The greatest programs: No. 6, Indiana
Posted: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 6:37 PM
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Greatest hoops programs
Indiana has the tradition. It has the titles. It has legendary coaches, players and a fan base few teams can match.
What the Hoosiers don’t have is a recent résumé comparable to the rest of its storied history. Just one Final Four since 1993. One Big Ten title since 1994. NCAA tournament misses in 2004 and 2005, their first since the mid-80s.
Those kind of on-court struggles – complicated by their coaching issues since 2000 – are why the Hoosiers are No. 6 on the list of greatest college basketball programs.
Not that six is low, mind you. It’s just a little strange to think of five programs being better than Indiana. But someone from Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and UCLA was going to miss out on the top five. The Hoosiers can make up the difference, though. They certainly have a rich history to build on.
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Indiana’s five NCAA tournament titles are behind only UCLA (11) and Kentucky (7), while their eight Final Fours are tied with Louisville for seventh most.
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The Hoosiers have been to the Big Dance 35 times (more than Duke), but their tourney win percentage (.666) is 10th best, just behind Michigan State.
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Indiana’s 1,635 victories are 10th most, but its .649 win percentage is just behind Illinois and Utah. The Hoosiers’ 20 regular-season conference titles are 1 more than Ohio State).
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Indiana also has had 11 players named consensus All-Americans 14 times and have sported two players of the year in Scott May and Calbert Cheaney.
Yet, it’s a single-season accomplishment that Indiana seems to be most remembered for lately – the perfect season of 1976, the last time a men’s champ has completed a campaign unbeaten.
This is somewhat of an odd notion. Six NCAA champions finished their seasons with a loss between 1956 and 1973. Heck, Indiana was one of two undefeated teams in that ’76 Final Four. Yet, here we are, more than 30 years later and still no one’s ended their season without a loss.
(Usually omitted in talk about the ’76 team is that Indiana also entered the 1975 NCAA tourney without a loss. A Scott May injury before the tourney hindered those title hopes, though.)
Of course, Indiana’s other title teams were no slouches.
The 1940 squad claimed the second NCAA tourney trophy, finishing 20-3 after nearly a 20-point win against Kansas in the final. Oddly enough, it was the Hoosiers’ first outright title of any kind.
Purdue ruled the Big Ten in the 1930s and won the regular-season crown in 1940. But when the Boilermakers turned down an invite to the Big Dance, Indiana rolled through the eight-team field, winning by an average of 17 points a game.
That signaled the birth of the “Hurrying Hoosiers,” an up-tempo style favored by legendary coach Branch McCracken, who was an All-America at IU in 1930.
(McCracken played under Everett Dean, the first great Indiana coach who won 64 percent of his games and three Big Ten titles between 1925 and 1938. He left for Stanford and coached the Cardinal to their only NCAA crown in 1942.)
McCracken – who won 87 percent of his games during his first five seasons before serving as a Navy lieutenant during World War II – won his first Big Ten title in 1953, the same year Indiana won its second NCAA title. The driving force? A 6-10 forward named Don Schlundt.
Schlundt, the first Indiana and Big Ten player to crack 2,000 career points, scored 30 points in another title-game win against Kansas. He was the first of many big-time scorers under McCracken in the ‘50s. Archie Dees, Walt Bellamy (a double-double machine before the term existed and Jimmy Rayl (the school’s single-game scoring leader, twice hitting 56).
When the McCracken era ended in ’65, Indiana started to struggle. Except for an 18-8 season in 1966-67, the Hoosiers finished 9th or 10th in the Big Ten four out of five seasons.
That set the stage for Bob Knight, coming off a hugely successful six-year run at Army, to guide Indiana into its most glorious era – three NCAA titles, 11 Big Ten championships and 661 wins. No matter what Knight’s other issues were (chair throwing, belligerent cussing, intimidating his players or the media), there’s little debate about his on-court success.
Especially when his teams claim three titles in 11 years. Tough to ignore those results.
Indiana’s fourth title was a result of Knight’s guidance, a team that jelled at the right time and the individual brilliance of Isiah Thomas, who was remarkable in the ’81 title game against North Carolina. The fifth? Great guard play and a Knight-hardened team that just two years earlier had missed the Big Dance.
Of course, there was that one shot…
By now, Keith Smart’s jumper in the final seconds against Syracuse has gone down as one of the great moments in NCAA history. People ask Smart about the baseline move “almost every day,” though he wasn’t even the Hoosiers’ biggest star.
That was senior Steve Alford, an Indiana native who led the team in scoring each season. Few players endured more of Knight’s berating and black moods, but few would argue with the results, either.
Knight’s teams still had some punch, winning three more Big Ten titles in the next six years, with the 1992-93 squad standing out as one of his best. Behind Wooden Award winner Calbert Cheaney, it finished 31-4 and just missed out on sending Knight to back-to-back Final Fours.
After seven more seasons of about 21 wins a year, just one trip to the Sweet 16 and with the off-court incidents piling up, Indiana severed ties with Knight. It replaced him with assistant Mike Davis, which wasn’t an easy transition for the school or Davis.
Amazingly enough, Davis guided the Hoosiers to their eight Final Four in just his second season. The No. 5 seed Duke in the Sweet 16 and eventually reached the 2002 title game, where it lost to Maryland.
That was the highlight of Davis’ tenure, though. Indiana finished 9th in the Big Ten just two years later. By 2006, Davis was out, replaced by Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson. Two years later, Sampson was gone too, the result of NCAA violations.
Now, under new coach Tom Crean, the Hoosiers face a re-building challenge they haven’t seen since Knight arrived. To remain among college hoops top programs, it’s not essential IU hits the same heights it reached under Knight.
But to keep its spot in the top six, it’ll take nothing less.
Coming next Tuesday, No. 5 on the list of greatest programs.
No. 7, Louisville.
No. 8, Arizona.
No. 9, Syracuse.
No. 10, Connecticut.
No. 11, Cincinnati.
No. 12, Utah.
No. 13: Villanova.
No. 14: Illinois.
No. 15: Michigan State.
No. 16: Georgetown.
No. 17: Arkansas.
No. 18: Ohio State.
No. 19: St. John's.
No. 20: UNLV.
No. 21: Texas.
No. 22: Notre Dame.
No. 23: Temple.
No. 24: Oklahoma.
No. 25: N.C. State.
