With Hiring Season Looming, What Will Indiana Do?
Because that job will be at the top of the heap and affect every other hire, including in the ACC.
As you may have heard, Indiana’s Mike Woodson, who has been under some pressure, has agreed to resign/retire at the end of the season.
It’s been a long time since Indiana’s been Indiana really, but...well, it is still Indiana and if they can get the right coach, it’ll be a monster again.
It’s a big job, in other words, and they’re getting an early start on hiring. And if you had to choose between Miami, Florida State, Virginia or Indiana, there’s a pretty good chance you’d choose the Hoosiers. So it’s worth keeping track of what’s happening there.
In this article from CBS Sports, David Cobb and Mike Norlander look at the IU job and who might be in the running.
- Highly unlikely: Brad Stevens, Scott Drew and Billy Donovan.
- Possible but unlikely: Dusty May, Bruce Pearl, Nate Oats and TJ Otzelberger.
- More likely: Mick Cronin, Buzz Williams, Gregg McDermott.
- Wild cards/flawed character(s): Will Wade, Chris Beard, Chris Jans.
- Further down the tree: Ben McCollum, Micah Shrewsberry, Jerod Calhoun.
For all the talk of home run hires and so forth, the bigger need is to get the right guy. We’ve talked about Ben McCollum for years and Drake finally took a chance.
So far, he’s 20-2. Not bad.
As soon as Beard was fired at Texas, we knew it was just a question of time before someone took a chance on him, his alleged abuse of his fiancee be damned. And in fairness, charges were dropped. However, the Ole Miss coach is still a tough sell. That said, there’s no question he would succeed. He’s a risky hire in several ways, but the guy is a brilliant basketball coach.
Jans, currently at Mississippi State, could be risky too. He was fired from Bowling Green for allegedly being drunk and hitting on women at a bar near campus. And given the geography, it’s a reasonable bet that the women were students. Might be smart to let someone else take a chance with both of them.
The thing about Indiana is that it has such tradition. Bob Knight left a huge stamp on that program and, like Beard, he was a brilliant coach with some significant personal flaws.
When Indiana hired Knight, he was the coach at Army, and as everyone knows, no great coaches ever come out of Army. Right?
Right?
Seriously though, Knight was not necessarily a home-run hire and neither was Mike Krzyzewski. For that matter, neither was Dean Smith, Roy Williams or Tom Izzo.
At this point, with the game in flux, we might not go for an older coach. We might look at a younger coach and possibly an aggressive assistant who has been closer to the ground. And even then, we’d make sure he had the full package he’d need to succeed: NIL support, a framework to jump into portal season and so on.
With that said, if we were hiring, we’d look at a few other people, starting with these three:
- Bucky McMillan
- Luke Murray
- Jai Lucas
McMillan has done a great job at Samford and his offense is a blast. He’s just 41 and he’d shake things up. Knight is so tightly associated with IU that people forget that before he got there, it had a reputation as a running program. Indiana fans would love his offense. Who wouldn't?
Murray has done a tremendous job with UConn’s offense. He might be able to hire Luke Yaklich, a tremendous defensive coach who is currently out of work. That’d be a great pair.
Finally, we think Jai Lucas has done a tremendous job for Duke since (wisely) leaving John Calipari’s fading UK program before it hit the shoals. He’s also a great defensive coach and a guy who may be ready to step up and run his own program. There’s no question that he’s learned an enormous amount at Kentucky and at Duke.
The point is that, as Kansas learned when it hired Williams in 1988 and as other schools, including Kentucky this year have learned since, the big name isn’t nearly as important as the right name. It might be McCollum. It might be McMillan. It might be Murray or Lucas.
Or they could just break open the bank and chase big shots.
Whatever they do, it’s bound to affect the ACC schools that are also in the market.