Giving Your Team A Chance - Why IU Should Fire Tom Crean

I lived through both the Mike Davis and Kelvin Sampson eras at IU, and so I can say this with a bit of authority: Tom Crean is the best coach IU has had, on balance, since they fired Bobby Knight. Davis was a far worse in game tactician than Crean is (even if that is saying something; Crean's in game adjustments leave a lot to be desired). Sampson, while a better in game coach, was corrupt and couldn't play by the rules, so his achievements in recruiting talent and on the court are tainted. Crean sits somewhere in the middle: a better coach than Davis and able to run a program without relying on cheating like Sampson.

Unfortunately, that's likely not enough. Indiana Basketball hasn't won a national title in 29 years, and based on the way this year has gone it seems impossibly unlikely that they will even have a chance to stop that streak from moving to 30. Put another way, barring a shocking turnaround which leads to the team running the table through the Big Ten Tournament to secure an automatic bid, Indiana basketball will miss the NCAA tournament for the fifth time in nine years. This article, which lays out the argument that Crean's sin is lack of consistency in getting to the tournament, is kinder than I am, giving Crean a pass for his first three years. Certainly, the first three years have an asterisk due to the state of the program when Crean took over, but nonetheless he is poised to fail to make the tournament the majority of his first nine years in Bloomington.

For a program that grades itself by how many banners it has hanging in Assembly Hall, the first goal has to be to make the tournament with consistency. As the article lays out, in table form, that is what allows programs like Duke, UNC and Kansas to have a chance to win titles. They simply make the tournament with consistency. IU hasn't done that since the 1990s; that is a large part of why their title drought is about to roll over 30 years.

This concept is not specific to NCAA basketball either. Consider Alabama football. The program, which judges itself based on national titles, hadn't won a title since 1992. Then they entered Nick Saban, and the program's finish since his first full year has been, in order, sixth, first, tenth, first, first, seventh, fourth, first and second. That is nine consecutive top ten finishes, with four national titles. Simply put, Saban's team is always in the running, ready to take advantage of the breaks of the game. Last year they narrowly missed their fifth national title in nine years. The smart money has them finishing in the top ten next year; already, they are the projected to be a top team by most publications.

This is the same theory that Theo Epstein had coming to Chicago, and before that in Boston. You can't focus on trying to make any one year the year. Instead, you have to focus on making the playoffs year after year, and then wait for your pitching to get hot ... or a ball to fall just right ... or to take the right bounce. In hockey we know this to be true as well: get yourself in position, get the hot goalie or the hot scorer, and anything can happen. The Blackhawks had made the playoffs just once in ten years prior to their recent string of success. Since then they have made the playoffs eight straight years, resulting in three Stanley Cup Championships, and are currently poised to make the playoffs for a ninth consecutive year. And just recently I wrote about this same concept regarding the New England Patriots, just before they added a fifth Super Bowl title in an unprecedented age of parity.

This, ultimately, is why Crean must go. Indiana Basketball is not poised to recruit like Duke, UNC, Kansas or Kentucky is, at least not at this time. But to get there, and to improve their chances of hanging banner number six, the team has to get consistently to the NCAA tournament. Crean has failed to do that, and in doing so he's made his team even more susceptible to being on the wrong end of the breaks of the game. Who knows who will replace Crean; it's unlikely they will get someone with even the same amount of name recognition that Crean had coming in. But a good coach who can maximize the talent on the roster will be a start. Getting to the tournament yearly, ideally with a top four seed, has to be the goal. It's time for IU to move on and try to find someone who can build a program capable of that.