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Big Ten Basketball Race: Showdowns Ahead This Week

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We’re about one-third of the way through the conference schedules in the college basketball season and the Big Ten has a big week ahead. Four teams have just one loss in league play and they all go head-to-head this week. It starts tonight with Iowa-Wisconsin (9 PM ET, ESPN) and continues on Thursday night with Maryland-Indiana (9, ESPNU). Let’s take this opportunity for a quick primer on the key players in the Big Ten basketball race.

Let me begin by saying that by no means am I dismissing Michigan State, which has two losses. Nor Michigan, who won last year’s Big Ten title in a runaway. But there will be other opportunities to discuss those teams. For now, we know that two teams will be tied for first by the weekend and those two will be the winners of the games above. Here’s a summation of Wisconsin, Maryland, Indiana and Iowa.
Wisconsin (16-2 overall, 4-1 league, ranked #6): The top-heavy favorite when the season opened, the Badgers have mostly lived up to their press clippings. Their home loss to Duke was a great game against an extremely good opponent. Then UW dumped a game to Rutgers and lost point guard Traevon Jackson to a foot injury until the latter part of February.
Wisconsin still has a physical front line, with national Player Of The Year candidate Frank Kaminsky averaging 17 points/8 rebounds. Nigel Hayes, an immensely talented sophomore is coming into his own with a 12/7 average, and versatile Sam Dekker is at 12/5. Josh Gasser is a lights-out three-point shooter that loosens up defenses for the inside players.
This is clearly the most talented team in the Big Ten, but there are two concerns. First, we don’t know how the offense is going to function without Jackson running the show. Second, Wisconsin really hasn’t beaten anyone. Oklahoma is the most impressive win.
This isn’t incredibly alarming because the Badgers haven’t played the best teams in the Big Ten so saying they haven’t beaten anyone is really just a way of saying they lost to Duke. So the Badgers are still the team to beat, but if they don’t play well against the top contenders, something that starts tonight, keep this in mind.
Maryland (17-2 overall, 5-1 league, ranked #13): Maryland has the most impressive resume of any Big Ten team right now. The Terps have swept Michigan State and beaten a good Iowa State team. One of their losses was on the road at undefeated Virginia.
Maryland has gotten a big spark from freshman Melo Trimble. The 6’2” guard is averaging 16 ppg, and he joins talented senior guard Dez Wells, who knocks down 14 ppg. Jake Layman, a 6’8” junior, bangs around underneath to the tune of 15 points/7 rebounds per game.
The lack of depth inside is a concern, but Michigan State is the most likely team to have exploited that, and the Terps met the challenge not once, but twice. The bigger challenge will be on February 24 when they have their lone meeting with Wisconsin.

Indiana (14-4 overall, 4-1 league, ranked #23): Tom Crean’s Hoosiers love to shoot the three-ball. A guard-heavy lineup spreads the floor and lets it fly from behind the arc. No one shoots from downtown better than James Blackmon Jr, averaging 17 ppg. And point guard Yogi Ferrell is as good a guard as there is in this league, averaging 15 points/4 rebounds/5 assists, as he does it all each time out.
Big_Ten_Conference_logoIU is a small team though, with only 6’7” sophomore Troy Williams (13/6) to play underneath. They’ve looked woefully overmatched by Louisville, and lost an overtime game to Georgetown because they couldn’t match up with the Hoyas inside game. There have been some nice wins—SMU and Pitt—but while the Hoosiers’ aggressive three-point shooting can make them a nightmare for a favorite to play, it also makes them likely to dump a few games when the shots don’t fall.
Iowa (13-5 overall, 4-1 league, ranked #25): Iowa is the reverse of Indiana—the Hawkeyes find their strength underneath with Aaron White and Jarrod Utoff, while struggling in the backcourt. White and Utoff combine to average 29/14 each night, and they’ve been able to beat North Carolina and sweep Ohio State. Losses to Texas, Syracuse and Iowa State aren’t bad. But they’ve also lost to Northern Iowa.
Iowa plays exceptionally hard and they’ve been able to give Wisconsin a hard time in Madison, something not a lot of teams can say. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on tonight, but over the long season the lack of consistent guard play will likely doom any conference championship hopes.
If you could combine Indiana’s guards with Iowa’s frontcourt, you’d have a championship contender. Right now, both teams look more like spoilers. Wisconsin looks a lot more complete than Maryland, but the Terps have demonstrated more on the floor to this point in the season. I’m a partisan Wisconsin fan and am still picking the Badgers to win the Big Ten basketball race, but they face tough challenges ahead.

It's Time For Tom Crean To Be On The Hot Seat

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The impression of Indiana Hoosiers basketball coach Tom Crean is that of one who brought a traditional power back to life after it had been down and restored it to, if not greatness, at least respectability. I disagree with that view and believe that Crean should be coaching for his job as Big Ten play gets set to open up this week.

Let’s put Crean’s tenure in Bloomington in context. He took over after the program prior to the 2009 season, after it had been put on NCAA probation for three years. Crean’s first three seasons were miserable, with a record of 8-46 in conference games. In the first year, his roster had nine freshman and two sophomores. It’s that which gives rise to the media impression of “starting at rock bottom.”
In 2012, things began to turn for the better, and Indiana had a pretty good year, getting back to the NCAA Tournament after a fifth-place finish in the Big Ten. One year later, Crean hit the jackpot with Victor Oladipo and Cody Zeller. Indiana went 14-4 in the Big Ten, won the outright conference title for the first time since 1993 and was a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, before falling in the Sweet 16.
Last year was a step back, finishing 7-9 in league games, barely over .500 overall and out of the NCAAs. This year is still up in the air—there have been some nice wins over Butler and Pitt, an aggravating loss to Georgetown, an inexplicable upset at the hands of Eastern Washington and a very understandable defeat to Louisville.

Now let’s review what basketball life in Bloomington was in the years immediately before Crean’s arrival. Mike Davis, the successor to Bob Knight, was universally panned by most observers, myself included. In his final year of 2006, his team went 9-7 in the Big Ten and reached the NCAA Tournament. Davis resigned under pressure and Kelvin Sampson was hired.
Sampson made the NCAA Tournament in both 2007 and 2007, and averaged 12 Big Ten wins per year, even though one of those seasons was still just a 16-game league schedule, before the conference expanded to 18. But Sampson violated NCAA rules regarding how many phone calls can be made to recruits. He was fired and the program got the aforementioned probation.
One thing we have to note about the probation though, is that it was toothless. There was no loss of scholarships. There was no ban from postseason play. There was no loss of TV exposure. It was nothing more than saying “Behave yourself for three years.” When Crean was hired, he decided to clean house, and bring in his own recruits, resulting in the young roster.
There are undoubtedly a lot of different views regarding Tom Crean, but to borrow the words of Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men, these are the facts of the case. And they are not in dispute.

Now I want you to consider this entire context, of Crean’s entire track record and where the program was when he was hired. How does taking over a program that went to the NCAA Tournament three straight years constitute taking something over that’s at rock bottom? If Crean wanted to clean house and bring his own kids in that’s his prerogative. But why does he get extra credit for it? Indiana bottomed out, because Crean felt it was best for the long haul.
Has it been? Crean has only won 12 conference games in a season in the big year of 2013. I use 12 as a benchmark since it represents winning two-thirds of your games and seems to be what a program with national aspirations should aspire to (and in truth, I think that’s pretty a minimal baseline). Even if you make the extraordinarily generous concession of throwing out his first three years, and only use 2012-14, he’s still only averaging 10.6 league wins per year. In other words, he’s barely over .500 amongst his peers at one of the Big Ten’s most tradition-laden programs.
Whether or not you think that’s good enough will, in large part depend on your view of what Indiana is in the broader scheme of college basketball. I spent three years in school there and was a big Bob Knight fan. Though I’m not an alum nor a part of the fan base, I still think of Indiana as a place that should aspire to be in the national elite. Much like Penn State football, they might not always be there, but the natural recruiting base in an ideal state is always there.
Even if you disagree with that, can you disagree that Indiana should certainly aspire to match or exceed what Wisconsin does in basketball? Even if national championships don’t come, is it unreasonable to think that one should make the NCAA Tournament every year, rather than two out of six, as Crean has done? Or even two of three, as he’s currently done? I don’t think so.
I’m not suggesting that Tom Crean is some awful coach, and Indiana would certainly need to have a backup plan in place. That backup plan should be a coach who’s not only a slam dunk hire, but is immediately perceived as such by outsiders. Let’s use Brad Stevens, formerly of Butler and currently with the Boston Celtics, as an example. If Indiana can get him—or someone of similar cache—they simply have to do it. If they can’t, then bite the bullet and live with Crean’s mediocrity until the right coach comes along.
But let’s not be in denial anymore about what Tom Crean is. He’s a mediocre coach who recruits just well enough to have the occasional good year. At a lot of places that can be good enough. Indiana shouldn’t be one of them.

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