Tom Crean pulled Indiana from unthinkable depths to the NCAA tournament in four arduous years

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – They never told Tom Crean how deep the rot went.

It was April 1, 2008, and this was the joke: Indiana's new basketball coach somehow understood the disaster he was inheriting. But he couldn't because nobody could, because on the day he arrived from Marquette to take this job, he saw the five national championship banners dangling in Assembly Hall and knew only that it was Indiana and the name "Indiana" would withstand the crimes of his predecessor, Kelvin Sampson.

Then, on April 3, the day after the welcome news conference backdrops had been pulled down and the last TV truck rolled away, the team's academic adviser told him there were 18 F's on the team. That struck Crean as an outrageous number until half an hour later, when the academic director told him there were actually 19. And that's when Crean knew this was much worse than he could have imagined.

For there is a message in 19 F's on a 14-player team with an armada of tutors whose primary task is to make sure the players pass. It says the decay is much broader than a rogue coach who made too many illegal phone calls. It says oversight has disappeared, that the players no longer care, that the delicate pilings holding up a wobbling basketball program are about to topple and the whole thing is on the verge of collapse.

Sitting nearly four years later in a conference room overlooking the team's practice court, Crean gives a dry chuckle.

"Everybody wants to talk about a honeymoon," he says. "Well, people can think what they want; the honeymoon was over that day."

Of all the stories in the NCAA tournament – the finally-made-its, the last-second shots, the upset champions – this might be the best of them all: how Tom Crean revived the Indiana Hoosiers after Sampson left them for dead.

By all rights, Indiana shouldn't be playing New Mexico State in the round of 64 Thursday night or have finished 25-8 and in fifth place in the Big Ten this fast. Not when, after the 19 F's, came the departures of Eric Gordon to the NBA and Jordan Crawford to Xavier and the dismissals of Armon Bassett, DeAndre Thomas and Jamarcus Ellis. Not when two recruits renounced their commitments and Gordon made allegations of uncontrolled drug use by Indiana players.

But it wasn't until Crean took a call from one player's mother offering to keep her son at Indiana if Crean kindly would ignore the player's two positive drug tests that he grasped the calamity this was about to become. The program was in ruins. In the end, after the suspensions and defections, he was left with two walk-ons who had scored a combined 36 points in their Indiana careers.

"There was no way to brace ourselves for some of this," Crean says. "I tried to live with that, but it was like, ‘What is next?' Whatever was in my memory or imagination of what Indiana basketball was like – it wasn't like that. It didn't feel like it whatsoever."

In many ways, Crean is an odd man to be the redeemer of Hoosiers hoops. This is, after all, very much Bob Knight's place, even if he hasn't glowered from the sideline here in more than a decade. On the surface, Crean doesn't seem much like Knight. He wears glasses and has a perpetual tan even in the middle of the winter. His words come fast and in such confident torrents that skeptics are quick to call him "a politician."

The image has stuck even as he has vowed to run the program as clean as Knight did. But this is Indiana and there is a compulsion here to recreate Knight and his three national titles even if everyone knows Knight isn't coming back. To many Hoosiers fans, especially older ones, the IU coach still must run Knight's cherished motion offense and play man-to-man defense as if this was deemed by God Himself.

Crean prefers an attack in which his guards penetrate, drawing defenders with them, then throwing passes to open teammates on the perimeter ("NBA basketball," the old timers scoff). Rather than focus on 10 plays, working to perfect them as many coaches do, Crean has more than 300 that he might use in a season. He is obsessive about preparation, spending hours with his assistants, searching for flaws in each upcoming opponent, then designing three or four things that specifically will attack that weakness.

Perhaps he always was destined to be a coach. While in college at Central Michigan, he worked as an assistant at Alma College and at his hometown Mt. Pleasant (Mich.) High. After CMU, he found himself working for Ralph Willard at Western Kentucky and Pittsburgh, then joined Tom Izzo at Michigan State. He even married the daughter of a coach, Jack Harbaugh, who won an NCAA Division I-AA football title at Western Kentucky and whose sons, John and Jim, are NFL coaches.

When Crean finally got a head-coaching job, it was at Marquette, where he signed a guard largely missed by other schools named Dwyane Wade. Together, they went to the Final Four in 2003. Marquette later moved from Conference USA to the Big East, where Crean had five more seasons with at least 19 wins and a job for life if he wanted it. But then Indiana called.

For inspiration, Crean has a library filled with biographies of coaches and business executives, and reads them all, absorbing everything he can from those that offer something unique – Jim Collins' management guide "Good to Great," and the study of Bill Belichick's rise in New England, "Patriot Reign," are favorites – and discarding those that come off arrogant and self-congratulatory.

Unlike Knight, Crean is open to any gimmick he thinks might inspire a player or cajole a recruit into signing with Indiana. Several times during the building of IU's new basketball practice facility, he stood next to the cranes and bulldozers and held his cellphone in the air screaming to a recruit, "Listen to this. This is progress! We're building it just like they're building this building. And when you get here, you will have the best facilities in the country. But we need you. We need impact players."

Unlike Sampson, Crean has tried hard to seek players who are more like the kind Knight would have preferred: gifted but unselfish and well-drilled in fundamentals.

"He has standards – a strong standard – and we were not going to compromise standards for a great player," says longtime assistant Bennie Seltzer.

Still, much like Knight, Crean storms in front of the Indiana bench with an intensity that shocks even his brothers-in-law, such as the time Jim Harbaugh, the San Francisco 49ers' coach, was sitting near the bench and Crean, disappointed in his reserves' lack of enthusiasm, glanced at Jim and said, "What do you think of our bench energy?"

Stunned, Harbaugh paused, then replied, "Um, I guess it could be better."

"You hear that!" Crean screamed at his players. "We have no bench energy! Where is our bench energy?"

Looking back on that story, told to him by Jim, Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh laughs.

"I think Tom is really a football coach," he says.

That might have made Crean the perfect choice to revive Indiana after all.

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So how do you repair a broken giant? There was no manual, no viable comparison, nobody to say what to do. Nobody had rebuilt one of college basketball's most renowned programs like some expansion team. Such a thing never had happened. It was spring of 2008 and Indiana's basketball team officially was broken, and since most high school seniors already had signed or committed to colleges, there was no one to recruit. The few still available had little interest in a school beginning three years of NCAA probation and had a roster with two players.

"I had no clue," Crean says, talking about what awaited him when he arrived at Indiana. "I wasn't smart enough to ask [in the interview]. Who would ask that? I blame myself many times, but who would have thought to ask that? There were a lot of things I never thought to ask. Now when I have a friend going for a job that's a little tough and I get a call, I'll share some of those things. 'Ask this because I never thought of it.'"

Rather than design plays for the coming season or work on players' jump shots, Indiana's coaching staff spent their first several weeks locked in their offices until 2 a.m. watching tapes of any high school or junior college player they could find, hoping something on the screen would surprise them. Every day the phone rang, some small-town coach on the line insisting he had a player Indiana had to see.

"We'd ask, 'Who else has offered [a scholarship]?' and they would say, 'Just a couple of [Division] III's in Kentucky, but big schools have missed him,' " Seltzer recalls with a roll of his eyes.

Still, the coaches watched the tapes, just in case someone had missed something – a clever dribbler, a smooth jump shooter, anything to give them another player to put in an Indiana uniform. More than 300 players showed up on unofficial visits that year. Most had no shot at playing in the Big Ten, but given the circumstances, how could anyone at Indiana say no? Halfway through the season, Crean still was trying out students who said they could play basketball, eventually giving uniforms to a student manager and a player on Indiana's baseball team.

Desperate to establish a new culture with a roster of nine freshmen and eight walk-ons, Crean remodeled the locker room, which was curiously devoid of Indiana history. He had replicas of the five championship banners placed in the hallway out to the court so players could touch them as they ran past. Magazine covers from great IU moments were framed and tacked to the wall. Rather than ignoring the past, the room became a shrine to it. This was what Crean thought he had to do in bringing the Hoosiers back. He had to sell something to his players and there was nothing in the dismal present to peddle. The past gave hope. The past said Indiana once had been great. The past said Indiana could be great again.

"We had to sell the past," Crean says. "The future was so uncertain. And the only way to get people to come for the future, they had to know there was a past. Believe me, negative recruiting was alive and well. You had to remind people that before you could remind them you were going to be good that Indiana had always been good. So it was a bit of reverse psychology; there was no way around it. We had to counter what we had to counter."

A decision was made: Forget about recruiting the top high school juniors and seniors. Few were going to be interested in a place with walk-ons and baseball players in the lineup. The real gold were the kids who were high school freshman or still in junior high school. Crean was lucky in that his top assistant, Tim Buckley, had been coach at Ball State and already had relationships with the state's high school coaches.

One of the first recruiting trips Buckley made was to Washington, Ind., to visit Cody Zeller, then a high school freshman but a player who three years later would commit to IU and help lead the Hoosiers to the NCAA tournament.

"The smartest thing we ever did," Crean says.

On the court, the Hoosiers were, predictably, a disaster that first season. Still, Crean attacked practices as if he had a Final Four team. He knew he was coaching players who didn't belong in the Big Ten and, in some cases, probably shouldn't even be in Division I. Yet he knew he needed to establish a baseline, a standard for the way Indiana would play.

"Basketball was an all-out brawl," says Kory Barnett, a guard from Rochester, Ind., who was a walk-on that season. "We were doing war drills every day. There were no balls. Sometimes [Crean] would just throw a towel at the rim and we'd have to fight over it.

"I remember one time running so much that I fell down and I stumbled up and looked around and said, 'This is Indiana basketball.' "

Practices were long. Everything hurt. And yet as the losses piled up on the way to a 6-25 record with just one conference win that season, Crean still prepared as if he expected to win. He and his assistants still wrote detailed scouting reports and went to practice with the three or four plays he insisted would beat Michigan State. Later, he'd be deflated when they didn't.

It amazed Barnett the way Crean managed to invent a rousing pregame speech for each game, all with the understanding that his team was going to lose.

"I mean you can't give the same rah-rah speech every time; guys will stop listening," Barnett says. "After a while they're going to say, 'Hey Coach, we're 4-19,' but it was never like that. He'd find something that worked."

One time, Crean reminded his players that the opposing coach said they were going to be terrible. When Indiana played Purdue, he had several former IU stars tell the players that they were expected to always beat Purdue at home.

"He was always trying to find that chip," Barnett says.

Still, the losing was hard. And it kept on into the second season, when a slightly better team went 10-21 overall and 4-14 in the conference. The losing continued into last season, when Indiana was 12-20 overall and 3-15 in the league. At one point, Crean glanced at the press notes and saw how his once-glittering overall winning percentage had eroded and said to himself, "Wow, this thing is really taking a beating."

In the second season, Crean was ejected from a game against Wisconsin for arguing with the officials. A few minutes later, a security guard approached John Harbaugh, who was in town for a visit and sitting in the stands.

"You better get in the locker room," the guard told Harbaugh.

"Ah, he'll be OK," Harbaugh replied.

"No!" the guard insisted. "You better get in that locker room now!"

When Harbaugh walked in, he found things strewn about the floor, apparently thrown by an enraged Crean. Then he noticed a white dry-erase board that now had a hole in the middle.

"He says that's fiction," Harbaugh says with a laugh. "I'll just say it's fiction that he put his fist through the white board."

Eventually, Indiana did turn around. Given where IU was, the revival was quick and probably unexpected. It came with Zeller's arrival. It came, too, with the development of players who had arrived through the bleak years, such as forward Christian Watford and guards Victor Oladipo and Jordan Hulls. It came with the promise of next season's recruiting class, already picked among the top two in the nation, a group that calls itself "The Movement." And it came, too, from seniors Verdell Jones III, Matt Roth and Tom Pritchard, many of whom saw less and less playing time as the team improved but who also understood the lessons of that first season when everyone was fighting for a towel on the rim even in the middle of a 6-25 debacle.

Instead of losing, Indiana was winning. The ultimate moment was a December victory over Kentucky, then the No. 1 team in the country. And as the students spilled from the stands, celebrating what had been unimaginable just a year before, John Harbaugh – watching on TV – caught a glimpse of Crean's face.

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"I just knew what he was thinking: ‘This is what it is supposed to look like,' " Harbaugh says.

Yet winning changed nothing. If anything, Crean pushed more, and when, on Super Bowl weekend, Jim and John Harbaugh came down from Indianapolis, the Hoosiers were 5-6 in the Big Ten and about to go to Purdue for what might have been the most important game of the season. At practice that day, Crean had given several players boxing gloves and they were jabbing at their teammates as they drove toward the basket.

"Jim and I just looked at each other and said, Can you believe this practice?' " John Harbaugh says.

On the last Sunday night of the regular season, on Senior Night, the five remaining players from that first disastrous year stood beside their framed jerseys. They gave speeches about their time as college basketball players. Barnett read a poem. Roth, Pritchard and Daniel Moore read long thank you lists. Jones, who would tear his ACL in the Big Ten tournament a few days later, offered advice to his younger brother.

In the background, a man wore a T-shirt that read, "We are back!"

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Tom Crean, who inherited the worst situation a college basketball coach could ever have found, stood on the edge of the court, near the place where on this night 18 years before Knight said he wished to be buried upside down so his critics could kiss his backside. The new coach smiled, remembering the moment he met each of the players who would stick with him when everything else had fallen apart.

"The thing I learned was this," he'd say the next day. "I absolutely love coaching and I felt I got better at it because we were searching for so many ways to find a basket or find a stop or find a better way to win. Great last couple of years, becoming a better Christian. [You find] that God doesn't give you anything you can't handle. There were high standards for us to live up to."

But at that moment, with most of the 17,000 people still standing in Assembly Hall, there was a knowledge that something had been preserved, that the worst was behind them and the darkest years of Indiana basketball were gone forever.

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