Despite the fact that nearly everybody associated with the Indiana program is moving on to the future, we’ve still received a few requests for updates on the departed from last season.

We’ve tracked Kelvin Sampson, Brandon McGee, Jordan Crawford, Eli Holman, Armon Bassett, DeAndre Thomas and you can all sleep easy now that Jamarcus Ellis has surfaced at Oklahoma City University.

As much as I’d like to keep an eye on the progress of these fine young men at their new institutions, they’re no longer a part of the IU family and will be treated as such on this very blog.

Translation: Unless you hit up the archives, you won’t be reading about McGee, Crawford, Holman, Bassett, Thomas or Ellis around these parts. Sampson is a different story because we’ll always welcome opportunities for cheap shots until the NCAA dust settles. (We’ll also welcome your attempts at heckling him when he returns for the Bucks and Pacers later this season in Conseco Fieldhouse.)

Our old friend Jamarcus Ellis, who somehow got me to believe he was “happy to be a Hoosier” last summer, is reportedly considering a transfer to Northern Kentucky University. Here’s the scoop, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer:

It’s been an offseason of recruiting that has produced a lot of what-might-have-beens for Northern Kentucky University men’s basketball coach Dave Bezold, but he may be on the cusp of a major coup.

Multiple sources say former Indiana University forward Jamarcus Ellis, who was selected honorable mention All-Big Ten this past season, is strongly considering transferring to NKU. According to the sources he visited NKU a few weeks ago and came away impressed, especially with the new Bank of Kentucky Center.

So in a little more than a year Ellis has gone from the Junior College Player of the Year to a guy who will be lucky to suit up at a Division II school. Probably not what he had in mind when he arrived in Bloomington, but when you combine an attitude that was poisonous to the team environment down the stretch with shaky academics, what do you expect?

{HT: Basketblog}

Here is a statement released a short time ago by IU Media Relations:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – ­ Indiana Men’s Basketball Coach Tom Crean announced today that junior DeAndre Thomas has been dismissed from the program and will not have his scholarship renewed. In addition, sophomore Armon Bassett will not be reinstated for failing to comply with University and Athletic Department guidelines. Junior Jamarcus Ellis also will not be reinstated to the active roster. Both Bassett and Ellis were originally dismissed from the program on March 31. Crean also announced on Thursday that freshman Eli Holman could not return next season.

“Before you build a team, you need to develop a family,” said Crean. “We will go through the learning process, feel some growing pains and experience some bumps in the road along the way. We need the Hoosier Nation to rally around this program as we go through these stages.”

“Our staff if going to ensure that anyone who attends this University and wears the Indiana uniform will make this privilege among their highest priorities and not treat the opportunity as an entitlement,” added Crean. “We fully expect our student-athletes to accept the responsibilities academically, athletically and socially that come with representing one of the top programs in college basketball history.”

Andy Katz over at the World Wide Leader is reporting the following this afternoon:

New Indiana coach Tom Crean will be down to three returning scholarship players and eight players in all for next season once the school officially announces the departures of four Hoosiers later Friday afternoon, a high-ranking Indiana source told ESPN.com.

Sophomore Armon Bassett and junior Jamarcus Ellis, who had appealed their suspensions by former interim coach Dan Dakich, were dismissed from the program. Junior forward DeAndre Thomas will also not return and neither will freshman Eli Holman, who has elected to transfer after a meeting Thursday that required a call to campus police when Holman became agitated.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does. More later today after we’re able to wrap our collective brains around this mess. For now, I’ll just say: Thank you Kelvin Sampson. Not.

Both Hoosier Nation and the USA Today threw down stories yesterday about IU’s academic woes. We all know the gist by now: first semester the basketball team rocked it out in the classroom — if you want to call a 2.89 cumulative GPA good, that is — but second semester was sort of brutal. Perhaps it had some to do with the Kelvin Sampson debacle, perhaps the kids just got lazy. Whatever the reasons may be, Tom Crean has indicated that a good lot of players are fighting an uphill battle at the end of the semester here to get their grades in line.

So what does this poor academic standing mean for the team at large? Perhaps a scholarship loss.

If Indiana fails to meet the NCAA’s cutoff score, 925, it faces the prospect of losing more scholarships. The school already stripped itself of one next season because of Kelvin Sampson’s alleged phone call violations, and The Indianapolis Star reported the men’s basketball team is expected to turn in a score of 899 next month.

Neither Crean nor team spokesman J.D. Campbell would confirm that number Tuesday.

NCAA rules say any team below 925 could lose a scholarship for each player who leaves the school while academically ineligible. The maximum penalty in men’s basketball is two scholarships.

Crean declined to identify specific players who were struggling in the classroom because of privacy laws, but acknowledged he is concerned about the Hoosiers’ academic performance as a whole. Plus, he still has not decided whether to reinstate starting guards Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis, who were dismissed from the team just hours before Crean took the job April 1.

So basically here’s the deal: if Armon Bassett or Jamarcus Ellis or anyone else ends up leaving IU — and they also happen to be academically ineligible — IU could very well lose another scholarship. Hoosier Nation reported that Ellis was one of the seven players on the team that had a GPA above 3.0 first semester, so if he happened to leave, a betting man would say he might be leaving in good (enough) academic standing.

This certainly isn’t the worst thing to befall the program in recent months, but it’s a bit unsettling nonetheless. Crean has a stellar graduation rate and a strong focus on grades; hopefully this is the last time we have to deal with something like this under his tenure.

With the news on Sunday that both Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis have contacted Tom Crean to discuss reinstatement, the new Indiana coach is faced with a pivotal decision less than a week into his tenure.

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.

Headline alliteration is my favorite kind.

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?