“Fire Tom Crean!”
If you’ve been on the internet for longer than about five minutes, these words have probably come across your screen more than a few times. These calls for Crean’s head seem to pop up after just about every Hoosier loss, but they are nothing new. There are several Twitter account dedicated solely to leading the #FireTomCrean campaign.
Noticed the “joined” dates on both of these accounts. This faction of Indiana fans, who believe Indiana is still just as much of a blue-blood program as they were the day Bob Knight was unceremoniously fired over 16 years ago and should be competing with Duke, Kansas and Kentucky year in and year out, are out in full force this year perhaps more than ever before.
After early season wins over Kansas and North Carolina that vaulted them as high as #3 in the AP poll, Indiana’s season has been underwhelming, to say the least. They lost what was supposed to be a glorified exhibition game against Fort Wayne, and their 5-9 record in Big Ten play has them sitting in 11th place in the conference. As of today, Indiana has lost six of their last seven games with their lone win over that span coming at home against Penn State in triple-overtime. According to ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, if the NCAA Tournament started today, the Hoosiers would be on the outside looking in.
Some of Indiana’s struggles stem from circumstances outside of Crean or anyone else’s control. Senior forward Collin Hartman, who averaged almost 22 minutes per game last year, has missed the entire season with a knee injury. Sophomore forward OG Anunoby was averaging over 11 points per game before a knee injury suffered against Penn State on January 18 marked the end of his season. Leading scorer James Blackmon missed three games including road losses to Northwestern and Wisconsin. I don’t care how good of a coach you are, it’s hard to win when your best players aren’t on the court.
The argument that Indiana should part ways with the coach who has won them two Big Ten championships and been to two Sweet Sixteens in the last four years implies that they would be able to go out and hire a coach who would be a substantial step up from Crean. This is not as simple as it sounds.
Hoosier fans don’t seem to understand Indiana is not the same caliber program that they were twenty years ago. The Hoosiers have failed to even make it to an Elite Eight, let alone contend for a national championship since 2002. The Indiana job is not nearly on the same level as the head coaching job at schools like Kansas, Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky or UCLA, but fans do not seem to realize that.
I saw this article advocating firing Crean and pursuing Oklahoma City Thunder head coach Billy Donovan the other day and almost fell out of my chair. The idea that Donovan, who left a college program where he had won two national championships in the past decade, would walk away from $6 million a year gig where he gets to coach Russell Westbrook is downright laughable. I have seen similar arguments made by Indiana fans for hiring Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens and Villanova coach Jay Wright which are both equally absurd proposals. Firing Crean in hopes of landing any of these aforementioned coaches would be about as pragmatic as if I broke up with my girlfriend because I wanted to pursue Selena Gomez.
SB Nation’s Chris Schutte summed up the Tom Crean situation pretty well. “A lot of (Indiana fans) claims against him are valid. Yes, he hasn’t had as much success with in-state recruiting. Yes, some of his in-game decisions bring concerns about his coaching chops (i.e., subbing patterns, not adjusting to Syracuse zone). Yes, his teams have generally shown sloppy fundamentals.” Schutte admitted. “But he’s also won two of the last four Big Ten titles. That’s extremely hard to do. He’s proven time and time again that he can develop talent and can identify that talent.”
Those who criticize Crean’s coaching ability seem to forget just how awful the program he inherited was. When he arrived in Bloomington in 2008, there were exactly zero scholarship players and two walk-ons on Indiana’s roster. Kelvin Sampson’s scandal-plagued tenure as head coach had left the program in shambles. In Crean’s first season, the Hoosiers went 6-25 overall and 1-17 in Big Ten play. Three years later, they were in the Sweet Sixteen. There are very few coaches in the country who could have turned a program around as quickly as Crean did, but Indiana fans seem to have forgotten that.
Indiana athletic director Fred Glass will face a difficult decision this off-season. If he fires Crean the year after a Big Ten title and a Sweet Sixteen appearance, he risks Indiana basketball going the way of Nebraska football and becoming a revolving door of coaches who will never be able to live up to the lofty expectations of fans and alumni. If he sticks with Crean and the program doesn’t improve, Glass may begin to hear calls for his own head.
Glass is not the first athletic director faced with this situation. 30 years ago, a young athletic director named Tom Butters faced similar pressure from boosters and alumni to fire their head basketball coach after several lackluster years and minimal NCAA Tournament success. A lesser man may have folded and caved into the pressure from alumni and boosters, Tom Butters didn’t. The man he chose to stand by was Mike Krzyzewski, and 12 Final Fours and five national championships later it appears Butters made the right call. I’m certainly not saying Crean is going to evolve into the next Coach K, but there is definitely a lesson in this story about standing by your convictions and your head coach.
There is no guarantee that Crean will ever be able to elevate Indiana’s program to a level that will appease the lofty expectations of a their rabid fanbase. There is also no guarantee that Indiana will be able to find a better coach to replace him. It would be a mistake for Indiana to fire a coach before they know what his ceiling truly is, and I think Crean’s ceiling is much higher than many people realize.