You're listening to the back home network presented by Home Field apparel. Welcome back to Crimson Cask. Alan Clavio, Scott Caulfield joining you. Good evening good evening Josh Wilson. Good evening, all of you Already in the crowd. We we said we would get something pulled together. We got Scott out of the vineyard. And how are the grapes today, Scott? Everybody's curious. We're we're doing, we're doing bourbon tonight, man. We're doing a little 4 Roses small Batch. Love it the.
Whole thing, but we have a new coach. As a chronic Hoosier would tweet out, we have a smoke coming from Assembly Hall White. Smoke. Yes, white smoke it. Happened. It happened quick, man Real. Quick, it did indeed real. Quick, let's go ahead and do our last four coach preview. Yeah. And well, the amazing the film,
Larry's thing about this. So for those of you who watch, and many of you were in the audience for that show that we did on Sunday night, we after that, Scott and I were like, well, we're going to have another week or so. We should probably do the coaches that are in the mix now that we haven't done. And we realized that one of them was Darren Devries, the new head coach of IU.
So we had this whole plan that tomorrow night we were gonna get together and do a pod where we previewed Darren Devries. Man, that would have looked prescient. They were. While those guys are right on it, they knew exactly what was going on and we didn't, we did the the, the route that it's, it's out. We're not part of Dolson's four people, right? We're not part of the inner circle. Unlike, unlike some other members of the media establishment, we never claimed to know anything.
And as it was, it was, it was demonstrated no one knew anything, right, right. So it is what it is. But no, it's great to see everybody in the comments. Feel free to leave your comments in the chat, we'll try to pop some of them up throughout the course of the show, but for those of you who are listening afterwards, we are podcasting at 9:45 PM Eastern Time on Tuesday, March 18th.
Indiana has a new head basketball coach, Darren Devries, the now former head coach at West Virginia and prior to that was the head coach at Drake and prior to that was a long time assistant at Creighton. We're going to talk all about the higher. We're going to talk about some of the other items that are that are out there. I know there's a lot of, I'll say this, there's mixed emotions amongst a lot of people in the
IU fanbase. Scott and I have not talked about how each of us feel about this to each other. So you're going to get those feelings live. I know that you guys love that. And we're going to talk about the implications. There's already stuff happening which I think is fascinating. So we're going to talk about that. We'll talk about some of the portal stuff that's already taking place.
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channel. You'd if if you had, you would have gotten the notification that we were going to go live a solid 5 minutes ahead of when we posted it on Twitter. But back home network search for that on YouTube and we would love to have you in the over 7300 people who have joined the YouTube subscriber channel. All right, Scott, we haven't talked, right? Let's talk about it. I want to get your thoughts first. What is your reaction to the hire?
So it's funny, I, I had a meeting today from like 4:00 to 6:00 and I was just, I was off the radar. I couldn't have my phone made and my phone just starts, my watcher's blowing up with like just text and text and text. And I'm like, this cannot be happening right now, but it's happening as I was driving away from that meeting and started getting into it. You know, I will just completely be honest. At first I was like man. That. That can't have been our first
choice. Like after all we had went through and all we talked about also a little bit like I can't believe you and I didn't talk about it on the podcast. It it was a little bit of disappointment probably based on me being over optimistic for who I, you know, the names that I was thinking of in my head and all these things I was going through and I but to be honest, I hadn't fully thought about
debris much at all. And when you look at it on its surface, you know, it's like, man, I didn't make the tournament last year. I'm like, that's who we're hiring. Like somebody just went, you know, 19 and 13. But I'm I'm, I'm coming around as I most IU fans should. I will say this, and this is probably like the not the fun podcasting answer and not the fun hot take, but this is my real honest opinion. We're going to know in three years.
And, and what I mean by that, I was kind of looking back, like if you go back and look at, you know, Nate Oates before he went to Alabama, you look at it, it's like, well, he missed the tournament. One of the two, you know, one of the four years in Buffalo, it made it three of the four years. You can, it's like a Rorschach test.
You can make it that if, if Nate Oates sucked at Alabama, you would look at that and and be like, man, man, that team played super fast, a little bit loose with the ball and like they couldn't really do what they needed to do in the tournament. Didn't make it a second year. You go back and look at it now, it's like, man, he made it three out of four years because you know, he was awesome. Same thing with Dan Hurley.
Like, man took him, took him four years to get to the tournament in Rhode Island. Like, if he's such a damn good coach, why did it take so long? But now you look back and it's like, man, he took over a crummy Rhode Island program and got them to the tournament in two years. I, I feel the same way about debris and that the answer is
we'll know in three years. And in three years we'll look back and see one of two things either, you know, man, this is a guy who took Drake to, you know, the tournament three of his last four years, similar to Nate Oates and and took over a West Virginia team that was Scott Check's notes 9 and 22 the year before he got there and got them. You know, you could say they missed the tournament.
You could also say there's an asterisk because they made 99% of the bracket matrix tournaments, but I mean like right on the edge. And so if he's great, you'll look back and back. Of course, the guy turns stuff around quickly. If it doesn't work, you could look back and be like, man, it took him a while to get it going at Drake. And it's a guy who went to West Virginia and couldn't even make a tournament his first year. So I know that's not the Super hottest take.
I'm much more on the positive angle now, and we'll get to that. But as I look at it, you know, honestly, at this point, I don't care about winning the press conference. I don't care about, you know, other fans and other in the Big 10 being like, oh, Indiana, screw whatever they can think whatever they want. We will know in two or three years. I hope that it really works out. And if it doesn't, you know, we've we've been here before, we can do it again.
But all that said, I am definitely turning the corner and I'm way more positive than I was even an hour or two ago. Yeah. You know, it's one of those things where I'd say about a week ago we started to see Devries's name pop up in relation to things related to this search is a possibility. And it was a name that frankly, we should have done a recap on earlier and we didn't just because like, we wanted to cover some of the bigger names 1st.
And we wanted to cover, you know, names that were popping up regularly in the search early on, you know, in terms of what was being reported. So you know you're going to cover Mick Cronin and you're going to cover Mark Biington, people like that, but. We had to hit Lawrence, Frank and Mike. We did and Mike and Lori, yes, absolutely. But when, you know, I would say about 7 or 8 days ago, it, it started to feel like there was going to be potentially some momentum here if IU didn't, you
know, hit their top choices. And I and I agree with that tweet that that Father Kavanaugh put in the chat about this wasn't Indiana's like first choice or second or third. But the more I dug into debris and this was before the hire, I think you and I even talked about it as like, I think this guy actually is a legitimately good hire. Potentially. I've had people from other schools, people that know basketball be like, wow, that's a really great hire for you guys.
And you know, we'll see if it's actually a great hire. But I had started to warm up on him as a possibility among that kind of like next tier of coaches. If you took out obviously the the moon shot candidates, as our friends at X's and Joe's talked about, if you took out the, you know, the Brad Stevens is there the Jay Wrights or, or even like the Scott Drews or TJ Otzel burgers, It's like, all right, what's the next grouping of candidates?
And I think ultimately, when you look at debris, there's a really, really nice record there that I think is to some degree getting obfuscated by the way that Drake is playing this season where everybody just assumes, well, hey, you could just win a bunch of games at Drake. That's that's no big deal. Our friend Mike Weemuth from the X's and Joe's podcast, which if you folks love college basketball, you really need to go watch that. That's a great show. Listen to that show.
They do a great job of breaking it down. You know, he noted that from 1974 to 2024, you know that that span of time, Drake outside of the Darian or the Darian Devries era, by the way, it's Darian Devries apparently not Darian Devries. This is going to take a lot of getting used to given that there's an extra I in there.
But he noted that I for Indiana, outside of the outside of the Devries era, Drake averages 12.5 wins per season over that span of time, that 50 years during the Devries era, he averaged 25 wins a game. I mean, that's, that's a, that's a, a staggering statistic. And, and you go back and you look, and I mean, they, they had some really interesting coaches.
They had one great year that a lot of college basketball people remember, which is that one year that Keno Davis took over for Tom Davis 'cause that was Tom Davis's retirement spot. And they went 17 and five. They were a five seed. They lost in the first round. That was the 2008 tournament.
It came out of nowhere. And then Keno Davis left, went to Providence, and then they had a series of coaches that just didn't measure up, including Nico Medved, who a lot of people like, who's a Colorado State right now. He bounced after a season. And Devries comes in, wins 2420262527 and 28 games, makes three tournaments where Drake had made one in the previous 20 some years. I had forgotten this until somebody reminded me they had Miami on the ropes in the 2023 tournament.
The same Miami team that beat Indiana in the second round and went to the final four. They were up 9 I think with 5 minutes to go and just ran out of gas at the end of the game. That was a popular upset pick that year. Goes to West Virginia and you maybe. Couldn't get over the hump, sorry. Ultimately true goes to West Virginia, you know, and I saw some folks looking at the West Virginia season and they're like, I don't get it. Like West Virginia went 19 and
13 this year. Indiana went 19 and 13. Why are we hiring a guy that had the same record? But the difference is like Indiana improved their win total by zero wins from last year to this year. And they repeated all the same mistakes in terms of roster construction, in terms of style. Debris comes into a West Virginia program that was in absolute shambles of people forget this. This was a program where Bob Huggins had gotten fired right at the beginning of the previous
season for another DUI. They have an interim coach and then they have to basically rebuild the roster. Improves their record by ten wins. They go from nine wins to 19 and literally got screwed out of the NCAA tournament because of reasons. There's there's a significant difference there in terms of of how I would look at those two performances.
And you know, ultimately when you look at Devries's overall profile, it's an interesting one because it is a little more defense oriented than offense oriented, but it's interesting because he's won with both styles in 2021 coming out of COVID. They go 26 and five.
They're 33rd in the country in offensive efficiency, and then they go to the tournament in 23 and 24 at Drake, and they're 40th in defensive efficiency in 2023 with the worst offense, but then in 2024 they're 40th in offensive efficiency. I'm really impressed with his ability to kind of switch around
what he does. The one thing his teams consistently did well at Drake, they didn't do particularly well this year at West Virginia. But I would look at that as a bit of an outlier given that it was his first season. But his team's always shot really well at West Virginia, excuse me, at Drake, they were, you know, in the top 100, five of the six years in effective field goal percentage. While he was there, they shot well from 2. They shot well from three this year at West Virginia.
They were 44th in the country in three-point attempt percentage, meaning the number of three-point attempts compared to their overall offense. So, you know, when I look at at Darren Devries, he's not the type of coach that's already won a lot at a high level. And I think that was the kind of coach that some IU fans and to be honest, you and me both thought IU should go after. They like, you know, we're like go after one of the big fish. We don't know the full back
story. I'm sure we will learn the full back story as we go along. But for whatever reason, IU didn't land one of those coaches. What we talked about, if you go back and listen to the podcast we did at the very beginning of this coaching search, we talked about where do coaches come from?
And we talked about how if you look at most of the coaches that are having a huge level of success at the college level right now, most of them came from the exact same background that Darren Devries is coming from. You know, and you can go down the list. I mean, yes, you can talk about Bruce Pearl had prior success at a Power 5 conference, but Todd Golden did not.
Todd Golden was at San Francisco, had a good 3-4 year run, goes to Florida. You know, Nate Oates had a good four year run at Buffalo. It's it's hilarious. You mentioned Oates and Hurley. That was the comp I was going to give. It's like the record that, and I'm saying Devries is going to turn into Oates or Hurley.
That would be amazing. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but if you were to look at the record that Devries had at Drake, it's not a whole lot different from the record that Oates had at Buffalo. It's not a whole lot different from the record that Hurley had at Rhode Island. And you kind of go down the list and you say to yourself, well, what IU hadn't tried up to this point was trying to get a big fish and bring them in. If that doesn't work, it's not
the end of the world. Because if you look down the roster of the top teams in college basketball right now, it's generally filled with two types of of coaches. It's coaches that were assistants and stepped up into
the head job. And then it's it's coaches that were at smaller schools, had a good 3456 year run and then step up. And with this guy, you're getting a guy that was an assistant coach under Dana Altman at Creighton and then was an assistant coach under Greg McDermott at Creighton. That's unusual that a guy would carry over like that. You're getting a guy who has now seven years of head coach experience, including one year of head coach experience at the Power 5 level.
He's under the age of 50. He was relatively inexpensive in terms of the contract. I think the number I saw was that Indiana was paying like 5 million a year or thereabouts over a six year span of time and seems to have a long runway in front of him. He's already recruiting. Well, he's he had the top, he had a top 25 recruiting class. It was 25th, but it's still top 25 at West Virginia. Two of those guys have already maybe all three.
I haven't seen about the third, but two of the guys have already opted out of their National Letters of Intent to West Virginia. You can kind of read between the lines there. Hopefully Indiana's able to pick them up. But a guy brings in 3-4 stars to West Virginia. I don't know when the last time was that Indiana brought in 3-4 stars in the same class at Indiana under multiple different coaches.
So I just, I look at all of it and I say I understand the skeptics and I've got several people who I respect who are long time IU fans, including our buddy Doctor Hoosier in the chat, you know, and, and my friend Mark and a couple of other folks who have expressed some concerns. And I get it 'cause this is not a sexy name. It's a name that you know if you follow college basketball. It's probably not a name that you know if you don't.
And yet you look at the profile and what I see is a younger coach who's clearly in his groove as as far as recruiting, just took a big step into a power conference and handled it really well. I think there's a lot of reason to be excited. It's not a for sure hire, but I'm not sure if there was a for sure hire even among the big
fish. That's the thing that I was kind of grappling with over the last couple days is that once you get those big fish out, everybody had some form of, I don't want to say warp, but just some form of concern. Whether it was, you know, somebody who had been a Brunel who'd been at AD one level for a while and hadn't really accomplished what I felt was enough or thanks 5 dusty banners. I think is that is that it? I saw that the most concise is that that's gas lighting.
That's just not a nice thing to say. I'm going to take it as a compliment until. It's proven otherwise. It's fine we're. Done. That's it. We're podcast done in 18 minutes. Sorry. It's all you get, you know. But the other ones were like McCollum, who it just would have been funnier to hire just to see Galen talk about it for two years about that. That would have been a tough, tough Rd. for me. I didn't.
Have a lot of experience so you know there's there really wasn't anybody out there where I'm like that is the absolute perfect hire even you know heresy to say like even Stevens hasn't coached like the college level in 15 plus years. So everybody had some kind of little minor concern on there. Here's the thing I want to talk about with Devries is everything you just said about Drake. You know he goes three of the last four years and makes the tournament.
Let's just and and stay with me here. Archie's COVID year kind of can go either way, depending on the the argument you want to make with Archie. I think the same thing with this year in West Virginia, But just go with me a little bit on this, you know, counterfactual future. Look, this is a West Virginia team. As you said, debris took over in 2024 that went 9 and 22 four and 14 in the with the Big 12 and he brought no players back. So this year he has zero. Like I started looking at the
player. I just Ken Palm has a number a thing called minutes continuity 0% brought no players back 0 minutes from the year before took that team, which by the way, living in Indiana under Woodson, I thought that's not possible was able to take that team. It had not possible to have success with that had took that team went 19 and 12:10 and 10:00.
There's a world where next year let's just pretend that he goes 24 and 8. And gets a eight seed in the tournament or like somewhere in that range or even what if he could even get to a six seed in the tournament and again I'm future casting but if he does that you would look at this and be like man, this is probably the hottest coach one of the hottest young coaches in the country.
It's like look when he did it Drake and my God, he just turned around West Virginia. No, next year hasn't happened yet. Barry Mel, this, this team could fall on its face next year. And it's like, wow, he missed the tournaments 2 years in a row in West Virginia, but all indications are he turned it around pretty damn fast.
And if he gets that, if he were to get West Virginia the tournament next year, we'd all be looking at it and be like, damn, why couldn't we have got degrees the next year? And maybe we just kind of got lucky getting him a year early. And that that's another way to frame this as well. Because I, you can't understate and even for me, I didn't, I was just like, man, WV to make the tournament.
Once you look into it, you know, taking a team that is that bad and has no returning players and you're restarting everything. And by the way, you're West Virginia. It's not even like Crean at IU where you have the, the, you know, 17,000 people in the stands and you have the, the power of IU behind you trying to rebuild it. This is West, no offense, this is West Virginia. Jerry West doesn't walk through that door anymore. I mean, it's it's not like you have people.
Kevin Pitsnoggles. Not walking through that door. Pitsnoggle, can we get him as an assistant, I mean. Well, they're, they're, they're there's though, I think you, you make really good points and I think some of the folks in the chat have have talked about, you know, this feels like a guy that is on the come up career wise. And, and I think you make a really good point. I mean, the guys won 71% of his games and it was at 73% before this year.
And they went 19 and 13, which is a a perfectly respectable schedule. They should have been in the tournament. The and if they make it next year, everyone would have been like, oh, they should have been in twice. Sorry, go ahead. Right, no, well, right. I mean, it's, it's one of those things where the rationale. For why they didn't make the tournament this year was, was ludicrous because this is a team that, you know what West Virginia lost?
Tucker Devries, Darren Devries's son, who's a, a, you know, a sharpshooter. I think is, is actually underselling him to some degree. Was shooting 47% from three in the 8 games that he played this year before he was knocked out. You probably saw him in Maui. So, you know, not their best player. Javon Small was their best player, but that want they beat Iowa State twice.
They beat Kansas, you know, despite the fact that they restructure the entire team on the fly and there's a lot to like about what we see him bringing to the table. When you look at there was a question from from doctor Hoosier how committee committed as either analytics and data. There's a so I'll answer that first by saying there's a really good breakdown, which I kind of feel bad about now by the West Virginia 24/7 site that breaks down his approach to offense and
his approach to defense. I think you'll like what you see there. I I heard some people worrying that he was a pack line guy. That does not appear to be the case from what I've seen. When you look at what he does analytics wise, four factors wise, it's clear to me there's a couple of things right off the bat his teams.
First of all, he runs a four out offense, which for those who aren't familiar, it's a very perimeter oriented offense, which is one of those things that a lot of IU fans I think have been pining for in terms of like we're tired of playing this, this slow, methodical 2 post offense. We want guys that can shoot. I think you're going to get that with Darren Devries and what he wants to do. I mean it. It's very clear he values shooting. He values taking care of the
ball. If you look at the last four years he was at Drake, his teams were 13th, 38th, 31st and 13th in the country in offensive turnover percentage. That means a team that takes care of the ball. For all the people that loved Ben McCollum and love the fact that Ben Mccollum's teams were like supposedly hyper efficient, by the way, they were not hyper efficient.
But we'll leave that. I think McCollum gets a job in the Big 10. I just thought, I'm going to get the job at Iowa for years, probably going to get the job at Iowa, which is going to set up a fascinating like retrospective. Five years from now, we'll be doing a podcast be like, hmm, how did these things go for both teams? We'll come back to that. Where his teams have generally not focused on a lot is offensive rebounding.
But I'll be frank with you. I don't think offensive rebounding amongst the four factors on the offensive side is that important if you can shoot the ball. The other thing they don't do, and this will be a little bit of a change and this is the one thing that's like a consistent thread. They don't really get to the free throw line a ton, but when they do get to the free throw line, they hit shots again. Wallet Drake. You know, I'll take four of the six years as an example.
They never shot under 71% from the free throw line, which you I might need to have a very IU fan listening to the podcast. Sit down before I say that again. They never shot less than 71% from the free throw line in the six years that they were at Drake, and they didn't shoot. They shot 72% this year at West Virginia, but they were in the top 50 in free throw shooting percentage in four of the six years. When was the last time we shot I I know the answer I'm looking at right now.
The last time we shot over 72% from the free throw line, 2013, 2016 shot 73.1 but 2017 were 2272.9. Yes, it's been a long a long slug for a while. Defensively, his teams really do more often than not do a good job of forcing the other team to not shoot particularly well. This year at West Virginia with not a lot going for them and missing their second best offensive player, they held opponents to the 18th best effective field goal percentage
in the country 46.3%. They forced a ton of turnovers and they they really limited their opponents from the three-point line like to. So for those of you who are worried about the pack line and you know everything that we grew to hate about that in the Archie era, this is not a defense that plays the three-point line that way. Like they allowed their opponents this year at West Virginia shot 29.7% from 3. I'm all for that. That's, that is, that is exactly the kind of defensive things
that you need. They also really forced the opponent into one-on-one. They, you know, historically, one of the things that I've noticed about his teams is that they really limit their opponent's assist percentage. And, and that's important because if you're if you don't have a lot of assists, you're really forcing teams to, they're having to rely on individual shots. They're not necessarily relying a lot of kick outs or a lot of penetration passes and things like that.
Now, how will those transfer to Indiana? It's hard to say. But I think if you're looking at statistics and metrics and you're trying to figure out how does this guy approach him from the analytical perspective, there's a lot there to like. And then if you look at the recruiting in his first year at a power conference, he was able to pull in 3-4 star guys. And that was at West Virginia, which as you said, is A, not a garden spot. And B, doesn't have a ton of NIL.
And I think, honestly, one of the reasons why we're talking about Darren Devries as the head coach at Indiana is because West Virginia doesn't have a ton of NIL and because Iowa does not have a ton of NIL either. But you know what? Indiana has a ton of NIL, lot of money here.
And so I am really giddy to think through what he can do in terms of bringing players in. And the interesting thing, Scott, is that we're talking about a coach that is going to come in perhaps with some recruits already. We haven't seen, we've seen a couple of players from IU under the portal, Gabe Cups, which everybody figured that was going to happen regardless of whether there was a coaching change. Malik Renew, which hurts a little bit.
Although Malik when I think about a four out offense and I think about Malik as the sole post, I'm not sure if that necessarily works. Maybe, but Malik or excuse me, Miles Rice, who I know a lot of people are down on, but Miles Rice from a skill perspective, like, oh, there's a reason
people were excited he was here. I think it a lot of Malik's or a lot of Miles issues were confidence issues, which to me stemmed from a real clear disagreement between him and Woodson about what the offense was supposed to look like. You might get Luke Goody back. You're going to get Tucker debris transferring over. There's a non zero chance that they might be able to perhaps reopen the Mullins recruitment.
You're going to get Trent Sisley and you're going to have a couple of other players that you grab in the portal. Like what I'm excited about here is you've already got a little bit of a core. You might be able to add some exciting pieces. And I do think that there's a real possibility that, you know, given the fact he's already had to assemble a team from scratch, he's going to be able to do something similar here. And we saw that happen with Pat
Kelsey at Louisville as well. And so you, you take all these things into account and I'm really excited about the possibilities. I, I don't have any guarantees it's going to work, but I am excited about the possibilities. And I, and I think again, if you can get over the name recognition issue and you start digging into what this guy has done, you know, it's easy to like I someone said earlier when they were talking to me, well, he hasn't won a conference championship. And that's true.
They finished fourth in the Missouri Valley Conference, but he finished, excuse me, second four times in the Missouri Valley. But they won two Missouri Valley Conference tournaments, which is really what you need to do. There's a ton of people that have won Missouri Valley regular seasons that never went to the NCAA to get Drake again. Not a historically good team to three NCAA tournaments in four
years. And each time they were good enough profile wise that they would have made it as an at large. They did it once in 2021 as an at large. The last two times they would have made it as an at large, but they ended up winning the, the, the tournament title. I, I, I think there's a lot of, of runway there and there's a lot of pieces that we haven't heard from yet. I don't know what happens with McKenzie and Bacco. Somebody mentioned him in the in
the chat. I don't know what happens with Bryson Tucker. The fact that Bryson Tucker went on to Twitter the other day and said I haven't decided yet. I think it's really interesting. So you could be starting with a nice pool of talented players and I'm really fascinated given what we've seen already profile wise out of him to see what he can do with do with that group of people.
I'm just excited because he issued a press release like what a novel idea coach issuing a press release to his fans about what he's thinking about things that are going on. Sorry, shouldn't throw too much dirt on him, but hey, Mike, talk to the press, talk to Fisher. You can do it. You know, here's the other thing too, is that I I think you you're right on the name recognition piece, but everything you're saying is dead on. I mean, like he he just used those same muscles to rebuild an
entire team. He can do most of that. Again, I would also say I, I don't keep up with the the portal that much 'cause renew's in the portal. I saw that he could come back. I mean, guys, go to the portal, they test it. He might not find what he wants. He might come back. So I would just, I'm not saying I know anything, but just 'cause someone enters the portal doesn't necessarily mean they're not coming back to Indiana.
The other thing that I would say too is, you know, hopefully this works out, but the fact that he went to West Virginia, hold on. And you know, year 1 with a brand new roster and I want, I want to get to this is, is a question I have for you with a brand new roster. They go to Atlantis and they go 2 and one they had the result. I mean, it was a bunch of overtime games. They had the result in Atlantis. I think that we we were hoping for.
They took it from us. You know, he started in West Virginia. They were 11 and 2 on January 4th. And then then things didn't go as well for them. That point. I mean, think about we haven't really Archie started with a what, 15 point loss to Indiana State like that wasn't immediately like, whoa, this is not what we're expecting. Imagine if he comes to Indiana and starts 11:00 and 2:00. Those two and one in a non exempt in an exempt tournament.
That'd be awesome. Now Woodson started off pretty well the first two years. Although you're you're I just want to note you're giving Archie way too much credit. He lost by 21. To Indiana State, not 15. OK, fair enough. Sorry. I know, Arch. Sorry. I know you're listening, Archie and Sean. I know you're both listening. I apologize. Sean's sweating through his shirt.
He's so nervous. You know Woodson started off well the first two years, but was always in the back of your head, like we were getting blown out by good teams. Obviously, the last two years were not as good. All I'm saying is the runway is there. Now what I think is interesting with the Atlantis tournament is Indiana was there, West Virginia was there, Scott Dolson was there and Devries was there. Do you think some of this
started at that point? I mean the conversations for for where we're at now between Dolson and Devries, like do you think there was something that all all there or you think it's? Complete happenstance. I think it was happenstance, although I, I, I don't know how you could be in Atlantis and not
see the difference between. I mean, there were two teams in Atlantis that had no business being as successful as they ended up being in Atlantis. One was Louisville and I would have been really happy if they've just nabbed Pat Kelsey, but the other was West Virginia. And I mean, you know, when you go back and look at that tournament and the fact that West Virginia was as competitive as they were in that tournament from the beginning didn't make a ton of sense.
You know, And I think for a lot of people, it was like, well, you know, why is Indiana not being, you know, why are they not more successful in this tournament? They got blown out in two of the games. You know, and you look at what West Virginia did in that tournament. They beat Gonzaga in overtime. They lose to Louisville in overtime, and then they beat Arizona in overtime. I mean, it was a, it was a really surprisingly effective set of games there.
And, and I'm, you know, when you think about that and then you think about the fact that they, they win at Kansas at the end of that month, I'm sure that, you know, whether it had been fully formed in Scott Dolson's mind or not, that this was a guy they might want to look at. Ultimately, surely they, that made a little bit of an impression, which made it a little bit easier 'cause you've seen the guy's team play.
And so, you know, I'm, I look at it and I say, you know, when you perform as well as they did, relatively speaking, and what was a very tough, you know, season for the Big 12. I mean, there were a lot ton of good teams in the Big 12 this season. And I mean, think about it like Houston was a one seed, Tech was a three seed, Arizona was a four seed, BYU was a six. To finish last. They were fixed to finish last. They finished.
They finished tied for seventh, right and you know the and then again, they got screwed out of the NCAA tournament for that, you know, which was unfortunate for them, but I was, you know, I don't know that you could look at that and not say, well, this is a guy that's clearly got some really fascinating things going for him. You know, again, we'll go back to what we said earlier. Was this the first choice? It probably was not. Almost certainly was not.
And I will be curious as we unpack the timing of all of this, 'cause it seemed like it happened pretty quickly. But you know, for, for it to happen the way that it did and for all of the different things that we heard and all the different names, whether it was Brad Brownell, whether it was, you know, we heard a lot of Ben McCollum this, you know, if you got past the top group. And I and people have asked me like, well, who was your favorite?
And I, I think I've been pretty clear on this, but just to, just to reiterate, like, I really, I really did what Ben McCollum, you know, no, I really, I really wanted to see Indiana go after Scott Drew, TJ Otzelberger, Tommy Lloyd, like that triad. It was, it ended up being a Big 12 coach, just not any of those
Big 12 coaches. But I I also said, and we talked about this on Sunday, it's it's not a foregone conclusion that you were going to go to a place like Indiana, if you can win at the place that you're already at, at a high level. And that's where I think for a lot of the coaches that might have in a past generation said, oh, Indiana's open. Well, I have to go get that job because that's where I ultimately can win a national title.
I mean, you know, you're not going to get a Grant Mcaslin necessarily out of Texas Tech because you've proven previously that you can get to a national title game at Texas Tech. You're not going to necessarily get an A, a, a Bruce Pearl out of Auburn because you've proven you can get to a Final Four with Auburn. You're not going to leave Alabama for Indiana or North Carolina necessarily because you can go to a Final Four from Alabama. Like all of these things have happened recently.
Even Iowa State, which hasn't made a Final Four, but they've been knocking on the door. The thing with Iowa State and the other, the other, the other three that you mentioned is like I, I was kind of putting more, more weight on that. You know, Big 10 and SCC schools are just going to continually have more resources year over year just on the TV money alone that it's going. I think it's going to be harder and harder for those schools to compete that are outside of the
Big 10 and the SCCI. Do think Arizona might be an outlier. I don't think Iowa State is I think, you know, if you're Scott Drew, you've already built a fiefdom in Baylor. So it's like, why do you want to leave? But that that's where I was looking at those guys. And that was always my argument.
I was talking to you. I was like, you're TJ Otzelberger, like, can you really compete at Iowa State over the next 10 years when any Big 10 school is going to have more resources than Iowa State year over year? But that sorry, just but that's I I thought that might have been enough to pull it over. But maybe that is enough to get what what we got to Reese. Yeah.
So look at, you know, I know we've got some folks in the chat that aren't happy and I I get, and I think Brian missed the first part of the show where we tried to explain things. But look, I think there's going to be people and I, I get this perspective, I really do, who are like, why are we hiring a coach from this level? There'll be a lot of well, Indiana isn't the job that they think that it is. There's you know, but again, I'll go back to the first
podcast we did on this front. You take a shot at the big coaches, you take a shot at the moon shot types of candidates. If they don't come, it's not the end of the world.
Because again, when you look at the pathway that most successful coaches have, where they start is about where Darren Debris started at Drake. And again, you go down the list, you've got, I'll do this again, for those who weren't with us in that podcast back in February, let's let's just go through the Ken Palm top 20. Duke is coached by John Shire, who was a career assistant at Duke before becoming the head
coach. Todd Golden at Florida coached for three years at San Francisco and then his first year at Florida they missed the tournament in the second year they bounced out in round one as a seven seed and now they're a one seed. You know, Calvin Sampson, we know his back story. We that's a little bit of a
different route. Bruce Pearl at Auburn was at a division two school and then spent four years at Milwaukee before being hired by a moribund Tennessee squad which he then lost because he had a BBQ with Aaron Craft and then came back and got hired out of a show cause at Auburn. Rick Mark. He also had a bunch of years as AD One assistant like Devries. He did. Rick Barnes, obviously long time regular, you know, coach at
relatively top levels. Nate Oates was at Buffalo for four years before getting hired at Alabama. With a similar profile as what Devries had to drink. Grant Mccaslin. Lot of people wanted Grandma Chasm from Texas Tech spent looks very similar frankly to Darren Devries, spent a year at our Arkansas State and then spent six seasons at North Texas. And to our friend Brian in the chat, Grandma Chasm made one tournament in that whole period of time. Probably would have made a second one.
We can give him a second one. It's less than Darren Devries did at Drake, which is arguably not arguably definitely a worst school to coach at. Than than than than North Texas is Tom Izzo, career assistant, Mark Few, career assistant TJ Otzelberger, who I was certainly very much on board with. Three years at South Dakota State, made 2 tournaments, 2 years at UNLV, made 0 tournaments and then got hired
at Iowa State at a discount. I might note Kevin Willard kind of a sneaky path through the college coaching ranks. Spent like 9000 years at Seton Hall, was not terribly impressive. He's got Maryland as a four seed now. We can keep going down the list. I mean, what you see more often than not is that if you're going to get coaches who are going to take off like on their own runway, this is generally the profile that they fit.
I do not blame anybody who looks at this and says underwhelming hire guy hasn't done nearly as much as you would want. I get all of that. I'm just going to tell you, when you look at the profile, it fits a ton of what you see in other hires that end up being really good. And I know everybody throws the Archie Miller thing at it, and I get that. But I was talking to Will McDermott and Matt Press at at upstairs earlier before the the
show started. And I told them what I'll tell all of you, which is that you can't let the fact that Archie failed be the reason why you don't consider these particular types of hires. It didn't work, Archie didn't work, and there were a number of reasons why it didn't work. That doesn't mean that similar profiled coaches don't work. And this is where we've said Archie was a good process, bad
results hire. Ultimately, you're going to have situations where things don't work and there's a litany of coaches when you go through the history of college basketball that got hired and didn't work out. I would point to our friends across the border at Illinois. Do you remember the, the, the John Gross era? You know, John Gross got hired and everybody was like, wow, this guy is the next big thing. Coach four years at Ohio. He had that one great year in 2013 and it was great year.
They were a seven seed in the tournament and then didn't make the tournament the next four years. And now he's at Akron doing pretty well. I had a bunch of people be like, why aren't we considering John Gross? And it's like, well, it didn't work at the highest level. The fact that you you hired debris at West Virginia and he does A10 game improvement right off the bat. That doesn't happen by accident. It really doesn't. I know people think that it
does. That doesn't happen by accident, especially as you said, Scott, when you're starting from scratch. I know it sounds like I'm trying to sell this higher, but you know, the more I've talked about it and thought about it, the more I'm like, this is really a fascinating move by IU. And the fact that I'm, you know, I look at where he's been and what he's done and, and the fact that Dolson, again, kind of brought out the Devries, checked all the boxes when we interviewed him.
The fact that he had that same reaction to Signetti, it doesn't mean it's going to be the same level of higher as Signetti was. But I think we have to at least put some trust in Scott Dolson's evaluative processes here 'cause it's already worked once and there's a possibility it could work again. And that's enough for me at this point to be like, yes, let's get behind this. Yeah. No, I I agree. I mean, there's definitely there's things that are concerning, there's concerning
things about everything. In the end, we're all fans. Like I'm not going to say I'm going to get in line, but it's like, all right, I'm going to try and find the positive, try and find ways and I want to go in the next season with a positive attitude and and be proven correct that this is going to work out again. We'll know in three years.
The kind of the other way to look at it too is, you know, let's just call it what it is. Like outside of Brad Stevens, Billy Donovan, Jay Wright and like Scott Drew just to the the upper absolute tier of guys. Everybody else had some kind of question mark there, you know, you know, to be like, oh man, you really settled. It's like what? Like as you mentioned, man, TJ Oltzenberger didn't make the
tournament at UNLV. You know, Ben McCollum had like we're we're really splitting hairs if we're like at this level, like, yes, we didn't get Brad Stevens. I don't think we're going to get Brad Stevens. I don't think Brad Stevens wants to coach college. I just want to coach college here. Like at some point we can't just it's not like it's no one's fault. It's just that's not an option that those guys aren't. Guess what? Neither is going back in time and getting Phil Jackson in 92.
Like he's no longer a coach either. You know, I'm just. I'm speaking suspicion that Phil Jackson at the college level probably wouldn't have worked. I did too much too much weed at that point to really make it work. Also no Jordan big. Big, big issue. No, No, Jordan, no. Kobe kind of an issue, yes. Just this idea of, you know, we
settled. It's like because what, because you, you couldn't like, I don't think Brad Stevens, they did whatever they could to try and get Brad Stevens in one of these two or three cycles. It didn't happen.
It wasn't going to happen. I don't know if they tried Billy Donovan or got turned down, but maybe it just wasn't even since like I, I, I pushed back on me. Like you settled it it because if you're just going to sit here and tell me, oh, like, you know, whatever, you know, Mcculliver will wait. Like that would have been the dynamite higher. It's like, well, we're really splitting hairs. Like there's there's concerning things.
There's also ways to spin everything to be positive, and that's what we're going to do. I mean, and that's this is where you know, the X's and Joe's thing. This is what a new coach allows you to do is you get a cultural reset. Everything.
You know, you can start to look at things in a positive way and you get there and, you know, I don't know how the future is going to go, but you just need to look down the road at a school in Kentucky who they felt like they got pissed on and turned down by every coach they went for. And like to them, no question Mark Pope felt like a real settlement. They went 22 and 11 and they're a three seed in the tournament this year. I don't know how they're gonna do moving forward, but I'll take
that. I'll take that right now for next year. So we had a request to stop defending the higher and move forward, which I think is fair. I appreciate it, Joey. Thank you. So let's let's move to that. So what happens next and you know this is where it's going to be interesting. So first and foremost, I don't know if you guys have released. Sorry, I got to go. What? What happened today? Is there a Woodson press release? Do we well? No, I don't think that's ever happening at this point.
I mean, I mean, there's still as I don't think there's been an announcement of the, the time of the press conference going to be 11:30 tomorrow. I do know that from from like off off track betting in terms of media the his assistants at West Virginia it it's like the ghosts of Christmas past for
IUI. Don't know if you folks have seen this, but his three assistants at West Virginia are Tom Ostrom, who of course was one of Archie Miller's assistants at IU. Chester Frazier, who many of you remember in an Illinois uniform, I believe shoved Eric Gordon. I don't know if he'll be coming. Maybe what that would be a fascinating one. I'd love to see Chester Frazier
in an IU polo just for the lows. And then Corey Barnett, our old buddy four year walk on, who was the original human victory cigar as Dan Carell mentioned earlier on. Corey, I think is definitely coming. I think we can count on Corey Barnett being on the IU coaching staff. The other two, I'm not totally sure and I am I'm fascinated to see what Devries does in terms
of his staff. I will say this like that's going to be the starting point that alongside the recruits that we will have to wait and see what it that what happens now. We just there were a couple of notes that happened earlier and I want to kind of run through all of them. So first of all, Trent Sicily immediately retweeted and said, let's let's go to work. We knew he was gonna be here. I don't think that was a. Surprise. And we can always already assume Devries son is gonna come here,
right? I mean, and I and Tucker Devries will be here. You know, Zerno, the the Bosnian kid, the immediately there was notes like he's gonna like getting interest from elsewhere, which is what happens when the coach's son plays the same position that you do. Someone tweeted that. I don't know who it was.
It was a great tweet. Then you've got a bunch of questions on the roster and, and this is where on the IU roster, if we start with the IU roster first, I think you, you know, you look through just because a guy's in the portal doesn't mean that a guy can't come out of the portal. But let's go through who the guys are, who we don't know about one way or the other. So Malik Renu is in the portal, but it's possible he could potentially come back. Trey Galloway is out of eligibility.
Omar Barlow is out of eligibility. Miles Rice haven't heard anything from. I still maintain Miles Rice can be a good point guard at the Division One level. You know what? I I, I think a lot of it has to do with the confidence issues that he had with Woodson this year.
Oh, and. I've, I've always felt with Miles Rice this year, it, it felt like everything that he is good at. We didn't play to that style that you know, he's, he was very quick and brought the ball up quickly and has a lot of pace and you're asking him to be slow and deliberate and he's just not that kind of point guard. He seems like a perfect Tom Crean type point guard, like someone who could just run and gun and shoot.
It's like, no, we just slow down, be very efficient, don't turn the ball over and pass the ball to the post. And it's like you're asking him to do all the things that he's, I don't want to say, not good at, but not as advantageous for him. And so I, I think at a different system with a different coach, he he could flourish. I mean, there's, there's a lot of.
Here's the thing. As much as Woodson deservedly got credit for coaching up big men, the guards really struggled under Woodson. Even Jalen Ochofino, who frankly like as as well as as he played at IU at times, you know. I mean, he was at. His own, it was very much like do it yourself. Absolutely. You look at the other players that are question marks on the roster. We have McKenzie Mbacco, who I'm I'm really curious to see what he does. I won't be shocked at all if Mbacco transfers.
I'm actually very surprised that I haven't seen his name in the portal, which makes me wonder, well, does he look at this offense and say, wait, a four out offense? That's like what I am made for. That's a guy who I would love to see him with, someone who can unlock whatever defensive potential he has. He may have none. I don't know. I know it's a dumb take. I wouldn't be surprised either way. I, I I wouldn't be surprised if he left. I wouldn't be surprised if he stayed Canon.
Carlisle, I'll be surprised if he comes back. I won't be shocked, but I'll be a bit surprised. Bryson Tucker. I'll note, like earlier on this week, it was announced by other media members that he was in the in the portal and that he he himself took to Twitter and said that is not true. And his family. And his family also took to Twitter and said that is not true, which makes me think that there may be a a future for Bryson Tucker at IU. So we'll see what happens with
that. Luke Goody obviously is suing for an extra year of eligibility. And God, if we could get Luke Goody back. As kind of a, an emotional anchor and another 3 point shooter to plug into this. How know you know the NCAA better than most? How where would you put your your chances of of him coming getting that extra year?
Well, let's put it this way. When when the news was announced he was going to try my immediate tweet was let's get him some great lawyers because I think at this point, I don't know how the NCAA says you're not going to get this extra year of eligibility because they know they're going to get sued And and that so that's what gives me some hope on Goody. I I'm keeping my fingers crossed. That would be amazing if we could get Luke Goody back for another year. Doesn't sound.
Optimistic about it though. Yeah. So anyway, Matt Norlander, this is Jr. ES. Matt Norlander is reporting 7 million plus an nil and revenue share. Does that sound accurate? Yes, so the, the question on the money, I actually saw a number that was going to be closer to 8 million, which is going to be close to the top of the Big 10. You need that in this day and age. And it's, I don't know if they actually like if debris actually went to Iowa and said that, hey, I need an IO money.
And they said, no, we only have this much 'cause I mean, there's reports that Iowa rolled into this year with $300,000 in NIL, which is incredibly Iowa. I mean, that's, that's, that's the most Iowa thing I've heard that they would do like that little money in in, in NIL. We put it all in Bitcoin that we had two million wait. Wait, wait, it's corn coin in Iowa. But but 8 million to play with and and that is about what you're going to be going for.
I mean, this is the thing. Indiana's got a ton of resources. They've poured a ton of NIL money. They're going to pour money and more money into it next year. Also Jr. asked, do you think Debris will get AGM to help build the roster and effectively allocate those resources? I do. I don't know if AG Ms. gonna get announced immediately but I do. We're gonna start doing 4G Ms. A A a podcast. We're gonna do our GM search. That's right.
That's right. We're gonna start with Lawrence Frank. Actually, he's gonna leave the Clippers and gonna come here. That's exactly right. Anyway, so you've got that group and then you've got the group that's at West Virginia. We've talked about Tucker Devries already, who who's an excellent player, and I'm really excited to see what he can do in an Indiana uniform. And then you've got the recruiting class. So there were three recruits in the West Virginia recruiting
class. They were, I misspoke earlier. They're 23rd in the country. Now you've got one West Virginia native, Braden Hawthorne. I I don't know if the chat can help with this. Did he go in the portal yet or not? Because I saw announcements for the other two. They both have entered the portal, which makes me they may not come to Indiana.
We'll have to wait and see. But I got to think with Indiana's NIL money and if Devries believes in them and thinks they can play at this level and and let's be honest, if you recruited them to West Virginia, he probably thinks they can play at a high enough level. The other two. So I'm being told that by the chat, they are not in the that the that Braden Hawthorne's not in the portal. The other two also four stars.
You've got Kelvin Odie, I I'm probably butchered that name. 64 small forward out of Socal Academy in Castaic, CA 75th in the country. And you know, a smaller small forward. But that's fine, especially since Devries likes to play a smaller style. And then you got another full circle moment for for us Scott Trent McClain, 141st in the country, 69 power forward.
He is the son of Don McClain, who if you are a long in the tooth IU fan, you remember Don McClain was the leading player on that IU, on that UCLA team that IU just like obliterated in the 1992 NCAA Tournament. And so that's fascinating to me. If you go back and watch the tape of that, there's like this weird, like Don, like the the other Don McClain, the guy that wrote American Pie intro during that broadcast, like where they they redid the American Pie lyrics to try to match like
something basketball related. And then and then, you know, that was the first like really great Jim Herrick UCLA team and they just got like bludgeoned to death. That was also the game where like, you know, famously Knight had gotten in trouble earlier in that tournament for like having the bullwhip out and then like Calvert Chaney does like the the whipping of Knight with the towel on the sidelines at the end of that. That's that game.
So it's hilarious that we might potentially get Don Mcclain's kid to come to play it. Indiana. That's like a perfect circle as far as I'm concerned. Perfect circle. It's also funny.
I don't know why I remember this intro songs of that tournament when we played in the final four that year when we played Duke that next game in that same tournament, the intro to the final four included a musical parody of Bohemian Rhapsody with Wayne World. And then it went into a like devil with a blue dress intro music showing all of its I I used to have it on VHS tape, but it was like it showed Cincinnati was playing God. Who'd they play in the But there
was Duke and us and they, they were showing the Christian Watford or the Christian Oh, did you put that? I I did put that game on YouTube. Yes yeah, Christian Leightner, not Christian Lander. I know it's it's getting late more 4/4. Roses, baby. Like we don't yesterday I had that shot with like devil in the blue dress like I yeah, yeah, we do not we do not 90s for a wild time. I want to give Scott 4 roses before he podcast. We've learned. You know they're saying names,
right? It'll like, well, I like them. Out. I'll hit a certain I like. EJ here. I need to rhyme Chevy Levy and DeVry. This is great, great content. I love it. But anyway, we talked about that and as has been mentioned elsewhere in the chat, there's a non. Quinn Buckner and Great Gumble. I, I was watching another Gumbel Buckner game from a it was the UCLA Princeton game. I watched that clip this morning and I was like, well, that's, that's great. That's Quinn Buckner doing that game.
That's wild. Anyway. There's also Pacers color, by the way. We still still got to have them. Among other things, as we've learned, there's also I, I think it's interesting, and this is something that I think a lot of IU fans are going to be interested in, is, is it possible to potentially talk Braylon Mullins into coming back to Indiana? And I do believe there's at least a crack in the door there
for a variety of reasons. Because you know, again, why, you know, why wouldn't you go play for the two time defending national champs? But on the other end, a lot of the reason why Braylon Mullins didn't want to come here was the coaching staff, or at least the head coach in terms of like, you know, that there just wasn't a desire to play there. And and now that's changed. So may not happen, but man, that would be a really fascinating collection of players.
And, you know, we'll have to see how the rest of the roster comes together. It may be that a bunch of players still transfer out, but the fact that we've only seen a couple of names in the portal, I am really fascinated by that. And the fact that that hadn't, I mean, you know, you've seen a lot of players announcing that they were going to be in the
portal in other schools. And the fact that Indiana without a coach didn't have a bunch of players jump into the portal until today was a really interesting one. I sort of saw somebody ask early about Jakai Newton. I have no idea what happens with Jakai Newton. I just don't know what his health situation is with like two major knee issues with I think it's knee issues within the last two years. It's like, that's a tough one to
project. But ultimately, look, I, I do think that the, the, the, the timetable on all this has been weird, but the fact that Indiana ends up making this higher two days before the bulk of the NCAA tournament starts and almost a full week before the portal opens does give them a huge
advantage. And, and, and look, I'm all, I'm all for what Newtonian's saying here, you know, go re recruit Jalen Harrelson. I mean, it's, it's one of those situations where IU had a bunch of players that were in the mix that were interested in coming to IU. And this is I, you know, if you want to call this piling on, I don't care. Clearly something wasn't working in the recruiting process that turned a bunch of guys who were otherwise interested in coming to IU off of coming to IU.
Does that change with a new staff? Especially if Corey Barnett and someone mentioned he might be in running for the Oral Roberts head coaching job. But if he ends up not getting that and he ends up coming here as an assistant, does that re establish the relationship with Indiana Elite? Does it help to re establish the relationship with the recruiting here in the Midwest? Roberts says odds on devries attending the Indiana State championship game? I would say very high.
Certainly. I'm sure someone has it written down a list of like dear Darren, here's the things we would highly suggest that you do for appearance purposes at the very least over the course of the you know the next month or so, I have a sense that they're going to give them some some Intel as far as like what's going to go over well with the families. We'll see what happens with that. But you know, when I've talked about the, you know, the
personality. Showing up high school games, just go to a couple Indiana high school games like don't be known as Bigfoot. Just just be know, be be known with the the players know with them. And I mean, if that number is true, if it's if it's an $8 million NIL budget again, I'm I'm Braylon Mullins. If you're going to get recruited by UConn, they've won back-to-back titles. They could win three in a row. I mean, you have a hell of a coach there a hell of a system.
I, I, you probably lost that one, but maybe you now come in and, and from all accounts, it sounded like he kind of had interest. Of course, everyone in Indiana's like always, but had interest and Woodson showed no interest back. Maybe you just come in and say, hey, I'm here, you know, but I also have a check for 2 million. Dollars. And we we now have interest and sorry, didn't work out before, but there's still an option to come and do this. Maybe it doesn't work, but yeah,
I'm I'm with Robert on that one. Like Indiana State title game, I this has got to be a must. You got to start actually recruiting the state of India. And a lot of it is just energy and look, you don't go out and get 3-4 stars to come to West Virginia if you're not putting a lot of effort into things. I mean that it's just kind of just how it works. So by the way, I keep seeing this in the chat and I'm sorry, I'm going to have to put Brian in time out because he's he's
just being unrelenting. But, and I appreciated Brian's spiritedness, but like enough's enough. You can't criticize a guy for going one and three in the tournament when all three times you're projected to lose. You just can't do it. I'm sorry that that's that's not how things work in college basketball. Like if you want a guy that had a really good tournament record before he got to the next level, Archie Miller had a great tournament record, went to an Elite 8.
You know, like the, the, the idea that, hey, you're a 12 seed or an 11 seed out of the mountain Missouri Valley, which has not been a great conference for a while. I'm sorry, Matt Blaska, but it has not been. And, and you go to three tournaments, you win a game, you're you're leading with 5 minutes to go against the team that went to the final four. I'm OK with that. Natos went. Two and three at Buffalo. No, Natos went two and three in Buffalo.
By the way, Scott, you got chided by one of our friends about saying, well, you know, you know, Dan Hurley only you know what? What did you say about his time at at Rhode Island? You used like he only made the tournament twice. It's like making the tournament twice at Rhode Island is essentially an act of God. Fair enough. But he, I mean, also he went two and two. Like if we're going to start throwing out, yeah, you're not talking. It's it's incredibly rare to have a coach.
I'll note shock is smart went to a final four at VCU, which looked like a miracle of the time and then couldn't cut it at Texas. So the tournament success at that level a lot of times is luck rather than anything else. And you're I I'm still a firm believer. You have to look at the the records. We were talking about Jay Wright earlier today and it's like, look at Jay Wright's record without Jaylen Brunson and it's like. It's not that great.
So a lot of tournament stuff tends to be luck, but you need to get those. You stack the 20 to 25 win seasons on a regular basis and. Again, last I I don't want to keep defending it, but it's like, I know it's dumb, but like we'll know in three years in. 3. Years if we're not if, if we're struggling to make the tournament in year 3, then you look back and it's like, all right, you were right. One in like one in three. We got to look somewhere else.
But you know what, I, I go back to what you, I don't want to keep defending it. Like what you said, when you look at the profile of the top 2025 coaches in the country, very few teams hire that elite #1 coach even. You look through history, it just hasn't happened. A lot of times. Like Kentucky got Calipari. I would say there wasn't really a Calipari out there this time. You know, Kansas got Roy Williams.
There's a lot of or no, sorry, North Carolina, I flipped that up. North Carolina got Roy Williams from Kansas, a lot of extenuating circumstances that wasn't there. Like as you said, this is the profile of coaches that win. And again, it's like Archie didn't work fine. Like, what does that mean? You can never hire a young coach again who might be good? Like we just have to keep trying new things.
Like we just like no. Look, I mean, and, and I'm sure we will get in one way or another the inside story about how all of this went. And we talked a bunch about this and, you know, we talked about how it felt like it was a long tail thing and, and we keep getting yelled at to stop defending the hire by certain people in the chat, which is fine. But I look, ultimately I'm, I'm optimistic. I'm fascinated to see what we hear tomorrow and I'm fascinated to see what the roster ends up
looking like. And I do think like ultimately, you know it, you do have to with a coach that not that many people were familiar with ahead of time, you do have to essentially establish their bona fides in a way that makes sense to everybody. And I thought, Bob, let's put the comment up again, made a great point. When you get to the tournament three times out of six seasons in a single big conference, it's damn impressive. That's the ceiling for Valley teams.
And when you make it as essentially an at large, when you're in 11 or 12 seed, you're essentially in at large territory, that's even more impressive. So anyway, as we move forward, those are going to be a lot to talk about. We're not going to go terribly much longer here. This was kind of an impromptu podcast. We're still gathering a lot of information. But I'm, you know, this is a good question by Nick, though. Would this have been the guy of West Virginia made the tournament?
I was, that's a great question. I was thinking the same thing and. I, I don't know, I mean, I, my, my thing is this, the timing on this, this is the one thing I find peculiar is the way that this went down and, and I can't reveal yet because I, because I don't want to betray any
confidences. But like the, the idea that that a press higher was going to be announced today and a press conference was going to be announced tomorrow was a huge acceleration of the timeline that most people thought that this was going to go. And so that I do wonder, was there a, were there some bids on the table where Indiana was like, you know what, maybe our first or second choice didn't hit, but this is the guy that we want and we need to go ahead and
move. Or did Indiana just say, we're going to hire this guy? We thought he was going to be in the tournament. He wasn't in the tournament. And everybody was shocked by that. We can't make a hire on Monday, but we're going to try to get this going as quickly as possible because we want to get on with it. Because as we talked about on the podcast last week, you really need a coach in place.
You really need to have someone. This is why Miami went ahead and hired Jai Lucas. It's why what was the other the other opening recently? But like, it's why a lot of these like North Carolina State's rushing to try to figure out who they're going to hire 'cause you just have to have somebody in place. You have to have somebody who's like, we're here, this is our roster, this is our thank you.
Florida State was the other one. We have to have somebody in the mix so that we can talk to our current players, we can talk to future players, we can put ourselves in a position where we are competitive in the portal because this is where you're going to be as we move forward. And you know, look, the question of who was the mystery guy, that's what I have to go find out and bring back to all you folks on the podcast.
I don't know, I've got some theories and I have AI do have a theory that there was another candidate that might have been the lead and it's something like there was and again, I don't know how much of this to believe and that I haven't talked about it on the show. I haven't talked about it on Twitter. There was a ton of back channel talk on Saturday that a guy had either signed or was about to sign and then it all changed in about 48 hours.
And and whether that was one of the names that just got mentioned in chat or another name that hasn't been mentioned in chat, I don't know if any of that was true. It's possible there was no mystery candidate and there was just a smokescreen. But I do think it's fascinating that this kind of fell together so quickly.
One of the things we talked about and we've talked about throughout is how tight of a search this has been under Scott Dolson. And I was just suspicious for most of the day that this was the name that kept spilling out. I was like, that seems like a smokescreen. And apparently it was not this time. But it's clear that like, you know, the all the Chris Beard talk was a smokescreen and there were other names that got thrown into the mix. Brad Brownell, No idea.
Not sure what that situation was. So we'll dig into that. We'll see if we can get some more information. Of course, anonymously because that's how you have to do things these days. But it is interesting that it came to together the way it did. But given all of that, it's almost all like in the past now and we almost can't concentrate on it because we need to focus
on things moving forward. I'm going to be really fascinated to see how the press conference goes tomorrow, what the roster looks like at the end of March, almost to the point now where it's like, well, damn, now I wish Indiana hadn't backed out of the crown because I would kind of like to see Darren, Darren Devries like coach an early version of this team and see, you know what that would look like. But the crown would still take us.
I I probably would. I'm sure their rules are very flexible if they wanted to just add a team. I don't know if you've seen the roster for the crown tournament, but yeah, it's it's a little bit of God forbid it. What if they lose a crown game? It's like, man, how could you hire a guy who's O and one in the crown? It's kind of like This is why new head coaches hires in football don't coach the bowl game, right.
You know, you never want to leave a bad taste in people's mouths at the beginning of things anyway. Well, look, great audience, over 730 people in the in the audience right now. And and many of you have kind of of come on and dropped off. We wanted to get something out
there tonight, yes. I want to and I don't want to defend, but just what do we have ahead of us here is, you know, Signetti has to, I'm getting larger point with what Dolson may have done for for IU. You know, Signetti has to kind of, I don't say prove it, but, you know, can't come out with another Allen 2021 season. We can't go 3 and 10 in football. But I don't see that as being something that happens if Signetti has another successful year that's not making the College Football Playoff.
But if it's if it's he comes out and, you know, wins 7-8 games and it's like, all right, we have something here. And you know what he's done with baseball and with women's basketball. And if Devries can can get IU back to it. I mean, it's awful to say, you know, I'm the the king of I just want us to be final, you know,
final four bus. But it's like if we can just be back to making the tournament every year safely, You know, if he can get you there, you know, you, you got to look at Tulsa's. This is the best, you know, athletic director we've had in 25 years. Like he, he really got this right. You would have to say he's going to get IU as healthy as it's ever been across all athletics since maybe the the Mallory night days in like the late mid 80s. So that's saying a lot.
That's what's on the table right now because Dolson has done such a good job in all other areas. Now it has to keep going, you know, it's, it's all, but that's where we're at right now. And I think that's a really cool place to be. And that's a the, to me, the real positive outlook I'm going to have going forward. Had this conversation with our friend Tricia Whitaker at the Big 10 tournament last week.
She said if if he nails the basketball higher the way that he appears to have nailed the football higher, like he could go down in history, it's like the best athletic director in IU history. There's a lot of space between now and then. But you know, I do think, you know, what I would advise everybody is let's not get over our skis. Let's, you know, let's see how the roster shapes up. Let's beat Indiana State first.
What's fascinating about everything as we move forward into the next, the the spring and the summer, like this is recruiting time. It's it's Huber's time. It's, you know, golf outing in French Lick time. It's like, let's get people excited. Let's get the NIL war chest up. Let's talk about what the philosophy's going to be. And then you hit the ground running A20 win season for IU in next year. I mean, that sounds like a low, it sounds like a low bar.
But if you think about it like, you know, Indiana's had 320 win seasons in the last eight years, I think, or nine years. I mean, it's it's kind of like that statue uncorked on Sunday. Well, you know, where it's like, well, you know, only Penn State and Washington and a couple of other teams have made the tournament less than Indiana has in the last decade. So I I think the nice thing now and, and again, I'm curious to see how the press conference goes tomorrow.
But the nice thing now is that there's first of all, the coaching search is over. And Scott, I couldn't be more thrilled. I'm tired of talking about the coaching search. I'm ready to just talk about basketball again. We got it done before the tournament, so we don't have to like break up the middle of one of the tournament days so that we can go talk about the higher. And now he gets to work on the roster. The guys that are here, the guys that are coming in.
I'm fascinated to see what happens as we move forward with all of that. And we'll have a lot to talk about and we'll talk about it as well. Our friends at Assembly Call as well, our friends at the X's and Joe's podcast. There's so many great venues through which you can have legitimate, calm, sober talk about IU basketball. I hope that you stick with us here at the Back Home Network. We certainly appreciate you folks for sticking with us. Yes, but I mean.
Can't say sober on the night we're drinking big glasses of bourbon and whiskey. I'm not sure but hello to Well hey, this is where you get it's Crimson cast after dark. Yeah, we've seen it off. From Assembly. Dude, Ryan just joined. He's gonna go back and tell Jerry we can't steal the the After Dark. We gotta come up with something else like the the Crimson cast Mansion, Crimson Cast PM or like Advil PM.
That's that's a you go. You're going to marketing jail for that, Scott. Anyway, put you to sleep. That's Yeah. All right. We're gonna wrap it up. Thank you all for joining us. And thank you to Four Roses for property liquefying. Scott here. Throughout the course of the podcast, we will catch you folks on the Flip side IU with a brand new basketball coach, Darren Devries. Welcome. Coach Debreeze, looking forward to seeing what happened to the Crimson cast.
Adult Swim. That's very hilarious. Thank you. All right, for Scott. I'm Galen. Thank you all for joining us here. We'll see what happens tomorrow and beyond. And all I can say, folks, is stay never daunted and bring back the Bison. We'll catch you folks on the flip side song everybody. And goodbye, YouTube. Bye. YouTube. It's been fun.