The Long Road Back

The Long Road Back The anatomy of a rebuilding project

by Chris Korman

T

om Crean stood unusually still in the middle of a parking lot. He was flipping through the pages of a document someone had handed him.

He paced now and then, perhaps indulging his frenetic impulses, or perhaps responding to something he read. His eyes, though, moved across the pages behind his glasses.

His assistant coaches and members of the Indiana basketball program’s robust support staff formed a perimeter around Crean, all giving him at least 50 feet. They did their best not to watch him. Somehow, the area was stifling despite being on the tip of an island in the Pacific Ocean. Waves rolled onto shore. Palm tree leaves blew lightly in the breeze. No one from Indiana seemed happy to be where they were at that moment. The Hoosiers had just lost, 80–54, to St. Joseph’s on the second day of the Maui Invitational, and had been outscored by 64 points in two games. Yet most of the focus from the media was not on those dismal games, but instead on the turmoil that had happened before most of the people involved with the program got there.

I walked over to Crean. We began talking about how long the day had been. He had not slept much. He rarely does. I had awoken to an alarm set for 3:30 a.m. and slid open the door to the balcony of my hotel room. Maybe for the first time, I realized that all those thousand little creatures you always know are there and only sometimes see live by some rhythm we barely understand anymore. They all began shuffling and rustling and making whatever noise they could make as it got closer to 4 a.m. About then, the sky began to change colors, anticipating the sun, and I received an email from the NCAA saying that it would announce later that day Indiana’s punishment for major recruiting violations and failure to monitor them during the brief Kelvin Sampson era.

As I sat there reviewing my notes and thinking about what the day would bring, the sun came up. It snuck up behind me, at first nothing but an orange

the Future

looking to the future

Devan Dumes was one Tom Crean’s first commitments upon arriving in Bloomington. glow. But when it cleared the roof of the hotel, the light suddenly shot out onto the water, and the island was lit and ready for another day.

Rebirth had to be on the mind of anyone who cared about Indiana basketball that day. It had been eight months since Crean took over, ten months since Sampson had been swept from Bloomington with a $750,000 buyout, 13 months since Indiana made public the fact that Sampson had violated the terms of his own sanctions as well as NCAA rules, 16 months since somebody on IU’s compliance staff noticed impermissible call patterns, and 32 whole months since the university hired Kelvin Sampson even though he was in the midst of being tried and sentenced by the NCAA for making too many phone calls to recruits at Oklahoma.

It had been a long time.

And a drastic, sad descent.

But on November 25, 2008, Indiana would receive what amounted to an end date. The 60-page ruling—that document Crean was leafing through—put the university on probation for three years (until November 24, 2011) and passed down otherwise fairly benign hand-slappings. Much of the damage to the program had already been done, as Crean was restricted in his ability to recruit upon arriving. And much of the damage was, of course, ancillary: Crean felt the need to cleanse the program of players he thought did not fit the culture he wanted, many of whom had failed to keep up grades during the months when Dan Dakich served as interim coach.

It all goes a long way in explaining the mood that afternoon in Maui. Crean and everyone else within the Indiana

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Sports is, of course, overloaded with metaphor. The theme of “rebuilding” permeates, because it is, in fact, what most teams have to do most years.

Let us not get too complicated, then. To understand the Indiana basketball rebuilding project, you must understand the architect. Start there.

Tom Crean flew into Bloomington late the night of April 1 (no fooling). News had already broken that he would be named Indiana’s next coach. After meeting with his team at Marquette to say goodbye, he came via private jet to his new home. Reporters were waiting for him at the airport, and then at the downtown hotel where he was staying.

Crean looked that night the only way any man in his situation could: tired, a bit overwhelmed, but ultimately excited. He showed almost immediately how well he understood the situation he was stepping into when he got to the hotel.

By then, a small group of fans had realized he’d be coming and they welcomed him with the fight song.

He sang along.

The importance of that cannot be understated. Crean would learn in the coming days that he’d have to completely rebuild many parts of the program. But near midnight on his first night, he was doing the most important thing he could do: showing a couple of fans that he’d taken the time to learn the words. He was the man who would remind them why this song was so meaningful, would restore the pride once found in each rousing note.

Crean continued along this path in the morning during his sprawling introductory press conference. He first used the phrase that has become his signature, “It’s Indiana,” in the Hoosier Room below the football stadium. The most important people at the university had gathered there, many who had been there during the years when Bob Knight built a powerhouse. Others had come to the university in the intervening years since Knight was fired in 2000 and had worked

Photo on previous page: Joe Robbins/Getty Images Photo this page: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

program were not upset at what the NCAA had decided.

Publicly they continued to challenge the idea of “failure to monitor,” but said that the ruling was fair. Internally, many were surprised that the punishments were not more severe.

The university had received the ruling a few days before so that it could have time to craft its response, and Crean had no doubt read it before his walk out into that empty parking lot.

So what was he doing, skimming over the lawyerly jargon once again? And why did it all feel so uncomfortable?

Probably because, for so long, they’d all been holding their breath, and were waiting just a few more seconds before finally knowing what it would feel like to exhale.

Photo: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

The Long Road Back to rebuild the basketball program knowing only that it could, at its best, serve as a source of pride for an entire state. Crean spoke to them. One contraction. One noun. He had them.

He’d said everything. Why was he here? It’s Indiana.

Actually, Crean is loquacious to an extreme behind a microphone. Words boil up out of him, sentences never end and veer into new paragraphs. He speaks with exclamation points.

He tells jokes, then makes sincere promises. He appears at times to be out of control, to be overcome by the things he needs to say. But always he comes back to where he’d planned to be. He is, in short, as good as any coach I’ve ever seen at making fans believe.

While Crean is certainly noted for his basketball mind and has long been seen as a topflight recruiter, his ability to market the program played a heavy role in his hiring at Indiana. Kelvin Sampson was a polished speaker, yes, and could be as charismatic as he needed to be. He came into the program with baggage, though, and could be standoffish, even in public. Crean was consistently gracious and energetic.

Crean quickly found that the vision of the program he was building with his public appearances would never be a reality with the players currently on the team. He told everyone that things would be done the right way, that rules would be followed, and that his teams would be made up of upstanding young student-athletes.

But when he finally got a chance to dig into the grades of his players, he found 19 Fs had been recorded through the first half of the semester. On top of that, two of his top returning guards, Jamarcus Ellis and Armon Bassett, had been kicked off the team by interim coach Dan Dakich on his last official day as coach. They’d been late for a meeting, then refused to run as punishment.

Sources say that the team’s first meeting with Crean could kindly be described as awkward. By then, Indiana’s players felt they were merely pawns in the program, and many had lost any sense of loyalty to Indiana University.

Sampson had recruited the sort of players he always won with: kids whose toughness was richer than their talent, and who craved the discipline of a hard-driving father. He’d shown faith in both Ellis and DeAndre Thomas, longtime friends who’d made it out of the Chicago projects. Sampson pulled Eli Holman out of one of the toughest parts of the country, Richmond, CA, even though Holman sat out most of his high school career after being suspending for pushing a referee.

Sampson brought in Bassett, originally a Mike Davis recruit, and challenged the mercurial point guard on a daily basis.

Jordan Crawford, who’d been lightly recruited out of Detroit due to injury and grade issues, and Brandon McGee, another product of South Chicago, both felt Sampson had taken a personal interest in them in a way other coaches hadn’t.

These players led a group that met with athletic director Rick Greenspan on the eve of Sampson’s dismissal. University president Michael McRobbie—a native of Australia whose first months in charge were beset by problems within an athletic department that, in the past, had wagged the dog—had given Greenspan seven days to find a way to rid the university of Sampson in early February, 2008. By then, the NCAA had come back with evidence that indicated Sampson and assistant Rob Senderoff had knowingly violated the terms of the sanctions they were operating under by taking part, at the same time, in three-way calls with recruits.

Greenspan had originally stood by Sampson, saying the coach’s impermissible contacts were acts of “omission, not commission.” Now that he’d been proven wrong, it was his job to begin cleaning the mess. It was clear that he could mitigate the damage done to Indiana’s reputation during the turmoil by turning to Dakich, who had been promoted onto the coaching staff when Senderoff was scapegoated. Dakich had spent the previous ten years as the head coach at Bowling Green, and before that he was Knight’s top assistant, having risen through the ranks after a gritty playing career in Bloomington from 1981–85.

So, despite being the freshest member of the coaching staff—Ray McCallum and Jeff Meyer had both been with Samspon since the beginning—Dakich was the only choice, politically.

The players began to sense this and wanted a say. They advocated for McCallum, who’d built bonds with them the

Kyle Taber, the lone remaining scholarship player Crean had in his first season, became something of a symbol for the Indiana rebuilding process.

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looking to the future

As the known players left, they were replaced with unfamiliar names. It is true that the guys recruited by Sampson not named Eric Gordon were not high-level, blue-chip recruits.

But they were known enough to be ranked by Rivals and Scout, and Crawford, especially, had shown flashes of being better than anyone imagined.

Ellis never made a serious bid to rejoin the team. Bassett did, meeting with coaches and taking part in some team activities. But he ultimately could not meet the standards set by Crean. The team announced in early May 2008 that they would not be reinstated, and on the same day said that Thomas, the behemoth forward, and Holman, the center who had been injured most of the year, would not be back. Few were surprised, as Crean had spent the past few weeks discussing a “culture of

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entitlement” that needed to be replaced. “Before you build a team, you need to develop a family,” Crean said according to the news release sent out that day. “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.”

There was that, and the fact that the police scanner had recently blared about an angry, 6'10" man in the south lobby of Assembly Hall. Holman, upset about a meeting he’d had with Crean, flung a potted plant against a wall.

McGee lasted only a few days into summer classes before being released for not meeting program expectations. He’d been late for several meetings. Crawford looked around. He heard the talk of family. His basketball brothers, though, were gone. He decided to transfer to Xavier.

All the while, Crean was trying to fill his roster. The Hoosiers had signed four players for the Class of 2008, but the two immediate impact guys had negotiated out clauses in their letters of intent in case Sampson was no longer the coach.

Devin Ebanks signed with West Virginia, Terrell Holloway with Xavier. Two role players—Tom Pritchard, a grungy forward from Ohio, and Matt Roth, the best three-point shooter in the history of Illinois high school basketball—stuck with their commitments. But they’d been recruited by Sampson in the hope that they could develop with minimal playing time in year one.

Crean convinced Nick Williams, a swingman from Alabama who’d signed with Marquette, to attend Indiana instead. He signed Devan Dumes, an Indianapolis native who’d played one year of Division I basketball at Eastern Michigan before transferring to Vincennes. He found a seven-footer named Tijan Jobe at another junior college. Jobe had actually been brought to the United States from the Gambia through a program run

For many fans, Kelvin Sampson (center) has become the face of infamy.

Photo: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

same way Sampson did, in a meeting with Greenspan the night before Sampson’s dismissal. A few of them also went through administrative channels on campus. But they decided that their pleas had been ignored, and several boycotted Dakich’s first practice as a sign of protest before returning to the program.

For several weeks, Dakich tried to shelter his players and allowed them to use the anger they felt over what had happened to fuel how they played. By the time Indiana lost, 86–72, to Arkansas in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, though, Dakich had flipped course and had an antagonistic relationship with the team. He prodded at players whose determination he had admired, and got nothing from them.

A college basketball season is long. The emotional toll taken on the squad had been significant. Its two best players, Eric Gordon and D.J. White, were both headed for the NBA and could sense something better if they just ran through the mess. All the remaining players seemed to already sense that their future with the Hoosiers was precarious, at best. There was no investment.

Crean determined early on that he was in no position to coddle players. His took a strict tone from the beginning, wanting to see how each would react. He had to have balance, though.

He needed the players to improve their grades so that Indiana’s Academic Progress Rate would not be completely decimated. So he evaluated every facet of every player, while at the same time keeping track of the players who were still available to sign.

That moved paid off.

By the middle of summer, Indiana’s roster of returning players consisted of Kyle Taber and Brett Finkelmeier, two walk-ons.

Crean continued to enunciate his hopes for the program with vigor and clarity.

That, of course was the easy part.

The Long Road Back

by Bloomington AAU coach Mark Adams and was returning to town. Crean managed to swipe Verdell Jones, a spindly guard out of Champaign, IL, from Minnesota with the promise of early playing time. Wedged between Indiana’s hearing with the NCAA Committee on Infractions and the revelation that said the body had decided the school failed to monitor coaches— which led to athletic director Rick Greenspan’s resignation—the Hoosiers signed Malik Story, a well-traveled wing who hadn’t played high school ball the year before. Crean was also gathering walk-ons, including Indiana All-Star Daniel Moore.

He’d cobbled something together and spoke optimistically about what the team would be able to do. He knew the reality, though. Teams made up of late signees and JuCo players don’t win in mid-major leagues, let alone the Big Ten. With his athletic director now ousted and the direness of the situation clearer, Crean negotiated two more years on what was already an eight-year contract.

Crean’s most significant work that summer came not in recruiting guys he could put on the floor the next season, but the 2009 class that would eventually be considered one of the top 15 in the country. He honored the one commitment Sampson’s staff had taken in the class, in-state forward Derek Elston, then added rugged Ohio forward Bobby Capobianco.

He pounced on Bloomington native Jordan Hulls when the six-foot guard began finally getting noticed nationally.

Symbolically, no addition was more significant. Hulls, whose grandfather had served as an assistant at Indiana, adored the Hoosiers as a child. But his family, like many, felt disenchanted after the way the Bob Knight era ended. Hulls had been, most recently, a Duke fan. But Crean spoke of transition, appealed to Hulls’s dogged work ethic, and also, somewhat paradoxically, pledged to play an up-tempo, NBA style.

Style of play, and the continued promise of early playing time, helped Indiana get a commitment from the most lauded of the bunch: lanky wing Christian Watford. He’d been recruited by Kentucky and Memphis, among others. Maurice Creek, a talented two-guard who’d played at a different high school every year of his career, also saw Crean’s method as appealing, envisioning himself in a role similar to the one Dwyane Wade had at Marquette. Bawa Muniru, a raw but chiseled big man originally from Ghana, rounded out the class.

The promise shown by those recruits gave Indiana fans some of the hope they’d need to endure that first season.

Indiana started off steady enough, beating Northwestern State without much trouble and getting the better of IUPUI by three.

Those first two games of the Maui Invitational, though, quickly put the team into context. The Fighting Irish were considered one of the better teams in the Big East heading into the season, sure. St. Joseph’s, though, ended the year 17–15. The

Hoosiers were equally inept against both teams, as they could not match up anywhere on the court. Pritchard played hard and was tough enough to stand his ground, but he had little help and would tire by the end of games. Indiana won its next two games, against Division II Chaminade and then Cornell, then tacked on a fifth victory by beating TCU in the middle of a string of heavy losses to Wake Forest, Gonzaga, and Kentucky.

As expected, Indiana came through the early part of the pre-conference schedule without much of an identity. Crean adjusted what he did on a game-by-game basis, and mixed in elaborate offensive plays with junk defenses. He was at times unflinchingly honest about how overmatched his team was, and acknowledged as much in his coaching. The Hoosiers where chameleons and spent the days between games finding a specific way to handle the next opponent.

While it was probably the right way to approach the season, it left the Hoosiers without a way to force their style on similarly talented opponents. In reality, they didn’t have a style, which became apparent when Northeastern and Lipscomb won at Assembly Hall in December. Those contests were part of an 11-game losing streak snapped by a win at Assembly Hall against Iowa on February 4, 2009.

Indiana would not win another game that season.

After his team lost 66–51 to Penn State on the first day of the Big Ten Tournament, finishing the year at 6–25, Crean allowed himself to break from the moment. He’d spent most of the year brushing off big-picture questions about the future of the program. “Day-by-day,” became his most frequently uttered phrase. But on that night, with a teary-eyed Taber nearby, Crean first thanked the fans.

“As I said to the team after the game,” he said, “we may not understand how great that is right now, but there will be a time, a day when we’ll look at it and know that our fan support was just beyond anything that anybody could have imagined.”

Then, “Well, our fans, to me, have made it okay for us to run this program. And I think, for the most part, hopefully they’re seeing it the way they would run it.”

The culture—no suspensions for off-the-court reasons, good grade reports after each semester—was returning, in Crean’s eyes. On the court, the team had grown. Pritchard carried it early, Dumes did his best to lead by action in the middle of the season, and Jones figured out how to deal with the physicality of the Big Ten late in the year and flourished.

None of the three appeared able to lift the team back into position near the top of the Big Ten, but help was coming. Williams and Story, meanwhile, were unhappy with their roles and future prospects for playing time and shots, and decided to transfer.

For the third time in as many seasons, the 2009–10 version of the Indiana Hoosiers would be composed primarily of incoming players.

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looking to the future

Of course, nothing could come easily. Maurice Creek, whose stock had soared during his senior season, had trouble getting eligible immediately and could not join his teammates on campus for the summer. Bawa Muniru had similar troubles.

Still, the sense of hope was palpable as Crean traveled the state promoting the program to groups of fans and boosters.

He continued urging patience, pointing out that Indiana would still be as inexperienced as any team in the country, but did say that fans would finally see how he wants his teams to play.

No more adapting to the other team. Indiana, with improved athleticism and length, would spread the floor with three-point shooting and have dynamic big men scoring in multiple ways.

When, of course, they weren’t scoring on the break.

Fans were heartened by the early results. Creek scored 17 points in his first game, and Watford had a double-double.

They clearly had All-Big Ten talent.

But Indiana still lacked the leadership to win difficult games. Dumes had a diminished role, Jobe barely played, and Georgetown transfer Jeremiah Rivers, who had played in the Final Four and also watched his father Doc coach the Celtics to an NBA championship, did not seize the role as he tried to recreate himself as a scoring point guard. The Hoosiers were out-classed in Puerto Rico by Ole Miss, then lost composure in losses to Boston University and George Mason. A win against Pittsburgh in New York City on national television bolstered the feeling about the club in December, and then the Hoosiers lost to Loyola-Maryland. Such inconsistency was to be expected. It was still maddening.

Indiana appeared poised to head into the conference schedule exactly where it needed to be, as players were finding roles and understood how Crean wanted them to play. Roth

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This year, Indiana heads into a season for the first time with a core of players who have played a year of basketball together.

While not usually unusual, this fact means so much for Indiana. Crean expects his players to be stronger and more prepared for the rigors of a college basketball season.

Neither of the new freshmen, Victor Oladipo and Will Sheehey, will need to be thrust into a vital role for the team. It can be a more normal first year for them, and they might even have bona fide leaders to look up to.

Creek’s ability to feel completely comfortable after a devastating injury is a question. And much depends on incoming JuCo center Guy Marc-Michel’s ability to own the paint. If he does that, the Hoosiers suddenly become much more diverse.

Crean is still catching up in recruiting, as signing the Class of 2009 demanded an inordinate amount of his time and may have hurt the Hoosiers with later classes.

But as dawn breaks on season three of one of the most difficult rebuilding projects in college sports history, there is reason, finally, to believe that when the sun clears the roof, it will find no clouds. MSP

Chris Korman previously served as Indiana athletics beat writer and sports editor for the Bloomington Herald-Times. He covered Kelvin Sampson’s final season in Bloomington and the first two years of Tom Crean’s tenure at IU. He is currently an assistant sports editor at the Baltimore Sun.

Photo: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

Christian Watford was one of a number of talented freshmen to feature for IU last season.

had been hurt, and Watford ended up needing to play closer to the basket than he was probably best suited for, but it was not hard to see the team making significant strides in the months to come.

That is, until Creek drove the lane early in the second half of a blowout win against Bryant on December 28. He came down and immediately grabbed at his left leg. His kneecap was split in two. Creek brought a unique confidence to the team and had become its go-to scorer. Now, he was done for the year.

The Hoosiers found a way to beat Michigan in the Big Ten opener, though, and appeared able to stay in any game they needed to. They beat Penn State on the road, their first Big Ten road win in 12 tries under Crean, and were .500 both in conference (3–3) and overall (9–9).

And then an Iowa team in the midst of its own rebuilding process came into Assembly Hall and pushed the Hoosiers around, winning 58–43. It wasn’t until the final game of the season, when it beat Northwestern in overtime, that Indiana could muster the power to push back. IU lost 11 straight games, playing often rudderless basketball, and were bounced from the Big Ten Tournament on day one again.