All we are past the mopey part of the season now? I’ll admit, I’ve gone through some weird attitudinal shifts toward the 2008-09 Indiana Hoosiers — going from depression to blind faith to cheeriness and back again a couple of times. The past week or so has been the worst. Just as the college basketball season is taking off, earning more nightly attention than at any other part of the year, the cruel reality about Indiana basketball was finally sinking in: IU is just plain awful. They’re going to be awful for the rest of the season. And no amount of rationalizing is going to make the experience any better.

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.

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This time it’s Crean with Terry Hutchens of the Indianapolis Star. You might be getting tired of these interviews by now, but hey, we had to post this because we love Hutch, as should you:

The point of The Morning After is to glean and analyze, thus building a store of knowledge from which to draw when it’s time to figure how well we can expect this team to perform late in the season. Early in the season, however, this is an extremely difficult to do. After all, we can only learn so much from a 50-point win over Longwood; taken as a whole the game really doesn’t teach us much about how well IU will perform against teams that possess similar athletic ability, which is much of Division 1. Still, I’m firmly of the mind that few of the more finite details are unimportant, and so we trudge on. Let’s see what we’ve learned:

– Early in the game, it was evident that Kelvin Sampson not only gave Eric Gordon the green light — Sampson went ahead and told everyone on the team not to be bashful, which made for an entertaining opening five minutes. Gordon got his fair diet of shots, and was never hesitant. Neither was Armon Bassett. Those shots came early in the shot clock, from a variety of distances, thanks not only to Longwood’s inept defense but to a seemingly conscious choice by IU. This might foretell a change in strategy from Sampson — the coach is notorious for his plodding, defensive Oklahoma teams — but for now we can still safely consider it an aberration.

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