Now, I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but it’s been rolling around in my head for the last few hours, so I just thought I’d get it out there.

Like most (if not all) of you, I watched at least some portion of the sound beating IU took at Wisconsin on Saturday. I was unable to watch from stem to stern, but I got the gist — not enough offense, not enough defense, not enough points, not enough hustle, not enough of anything for anyone to really find positives in anything but the final buzzer and those brief moments when it slipped from your mind that there was a game yesterday at all.

Now, it’s been suggested, in this space and in others, that I, specifically, am too easy on Tom Crean, too forgiving of the Hoosiers’ plethora of shortcomings as this season slowly turns the way of last.

But the truth is, folks, I understand. I really do. I understand how hard it is to watch this team play, and struggle as it does. There’s a standard Indiana fans expect, and it’s not being met.

And I know that for many of you, that standard isn’t measured solely with banners or wins-per-season averages, but simply with hard work, teamwork and commitment. The majority of you have (at least, I think you have) bought into what Tom Crean is selling — the rebuilding, baby steps approach that celebrates every move forward this team makes, and forgives most of its regressions.

But water will always boil when succumbing to intense heat, and so fans will become displeased when they see performances like the last three IU has managed. I’ve seen part or all of Northwestern, Ohio State and Wisconsin, and this time, I’ll agree with you, Hoosier Nation, your complaints are valid.

Sitting inside Mackey Arena on Saturday, (I cover Purdue for the Times now, too) I recalled IU’s trip to West Lafayette last season, because of something Matt Painter said after the game. I don’t recall, nor can I track down, his exact words, but essentially, Painter sympathized with Tom Crean a little bit.

Every coach that had come through the door after beating Indiana praised the Hoosiers’ hustle, their tenacity, their drive. But Painter had been through the same sort of rebuilding project, albeit on a smaller scale, in his first years at Purdue. So when talking about Indiana, and all those intangible qualities they supposedly offered, Painter also checked himself, saying essentially (and now I’m paraphrasing) that he understood how Indiana felt, that after awhile, you just don’t want to hear about how hard you try if you aren’t winning to go with it.

Painter said he knew Crean didn’t want pity, but respect, and I believed that day that in Painter, Indiana had earned it from the coach of their most-hated rival.

The problem, as I see it, is that Indiana has even lost that. They’ve lost that spunk that at least made them endearing without replacing it with genuine results, at least in the last three games.

Is it fair to judge so harshly on three games? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s Indiana basketball. The coach is the state’s highest-paid employee, the spotlight is brighter, it comes with the candy-striped warm-ups.

In this team’s defense, which many do think I come to too often, it’s hard to talk about this group and the tradition of Indiana basketball. One former player told me last year that that tradition, as it was passed down from player to player under Bob Knight and at least for a time under Mike Davis, had all but evaporated well before everything fell apart and needed putting back together again.

So what makes us think that this Hoosier pride, as it were, can be restored simply through speeches and t-shirts? What was it that made playing for Indiana so much more special that it was set aside as “tradition” rather than simply the trappings of playing within an elite program? Was it a commitment to honesty? Academic excellence? Hard work? Fair play? All of the above? None of the above?

When Dan Dakich said Saturday on the Big Ten Network’s studio show that Indiana essentially played with no heart against Wisconsin, I’m not sure he was attacking the Hoosiers so much as he was pointing out a significant program-wide mentality that has been lost in recent years.

The questions, of course, are how that is restored, and whether Tom Crean is the man to do it. Is a commitment to the way of those who came before, with an emphasis on playing hard, hustling, out-working everyone no matter the task in front of them? Because those challenges look like maybe they’re starting to fall on deaf ears.

Or is it something else? Is it time for a coach to come in and put his own stamp on Indiana the way Knight did, but independent of Knight’s methods?

Alabama football clung for two decades to the notion of trying to do things exactly as Bear Bryant had done them, and the only coach who was successful in that span was Gene Stallings, himself an incredibly formidable sideline task master.

After Stallings, the program faltered until Nick Saban arrived, with his own way of doing things, with his own plan and his own attitude and no time to look back because it was necessary only to move forward.

Maybe for Indiana, the dogmas of the quiet past (although I’d hardly call it “quiet”) truly are inadequate to the stormy present. Perhaps it’s time to stop holding onto the Bob Knight-instilled way of doing things, and let another coach come in and run the show his way, with his methods and his agenda.

This isn’t condoning the methods of, say, Kelvin Sampson. I think we can all agree that an adherence to the rules is requisite for any program anywhere. (Well, almost anywhere.) But unless these recent performances become an aberration rather than the expected — and given the way the Hoosiers have played and who they have coming up, that seems unlikely — then this will become the latest in nearly a decade’s worth of seasons that ended, at best, in disappointment.

Tom Crean would be the first to tell you, that won’t get it done at Indiana.

• Derek Elston audio
• Jordan Hulls audio

On the title if he were to write a book about his last six weeks at IU:

“Oh man, I don’t know. Angelo Pizzo, the guy who wrote Hoosiers, told me we need a third act and we’ve got a movie. He said it’s going to be ‘Hoosiers, Rudy and then Dakich.’ I don’t know, ‘Managing Chaos,’ I have no idea.”

On whether or not he was prepared to kick more players off the team at IU had he stayed on the job another day:

“One more day. One more day and I had two others that were outta there. There’s no doubt about that. I didn’t have time on that particular day, but you know, what Tom has done coming in there is what I told him he was going to do.”

“He had to make his own decisions. A new coach comes in, you’ve gotta figure out what you want to do and how you want to do things and give people chances. But the time Tom and I sat down and talked about it, I told him what the end result was going to be because it was not something that wasn’t obvious. It was something that absolutely needed to happen.”

“Unfortunately, in my opinion, for the players involved I think it’s unfortunate for them, because they, in my opinion again, got rid of a great opportunity, threw away a great opportunity at a great basketball program and a great school. I don’t care where you go, unless you transfer to Louisville or Kentucky or Duke or Carolina or UCLA, you’re never going to go any place that matches what IU has, other than those other schools that I just mentioned.”

On what has transpired since his departure and the fallout from last season:

“I think the culture needed to change. I said that after we played Arkansas and I was criticized by a number of different groups of people, but it just needed to be. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never been one that is good at beating around the bush. I pretty much say what needs to happen and then people criticize and then generally it happens.”

“In terms of Greenspan, I feel bad, very bad for Rick. I think Rick’s done a lot of great things at IU, I really do. The facilities that are going up are tremendous. His attempt and I think rightfully so, to push football into a very competitive place is what you have to do at a school like Indiana. Rick was certainly trying to do that as evidenced by what he’s doing with the facilities. I feel bad for Rick, I really do. I like Rick, Rick gave me a great opportunity, I didn’t necessarily agree with all the things that went down late in my tenure at Indiana, but that’s the way life is.”

“It amazes me the amount of people that were affected by all of this. When you think about Kelvin Sampson, I think about Kellen and his daughter Lauren and his wife. They had a beautiful home, Lauren had a great job, Kellen is a great kid. I think about my own family, my kid. Rick Greenspan and his family. Tim Fitzpatrick, his wife and newly adopted son. The managers that were there. The fallout for the people has been so wide ranged and so sweeping that it makes me really sad. It didn’t need to happen, but it did.”

“Jennifer Brinegar, who was the compliance director at IU and I’ve never been anywhere and I hope the NCAA is listening to this, where compliance was so strict. Now I was there after it all went down in terms of the phone calls and things and the investigation was starting, so I wasn’t there when it was all really happening, but in my term there, Jennifer Brinegar and her staff, Ian Rickerby, did a great job.”

– Our old friend Dan Dakich, former interim IU coach turned 1070 the Fan radio host, will be a guest on Friday’s edition of “The Front Row Ticket” with Rick Bozich and Zach McCrite. Dakich will appear at approximately 2:26 PM ET on the Louisville based show that airs on 93.9 the Ticket.

If you were to say we expected even a tenth of this stuff to go down, we would not have believed you. (This is how these things always go, it seems.) But hey, it was fun to cover and blog about. Sure: we would have loved for IU to storm their way to the Final Four, for Eric Gordon, D.J. White and Kelvin Sampson to cut down the nets in San Antonio, but things do not always go as we would have hoped.

Without confirming with E — though I know I don’t need to — the reason this site has garnered any amount of success is because of Big A. The guy lives and breathes this blog and he churns out the posts day in and day out. Myself and E are tied up with other writing endeavors outside of the real jobs (I’m also incredibly lazy); without Big A this site ceases to exist.

Lastly, we want to thank each and everyone of you. Without the comments, the visits, the feedback and the tips, we wouldn’t be nearly as enthused about the site, and what the future holds for it. To the commenters who have been here since the start, (hi Kelin and Jamie!) we thank you. To those that joined along the way and have made a community out of this place, we thank you.  We hope we’ve done a good job with year one; we look forward to year two.

Go Hoosiers.

NW Times: It’s been rumored there was a drug problem on the team.

Dakich: I’m not going into that.

NW Times: The Hoosiers finished 3-4 with you at the helm, leading many to believe the team quit on you.

Dakich: We were 3-1 and then a lot of things started happening, internally, that I’m not about to go into. Truth of the matter is, it got easy for people to say the players quit on Dakich, they quit on Indiana. But Eric Gordon went 7-for-50. That ain’t quittin’. That’s just missin’. Guys didn’t make shots they had made earlier in the year. This team lived on the edge — with Gordon making shots. This whole notion of the players revolting or being against me … the players were against losing Coach Sampson. I’m not going to say they weren’t (ticked) off at the administration, at the school. The players didn’t understand why phone calls were such a big deal when some of them had been called numerous times by other schools.

NW Times: Following the season, you kicked sophomore Armon Bassett and junior Jamarcus Ellis off the team. The exodus of players continued when Tom Crean was hired as the new coach. Were these simply bad recruits?

Dakich: When I took over the team, there was going to be accountability for class attendance, getting to practice on time, things of that nature. There were kids there that absolutely did not respect Indiana University and had no respect for the basketball program. My decision to dismiss two guys was really easy. Crean’s decision to dismiss the rest of ‘em was really easy. The only way that wasn’t going to happen was if somebody came into Indiana University and didn’t care about anything. I said that in my postgame after the (NCAA) Arkansas game: The culture needed to change and get back to being Indiana University basketball, which is on the level with North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky and UCLA.

For all of the second guessing that a lot of us (myself included) did when Dakich kicked Ellis and Bassett to the curb, it’s good to see the man has been vindicated for his actions. He started the cleanup of the program and now Tom Crean is moving forward with the rebuilding process.

As far as Dakich saying the team didn’t quit on him, I think the effort was there from guys like White, Gordon, Stemler and Taber, but there were definitely others who looked like they could not have cared less. Sorry Dan, but the downfall of the season can’t simply be blamed on missed shots by Gordon. The swagger the team had in those two home games against Purdue and Michigan State completely evaporated after Sampson’s dismissal. Combine that with an injured Gordon and a group of players that weren’t on board with Dakich and well, you know how the story ends.

– Former assistant Jeff Meyer denies intentionally violating rules in his response to the NCAA obtained by The Indianapolis Star.

– Bob Kravitz raises some excellent points about Rick Greenspan and wonders how the AD is still employed by IU. Here’s my favorite part:

Let’s not engage in selective amnesia: former coach Kelvin Sampson was hired by Greenspan. Now, were former school president Adam Herbert and trustee Jeff Cohen the people who most strongly supported Sampson’s hiring? Sure. Greenspan had his own favorite — sources tell me it was former West Virginia and current Michigan coach John Beilein — but Sampson was among the three candidates Greenspan sent to the trustees.

Ultimately, Greenspan signed off on this terrible hire, and on the day Sampson was introduced, Greenspan happily stood out front and sang Sampson’s praises.

You can’t have it both ways.

Or can you?

– Eric Crawford of The Louisville Courier-Journal writes that the self-imposed sanctions are not sufficient and that IU should pay for hiring Kelvin Sampson.

– And finally, Terry Hutchens has an update on IU’s self-imposed sanctions. Tom Crean has seven days of off-campus recruiting to use in July, IU has added two paid official visits and the staff will lower its frequency of correspondence with Derek Elston (who was named in the NCAA’s report) from seven times to six times for the upcoming school year.

From a basketball standpoint, allowing both Bassett and Ellis to return to the program is a no-brainer. The duo represents IU’s only returning starters for next season’s team and their presence would go a long way in solidifying a shot at middle of the road stature in next year’s Big Ten race.

Unfortunately, due to the actions of both players over the course of this past season, this decision is not simply about basketball. In his press conference following IU’s loss to Arkansas, then interim coach Dan Dakich talked about changes that were needed to send the program in the right direction. And a couple of weeks later, Dakich, with the approval of the athletic department, booted Bassett and Ellis from the team.

While it is unclear exactly what type of infractions were committed to lead to their dismissal, rest assured it was much more than missed meetings and refusals to “own up” to those missed appointments. Neither guy seemed willing to let Dakich do his job in the tough situation he inherited. Ellis was shown in a few instances talking back to Dakich on the sidelines and Bassett had already been suspended once before. No matter how tough the situation was for everyone involved, their disrespectful behavior towards Dakich cannot be justified.

Now the responsibility to sort out this mess falls on the shoulders of Crean. I’m confident he’ll make the right decision for the program, the university and the players. If that means allowing both guys to return if they meet certain criteria set out by Crean, we should welcome them back to the program once they’ve paid the price. Or if Crean decides they don’t deserve another shot, I’m positive the rationale behind that decision will be plentiful.

Either way, it’s important to remember that no one individual is, or ever will be, bigger than the program.

Those of you interested, I wrote a quick post this morning discussing Dan Dakich’s huge huevos for dismissing Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis at the Dagger. Here’s a little taste:

The entire situation is incredibly weird: According to this report in the Indianapolis Star, the two players missed a meeting that they weren’t allowed to miss, which is not something one should be doing but which is not at all grounds for dismissal. According to the Bloomington Herald-Times, Dakich wanted the players to run sprints, and they told him they wouldn’t, another act of insubordination that’s not exactly polite but which isn’t grounds for getting the long boot goodbye, either.

Of course there’s more: Both players had disciplinary issues under former coach Kelvin Sampson that caused them to miss games, and those issues were never revealed. So Dakich’s sudden curb-kicking was seen by some last night as an administration cleaning house by using a surrogate lame-duck coach to do so; all the while Dakich gets coaching cred among Indiana’s conservative faithful for clearing the team of troublemakers. [...]

Check out the whole piece if you have a chance, and feel free to leave a comment at The Dagger.

This thing is so incredibly weird. Either Dakich is acting alone, without the permission of the university and the athletic department, and just dismissing players he’ll never have a chance to coach again … or the administration is using him to clean house before they bring in a new coach. I still don’t get it. Does anyone else?

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.