Season of '69

Like so many stories, this one begins in the summer of ’69.

It had been 16 years since the Hoosiers won their last national championship, and the team was coming off its second straight losing season and facing a third.

This isn’t a story about the Hoosiers overcoming long odds and adversity to win a national title. Far from it. In fact, this is a story about the worst men’s basketball season since IU joined the Big Ten.

Things were different during that forgettable season from how they are now. For starters, there wasn’t an overriding feeling of optimism flowing through the program’s veins similar to what Tom Crean has recently injected. No one was reminding fans, “It’s Indiana.”

The Hoosiers had finished in the Big Ten cellar three of the last four years and had struggled since winning their last Big Ten championship in 1966-67.

It wasn’t exactly “help is on the way,” but Lou Watson urged fans to be patient and to wait for next year. Next year will be better; next year we’ll be more competitive. Next year we could win a Big Ten title.

But fans didn’t believe in Watson the way they do in Crean, or even Mike Davis. Sure, IU had won before, but it didn’t have the proud tradition to look back upon that Crean has now. Forget the five championship banners swaying from the rafters; Assembly Hall hadn’t even been built yet.

Fast-forward to 2008. It has been 21 years since the Hoosiers won their last national championship, and with inexperience and a grueling schedule, the team could be facing its worst season record-wise since, you guessed it, 1969.

Last year’s roster has been purged, the coaching staff done away with. No longer is winning the bottom line. The program once again wants to win with pride and integrity.
When a new athletics director was hired in October, he stressed the athletics department was going to “follow the rules,” a not-so-subtle hint that Barack Obama isn’t the only one trying to change the culture around him.

The two seasons were played under different pretenses.

The ’69 team didn’t undergo a massive overhaul over the summer. It returned its top two scorers in Ken Johnson and Joe Cooke. There were no NCAA sanctions looming over the ’69 team, and there wasn’t the same sense of reestablishing tradition.

To make matters worse, current coach Watson was beginning to have severe back problems.

It was the Hoosiers’ terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad season.

It was decided that assistant coach Jerry Oliver, previously a high school coach, would fill in for Watson for a few games until he recovered. A few games turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into the entire season. The University was still two years away from hiring an up-and-coming young coach from Army named Robert Montgomery Knight to take over the program.

The 1969-70 men’s basketball season was unusual. Peculiar. Odd. Much like 2008, but at the same time quite different. Both teams were facing difficult circumstances and both coaches, while trying their hardest, knew the challenges ahead would be massive.

There was a running joke around Bloomington in 1969 that the Hoosiers were the third-best basketball team on campus. The freshman team had defeated the varsity squad 86-84 in an exhibition that fall, and there was a McNutt intramural team that starred two 6-foot-8 freshman prodigies fresh off a state championship: George McGinnis and Steve Downing (the two were academically ineligible that season).

The team actually won three of its first four games before things got bad. Really bad. The Hoosiers lost nine of their next 10 and went 3-11 in conference play that season.

A 17-point loss to then-No. 1 Kentucky began a four-game losing streak. A win against Georgia Tech preceded the Big Ten season, which would begin with a five-game losing streak for IU. After a win against Northwestern, a 15-point loss to Iowa preceded an 18-point drubbing to Purdue.

The Hoosiers rallied to win two of three in late February, but ended the season with three consecutive losses by a combined 29 points.

The ’69 team finished 7-17 overall, with a winning percentage that resembled a Ted Williams batting average.

The following season, the Hoosiers’ record reversed. McGinnis and Downing were eligible, and a few talented newcomers added to IU’s fortunes. The team finished 17-7.
The year after that, the University hired “The General.” In his second year at the helm, the Hoosiers were Big Ten champions and made it to the Final Four. An era was born. The forgettable season, forgotten.

With 30 games scheduled, the 2008-09 Hoosiers will battle the label of being the worst team record-wise all season. Their schedule won’t do them any favors. They’ll play in the Maui Invitational in November, a pre-season tournament usually reserved for elite teams and the host school, Chaminade.

They travel to Winston-Salem, N.C., to play Wake Forest. They’ll play the first basketball game ever in Lucas Oil Stadium against Gonzaga. And they’ll face Kentucky in Rupp Arena.

And then, just when the Hoosiers will want to come up for air, the Big Ten season begins.

In his address to the IU student body earlier this fall, Crean said he told his team about the eighth wonder of the world.

He was reading USA Today and saw, to his disbelief, “someone who actually didn’t pick us to finish in last place this season.”

He added that if fans focus on wins and losses this season, they’ll be missing the point of what the 2008-09 season is all about. The first-year coach didn’t beg fans to wait. In fact, he didn’t even utter the phrase “next year.”

Instead, Crean said he sees an opportunity. An opportunity where maybe one day, people will look back at the summer of ’08 as the beginning of a new era.

“When you’re faced with adversity and different things, there has to be something that keeps you going,” Crean said. “There is a feeling here. If you have it once, you’re going to get it back. Everyone has a chance to watch this thing grow again.”