Enjoy success of Crean, Hoosiers

Fire Tom Crean!
That was the chorus being chanted by many Indiana University men’s basketball fans earlier this season. It wasn’t all of them, but it was a lot.
The Hoosiers had three-point losses to a bad Wake Forest team and an average UNLV squad at the Maui Invitational. They had suffered a blowout loss to Duke.
IU was 5-3. Fans were freaking out. The coach had to go.
Since then, the Hoosiers have gone 18-3. All three losses were on the road.
The list of teams the Hoosiers have beaten includes No. 8 Iowa, No. 20 Purdue and No. 23 Notre Dame. They have destroyed Illinois twice, as well as Ohio State and Northwestern. They are ranked 18th in the country and have clinched the Big Ten regular-season title for the second time in the last four years.
Not shockingly, all the winning has mostly silenced those who were calling for Crean’s head back in November.
That’s a good thing, because the idea of getting rid of Crean never made any sense. Every time that opinion was spewed forth, it was hard not to wonder if these fans had forgotten what it was like before their current coach arrived.
Let’s review.
Kelvin Sampson won 46 games in his two seasons at Indiana, but his second year was cut short when he was fired because of accusations of NCAA violations. Eventually, his missteps while with the Hoosiers led to the men’s basketball program being put on probation for three years and self-imposing the loss of three scholarships — one because of the violations and two more because they failed to meet academic standards.
(In a way, Indiana got what it deserved, because Sampson had been in similar trouble at Oklahoma and was still on probation for those NCAA violations when he was hired to come to Bloomington.)
Because of the mess Sampson created, nine underclassmen left the program for other colleges or the NBA following the 2007-08 season. Crean was left with just one returning scholarship player in his first season as he took on the challenge of rebuilding a program in disarray.
Crean took the job knowing he would have an uphill climb.
And his Hoosiers steadily made the ascent, from six wins in the brutal 2008-09 season, to 10 and 12 the next two years, to a 27-9 record, a top-10 ranking and a Sweet 16 berth in 2012.
Some fans have scoffed at the accomplishment of winning two Big Ten regular-season titles in four years. But let’s inspect reality.
Before Crean’s squad won it in 2013, IU had earned just one such championship in the last two decades. That one came in 2002 under another coach — Mike Davis — who fans seemed to despise mostly because he was not Bobby Knight.
Speaking of Knight, though his overall success can’t be argued, he went without a Big Ten title in his final seven seasons at IU.
It’s easy to understand why there was some concern early. The loss to Wake Forest especially had eyebrows raised.
But is it possible that it’s just not that easy to travel more than 4,000 miles to play a basketball tournament? And is it possible that Duke is just, well, Duke, and Cameron Indoor Stadium is one of the most difficult places to play in all the country?
The answer to both questions is clearly “yes.”
To fire Crean then would have been just as ridiculous as it would now. After all, who exactly did fans think IU could get to replace him?
Unless the name was Brad Stevens, who seems to have a pretty good thing going in Boston right now, they hardly could have expected to find someone who would do better. Since he pulled the Hoosiers out of the hole Sampson dug, Crean has gone 116-51 — that’s a .695 winning percentage — over the last five seasons, an average of 22 wins (with more still to come this year).
He may not be Mike Krzyzeski, Roy Williams or his good friend Tom Izzo. But few coaches are.
Fire Tom Crean?
Here’s a different suggestion:
Remember where the program was when Crean took it over, and where it is now.
Then sit back and enjoy the success.