not sure if this was up yet apologies if so...
link here --
http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/cs-080401-indiana-basketball-coaching-search,1,5876573.columntext here:
It's 'Crean and Crimson' for Indiana
David Haugh
On the Bears
April 2, 2008
Hoosiers like to romanticize about the days Indiana basketball conjured up notions of a boy, a ball and a dream.
Mention Indiana hoops around the state nowadays and a crook, a cell phone and a nightmare come to mind.
Now the program needs to scrub its image clean and start winning again before former coach Kelvin Sampson runs out of "any time" minutes. Now the margin of error for Indiana's 10-person search committee is thinner than Bob Knight's patience.
Hiring Marquette coach Tom Crean, as various reports confirmed Tuesday night, represents as close to a sure thing as an athletic director will find. Crean, 42, will arrive in Bloomington young, energetic and accomplished.
But every bit as important as the success he has attained in going 188-94 in nine seasons leading the Golden Eagles, Crean comes with the only mention of NCAA with his name in reference to the tournament. No NCAA investigations. No NCAA sanctions. Only five NCAA appearances in the nine seasons he spent in Milwaukee—including a 2003 Final Four appearance.
Crean and Crimson. Has a nice ring to it.
The Hoosiers could afford no more gambles on guys running from the NCAA, as Sampson was when he high-tailed it out of Oklahoma in 2006. No more experiments on inexperienced head cases, as the moody and unpredictable Mike Davis was when he replaced Knight full-time in 2001.
The need to find the right coach to restore order and integrity to this once-proud Big Ten basketball palace made the next coach the most important hire the school has faced since it hired Knight in 1971.
The reputation damage, caused by Sampson's forced departure Feb. 22 because of his second alleged NCAA violation for calling recruits in two years, already has made one of college basketball's 10 best jobs look like indentured servitude to potential coaches.
The perception was so bad that the hottest candidate in the country, Tony Bennett, rejected Indiana and passed up what once would have been considered the chance of a lifetime for a 38-year-old finishing his second season as a head coach at Washington State.
Xavier's Sean Miller, 39, took a similar pass after losing to UCLA in the Elite Eight when he informed reporters publicly what he told his athletic director privately.
"I will be at Xavier," Miller said.
Take a 20-second timeout and think about those decisions.
Thirtysomething head coaches at Washington State and Xavier, aware that a college basketball program such as Indiana has interest and a vacancy, essentially said thanks but no thanks.
Maybe Bennett and Miller looked at the uncertainty over NCAA sanctions likely to leveled against Indiana in June and saw the potential for scholarship limits or tournament bans—program killers.
Maybe they were scared away by the mutinuous atmosphere in Bloomington evident again Monday when interim-coach Dan Dakich kicked players Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis of Westinghouse off the team for insubordination. With the graduation of seniors D.J. White and Lance Stemler, and Eric Gordon expected to announce Monday he is going pro, the new Indiana coach will inherit a roster with zero starters from this season.
Maybe, from a practical perspective, the young coaches concluded no amount of money or coaching prestige was worth sacrificing family peace to dig out of the hole Sampson guaranteed the program would occupy for the foreseeable future.
Maybe they didn't see the potential Crean saw.
As successful as Top 20 programs Washington State and Xavier have been lately, many still would consider them apprentice jobs compared to Indiana, where the sport's all-time winningest NCAA coach made basketball the state's biggest export next to corn.
That at least two of the profession's most ambitious young coaches well aware of that history still spurned Indiana shows how badly Sampson scribbled graffiti on the monument that is Indiana basketball.
Hiring Crean, even at a high price, looks like a sound investment for a university that has doled out $4 million in contract buyouts since 2000, according to the Indianapolis Star.
That was the year Indiana fired Knight a month before the season for violating a zero-tolerance policy, setting off a statewide uproar and a week of campus-wide demonstrations. Which period of instability was worse?
That unrest ultimately unified a basketball program. The latest one slowly has chipped away at its foundation.
Wednesday, they will introduce a guy in Crean known for having the right tools to build it back up again.
