Archie who?
As the summer drags on with little Indiana sports news to report on, I thought it would be a good time to revive an old Crimson Quarry series, the “What ifs” of Indiana athletics.
Having been a student at Indiana for the last four seasons of the Tom Crean era, I know how hot his seat was following his inability to solve Syracuse’s (in)famous zone defense in the 2013 NCAA tournament.
However much that game may have decided Crean’s fate, it was far from his only wart. When I was a junior in 2015-16, he failed to land a center for his roster. Hanner Mosquera-Perea, Troy Williams, and Emmit Holt – the tallest of whom is six foot nine – rotated time at the five spot.
And then the 2016-17 season happened.
Actually, it started with Crean’s 2015 recruiting class. The big get was five-star Thomas Bryant, an immediate answer to Indiana’s problems in the paint, but the class also included low three-stars OG Anunoby and Juwan Morgan.
All three of those players have seen time in the NBA, with Anunoby and Bryant each winning NBA titles in 2019 and 2023, respectively.
The talent injection of the 2015 class, plus senior year Yogi Ferrell led Indiana to a 27-8 record, Big Ten Title, and Sweet 16 appearance after beating Kentucky in the Round of 32. Crean’s seat was starting to cool off.
Despite Yogi and Troy Williams (another two guys who have played in the NBA) graduating, expectations were still high for the 2016-17 squad. Josh Newkirk looked like a serviceable replacement, while the core of Anunoby, Bryant, and Robert Johnson gave Indiana some known production.
Just four games into the year though, we got a glimpse of what would be. Missing Anunoby with an ankle injury, the Hoosiers went to Fort Wayne and lost to a Mastodons squad that would go on to finish in fourth place in the Summit League.
The optimistic among us had excuses on deck for this loss. The Hoosiers were without Anunoby, who at that point looked like the best NBA prospect on roster, and Fort Wayne obviously had more to play for than Indiana, which appeared to have been sleep walking through the game.
Plus, Indiana had already opened the season with a neutral site win over preseason no. 3 Kansas. And eight days after losing to Fort Wayne, Indiana SMOKED then-no. 3 North Carolina, reaching third in the AP Polls the following week.
Crean looked like he’d have at least another winning season on his hands.
The wheels started to look a little wobbly again before OG got hurt, with three straight losses to Nebraska, Louisville, and Wisconsin. Louisville was still Louisville at that point, but dropping two home Big Ten games to lesser opponents did not bode well.
Even though the Hoosiers were just 1-3 in Big Ten play when they lost Anunoby for the season, it’s pretty easy to pinpoint it as the turning point of that year. Indiana was 12-6 before he got hurt, with one of those losses coming when he was injured.
After he went down, Indiana won just five more games, finishing 18-16 and ending the season with an NIT loss at Georgia Tech. We all know what happened next.
Crean was fired, Archie Miller was hired (no, you will not get a more in-depth retelling of those four years here), only to be fired and replaced by Mike Woodson four years later.
There have been some high points in the Woodson era, but nothing like a Big Ten title or tournament victory over Kentucky. While Indiana has struggled with consistency and identity since 2016, Purdue has risen to new heights and UConn has seemingly taken over the sport.
So what would have happened if OG hadn’t gotten hurt?
The wheels may still have fallen off for Tom Crean in 2016-17, but would it have been bad enough to justify firing him one year removed from a conference title?
It may not have bought him long-term job security, but the program as we know it would look drastically different if it hadn’t been looking for a new coach during an offseason that produced such spectacular busts as Archie, Chris Mack, and Chris Holtmann.
This isn’t to say definitively that such a change would have been better. Archie was a mess, but Crean was losing momentum on the court and in recruiting, so reinforcements weren’t exactly on the way. One more year with him at the helm could have set the program back further.
Either way, I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t on my mind when OG inked his new deal with the Knicks. The late Crean years saw so much NBA talent and some very high highs, but the lows of that 2016-17 season without Anunoby were the nail in the coffin for a very confusing, rollercoaster of a coaching tenure.