To fix Indiana Hoosiers basketball could require Texas intervention
As the college basketball season painfully plows towards its March Madness, a pair of coaches in Texas are persons of interest for a blue-blood program that is now only blue only because of its sadness.
Baylor’s Scott Drew and Texas Tech’s Chris Beard make sense to potentially replace current Indiana University coach Archie Miller in order to restore the Hoosiers to their rightful spot next to Duke, Kansas, North Carolina, UCLA and Kentucky as the rulers of the sport.
Indiana Hoosiers basketball is worse than bad. They’re worse than Purdue. In Indiana, that gets you fired.
The Hoosiers are irrelevant, still more associated with Bob Knight than anything else, and he last coached there in 2000.
Much in the same way the Dallas Mavericks “needed” a Mark Cuban type when he bought the team in 2000, his alma mater now needs similar “assistance.”
Not happening.
“Let me tell you about IU fans. What I love most is that every single one of us is a coach. They know basketball better than any coach IU has ever had,” Cuban said in an email on Tuesday.
Having been raised in Indiana myself, Cuban is correct.
“As a result whenever there is a bad game I get emails from Hoosiers telling me I should buy out the coach because they would have run a better side out of bounds play than [insert the coach’s name here] did,” Cuban wrote. “This has been going on for almost 20 years.”
And it’s been about 20 years since IU last made the Final Four.
“I don’t get involved in it at all. I’m here for Coach Miller to help him, not replace him,” said Cuban, who graduated from IU in 1981. “This is a crazy year across the board and I love IU and IU Basketball, but I also am not one to panic.”
If Indiana wants to replace Archie Miller, it won’t be because of Cuban.
Miller is due $10.35 million, and Indiana is not the University of Texas; IU doesn’t have a “Coaches’ Buyout Change Bucket” that’s full of millions of dollars.
Men like Drew or Beard are the top candidates to leave their respective spots in Texas to restore the name of Indiana basketball to what it was under Knight, and when Cuban was a student.
It would be fun to enjoy the irony of Scott Drew coaching on the same bench once occupied by Knight, who famously did not like the current Baylor coach.
Drew was raised in Indiana, graduated from Butler, and has done something no one thought possible when he went to Waco in 2004: He has made Baylor a national championship contender, and one of the best teams in the nation in men’s basketball.
On Tuesday night, Baylor won the Big 12 regular season title with an overtime win at West Virginia. It is the first regular season title for Baylor in men’s basketball since 1950.
Drew made people forget about the Dave Bliss fiasco. Whatever else Drew does in Waco is a bonus. He’s 50, and if Indiana calls he should go.
The same for Texas Tech’s Chris Beard, who is one of the last remaining ties to Bob Knight in college basketball.
Beard is one of the few Knight assistants who has done quite well on his own. Beard has done better at Tech than Knight did in his six plus seasons in Lubbock; Beard was seconds away from winning the 2019 national title at Tech.
He is also not Bob Knight.
Neither is anyone else.
At this point, Indiana is back in that terrible spot of wanting any guy but the one they have.
Indiana has not made an NCAA Tournament since 2016. The Hoosiers last Final Four appearance was 2002, and their last national title was 1987, when their best player was future former Dallas Mavericks second-round pick, Steve Alford.
IU is on its fifth coach since Bob Knight, and it may soon be back in the market for a sixth that could potentially come from Texas.
But on this one, Mark Cuban is not getting in the way.
