcasting seems really hard, so I don’t begrudge him his job; it’s something I would fail miserably at the first 80 or so times I tried it. (And probably after that, too.) So the blame lies with Big Ten Network. Take all that cash you’re getting from subscription fees and hire someone good, for the love of all that is holy and right in college basketball. Oh, wait: You don’t have to, because we’ll watch anyway. Damn this closed market.

– It’s always fun to see the huge proportion of IU fans in Welsh-Ryan Arena. And trying to get tickets to the game yesterday, I realized the potency of this fan base in the Chicago area. Awesome.

– Similarly, watching Northwestern play, I always feel really bad for Bill Carmody. Here is a good basketball coach, a guy who apparently does things the right way, and who is something of an innovator in the way he runs his team’s x’s and o’s. And, because Northwestern’s academic standards are so, so high, he can’t recruit anyone. He’s stuck trying to make ends meet with kids who are there just as much for their academic benefit as they are to further their basketball careers. There’s something noble in that, sure — and Carmody appears to be in no jeopardy of losing his job — but I still feel sorry for him. Losing once is frustrating. Losing every single league game you play is soul-crushing, will-flattening stuff.

Anyway: given everything, good win. I’ll take it. And I’ll take solace in the fact that we can go back to watching basketball now, the real reason any of us are here in the first place.

Photo via  Spablam on Flickr.

That’s two such wins now. The first was Saturday against Michigan State, a dominating performance that showed a resilient team rallying around their coach. The second was last night. Was it me, or did the focus seem to shift? Maybe it was because I was in a bar and couldn’t make out the commentary very well, but did last night’s audience — swept up in an important rivalry atmosphere — seem to forget about the sanctions for 40 minutes? I know I did.

It will be jarring to lose Sampson on Friday, but at this point, I’m not sure his presence is needed on the sidelines anymore. Stay with me here. It’s hard to complain about distractions after two very solid wins, but Sampson’s saga is a distraction. His assistants have been coaching this team all year; no doubt IU’s players feel just as comfortable with each of them as they do with Sampson. (Perhaps moreso, given the player-assistant-as-friends dynamic a lot of teams have.) It will be a difficult adjustment, seeing Dan Dakich running up and down the sidelines, but if the Hoosiers showed anything last night, it was a level of maturity and self-definition that gives me confidence in the coming games.

But that confidence doesn’t mean part of me won’t miss Sampson. He’s only been here for two years, yes, and even if this eulogy is premature (we still think Sampson’s going to be suspended Friday rather than fired), it will be a different place without him. He’s a frustrating coach, but if the past two years have taught us anything about his style it’s that his teams improve. They get better. They can make you miserable in November and December and even January, but come February and March they coalesce. They play hard together. They defend. And they’re fun to watch.

It’s a shame we can’t have a third year, but it’s a self-inflicted shame. And we know what we have to do. The dog might be cute. You might love the dog. But if the dog can’t control his bite, you put him down. It sucks, and it’s sad, but it’s best for everybody.

– Part of my confidence in a post-Sampson team this year is, like I said, that improvement. If the coach has given us one present before he’s suspended/fired/never heard from again, it’s in progressing his team forward by leaps and bounds in the past two weeks. This is a team, remember, that barely squeaked out an away win at Illinois, a team that I had all but written off as a serious contender. That team had brutal flaws: couldn’t defend the perimeter, couldn’t play man-to-man, couldn’t find a decent four spot, couldn’t get decent point guard play. Are any of these problems anymore?

– Armon Bassett is playing as well as he’s ever played, not only in shooting the ball — if he keeps improving, he’s going to be an incredible shooter — but in the way he runs the offense. He still had too many turnovers (5), as did IU (23. Eesh.). But he was focused, efficient, made good decisions, got IU into their half-court sets quickly … he was what you need a point guard to be.

– Turns out IU can defend the perimeter: Purdue took 72 shots in a 72-possession game last night, and only happened to connect on 25 of them. What’s worse, they were 7-25 from three, and posted a 39.5 effective field goal percentage, the type of shooting night that will kill you regardless of the defense you’re facing. Still, call me optimistic, but given the way Purdue’s been shooting from three the past few games, IU deserves a lot of credit for challenging those perimeter shots both in the zone and in man-to-man defense.

– As for the four spot, Kyle Taber is, well, he’s Kyle Taber, but it turns out Kyle Taber is all we need at the four. Compared to Mike White and DeAndre Thomas, who are both incredible mistake- and foul-prone, Taber is a breath of fresh air. Where Thomas believes it’s important to get himself shots, Taber actually refuses to shoot the basketball unless he’s three feet from the hoop. Seeing as we have the country’s best big man — that’s right, D.J.’s better than Tyler Hansbrough — across from that four spot, all we really need is Kyle Taber. Now, if we could only find a spot for Adam Ahlfeld …

– The one overriding negative about IU’s performance last night was the turnovers. Those have to get cleaned up. Fortunately, IU was efficient in every other phase of the game. Check it out, courtesy of Statsheet:

That chart shows a team that outplayed Purdue in every offensive phase of the game. The only thing Purdue did demonstrably better than IU was score more field goals, but it happened to take them, oh, 30 more shots to make an extra five. In the meantime, IU was getting to the line and making 88 percent of their free throws. Perhaps my favorite stat is total possessions: The Hoosiers weren’t afraid to get up and down the floor last night, a major plus playing against a strong Purdue team that seems comfortable bruising under the basket.

– What little commentary I heard last night was from Steve Lavin, who was actively campaigning for D.J. White to receive player of the year honors. I think it’s official: Steve Lavin loves IU. Earlier in the season his hyperbolic love was directed toward Eric Gordon; now, it’s White. We have to ask the question (jokingly): Does Steve Lavin want the IU job? Would we want Steve Lavin? I can just imagine the press conferences — Lavin using every goofy catchphrase he’s come up with in broadcasting. “Well, you know, Armon Bassett’s just our energy guy out there, he’s our little pepper pot …”– Finally, in closing, a note to Purdue fans: If your social scene is so broke that you have to congregate in alcohol-less Mackey Arena to get your kicks for IU-Purdue, I’ve underestimated the lameness of your college experience. Please, please don’t do that again. Go get some beer in your system. Live a little.

Also, Scott Martin looks like he’s 14. That’s all.

Anyway, if we have to lose our coach, and say goodbye to the promise of his tenure, last night was a pretty damn good way of doing it. Pat Forde summed up how to feel pretty well this morning:

“We love your team. We hate your ethics. We’re confused as hell. We want to thank you for beating Purdue — and now we’d like you gone.”

Farewell, Kelvin.

But for all the unanimous consent to fire on this site, and among ESPN’s chosen local interviewees, last night’s game showcased an atmosphere, and a fanbase, still totally confused and weirded out by what’s happening right in front of them. I watched on TV last night, and it was clear from the Dolby 5.1 that the pregame crowd hadn’t made up its mind to boo Kelvin Sampson, nor had they decided to show solidarity with the embattled coach. Sampson was just sort of there most of the game — drawing angry comments from myself, PostmanR, and my girlfriend, all the while coaching IU to its best win of the season in front of an emotional and raucous home crowd.

Just how the hell are we supposed to feel about that?

I still don’t know. And it was clear from the Kel-vin Samp-son cheer last night — clear from friends on campus who say opinion on KS is split — that I’m not alone. No one who loves IU basketball is totally sure how to feel about all this.

For me, it’s a mixture of sadness, anger, doubt, excitement, revenge, righteousness, forgiveness. It’s hard to say goodbye to someone who knows he needs to leave. It’s hard to force him out when you watch him hug his kids. It breaks the heart to see him cling for dear life in the face of certain failure. And then you remember what he did in the first place — the stupidity and arrogance — and it brings you back to the angry, vengeful thoughts you first had.

And that’s what it is right now. That mixture. That confusion. We’re on the tail end of something, and if the above paragraph was any indication, things aren’t going to be easy to synthesize anytime soon.

— What would have made things simpler was if IU would have played all 40 minutes last night like they played the first five. When it was 15-6 and Michigan State showed no signs of slowing down (and IU showed no signs of offensive potential), the assembled audience in my living room had all but given up. Credit goes to the girlfriend for dropping the old “it’s not over” as a means of encouragement, and wow, was she right. We could have been blatantly angry there, could have sworn at Sampson for not only besmurching the program, but for being a bad coach too. Turns out, last night might have been Sampson’s crowning achievement at IU: a dominating win by a coherent, improving team.

Have we seen a more complete performance all season? A better shooting night? A more varied group of contributions? A harder effort? I’m not sure how much of any performance that involves college students you can credit to outside factors. Anyone that has ever played a sport, competitively or not, knows that one of the true beauties of constant motion is the numb sensation it affords. You don’t have to think about anything else to play basketball; you merely think about ball, hoop, spacing, and technique, and the rest floats away happily until you step off the court. So maybe we can parse what IU did last night away from their coach’s troubles, and hope that that’s the kind of thing we can expect to see when Dan Dakich is (presumably) roaming the sidelines in a week.

Wasn’t it beautiful, though? The screens, the spacing, the power of Eric Gordon? Though Wisconsin was a loss, it was a loss not because of IU’s regression but in spite of their progression. Last night, we saw yet another step in that progression. It was what happens when an entire group of kids — stars or not — figures things out at precisely the same moment. It was great.

– What wasn’t so beautiful was D.J. White’s injury. I won’t lie — when I saw the awkward landing, and the D.J. clutching at the back of his knee, I was sure that his luck had once again caught up with him. Torn ACL? It wasn’t beyond my line of thinking, I’ll admit. But a few minutes and one giant roll of ice later, it looked like D.J. was going to be OK, something confirmed today by this Peegs poster. Good for D.J. — he deserves to finish this season at the peak of his performance.

– A quick note about this Scott Skiles rumor: If you think this has any basis in reality, may God have mercy on your soul. It’s not that I necessarily have a problem with a Skiles hire (though I do), but rather the idea that anyone credible at IU would drop a name this early in the process. They’re hiring an interim coach, at which point they have about six or seven months to hire a new guy. You really think they’re going to settle on the pugnacious, what-the-hell-is-with-this-lineup-oh-God-please-play-Tyrus-Thomas Skiles this early? IU’s search process may be irrevocably effed, but no one’s that stupid.

– Everyone caught that Adam Herbert-Kelvin Sampson embrace, which was funny not only because Kelvin is about to join Herbert in unemployment, but because it reflected something most IU fans are just now figuring out: Sampson was Herbert’s hire.

That was reflected in President Michael McRobbie’s press conference, where he refused to chide Greenspan for the hire, instead saying the AD and his compliance office “did their job.” To me, that smacks of the fact that Greenspan heard the rumors about Sampson more often, and for many more years, than Herbert did, and that Sampson impressed the president and won him as a vital supporter in the search process. This is just speculation, of course. If Sampson was Greenspan’s hire, he deserves to take the fall … but if the dialogue keeps up the way it has been, it seems that Greenspan won’t take the fall for Adam Herbert’s boy. Considering Greenpan’s record, that’s only fair.

– One of the more suprising things, at least to me, about the Sampson sanctions fallout has been the reaction of the national media. I know that media people like to high-horse it from time to time — as my friends will tell you, I enjoy a comfy ride on the back of self-righteousness myself from time to time — but the national outrage and calls for firing have been beyond even the normal mainstream’s call-to-arms. What Kelvin Sampson did was bad, and he deserves to be fired, but with the exception of Hubert Davis last night, nary an opinion to the contrary was heard. Digger Phelps, old Bob Knight tagalong, was especially vehement, as though he’s never done anything nebulously wrong in recruiting in his entire life. (Right.) What’s worse is that I agree with Digger — Kelvin deserves to lose his job! — but Phelps’ anger, and the way apparently every IU fan ESPN interviewed last night wanted Sampson fired, made it seem like this fanbase is unanimous in its discontent. After hearing the chants last night, it seems safe to say that’s not true.

Which is to say: Did anyone expect media to be so harsh? These aren’t die-hards; these are the jaded columnists covering the corruption of the NCAA for years and years. Do they really think Sampson’s crimes are worthy of Barry Bonds-esque scorn? (Does Dick Vitale really deem it necessary to bring up Bob Knight every two seconds, who, it can be argued, did things in Bloomington far more morally reprehensible than overuse his phone line?)

And so here we are again, not sure what to think, afraid to not be angry, confused as ever. That’s the damage here. Sports are supposed to be simple. Black and white. Good vs. evil.

Kelvin Sampson has made them pretty damn confusing.