IU to face Penn State on Saturday

IU men’s basketball coach Tom Crean never set a timetable on how long it would take to rebuild the Hoosiers. The quest to return IU basketball to glory is proving to be a challenging one.

After his team’s loss to Northwestern on Wednesday night, Crean sat at a press conference podium for the 17th time in 18 games explaining why his team had lost.
The coach, known for his eternal optimism, rarely admits defeat but was ready to concede something as he searched for words to open his press conference.

“I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just start with this: I’ve never accepted it, and I never will. But this was bound to happen with this team,” he said. “We’ve asked a lot of them.”

Losing hasn’t been easy on the Hoosiers (6-21, 1-14). After tumbling to an 11-game losing skid earlier this season, IU finally won its first conference game against Iowa on Feb. 4.

But since the feel-good victory, the Hoosiers have lost six in a row, five by double digits.

Crean referenced a quote Wednesday posted in the team locker room Wednesday.
“‘Tough times never last, tough people do,’” he said.

With three games remaining in the regular season, the Hoosiers are running out of chances to get another victory this season. On Saturday, they’ll travel to Penn State to face the Nittany Lions (19-9, 8-7), who have lost four of their last six, but beat IU in the two team’s first meeting Jan. 17, 65-55.

Crean admitted Wednesday night “the steam is running dry right now” with his young team.

“There’s no question they’re mentally drained,” he said. “I think it’s far more mental than physical.”

Crean himself is battling through a mental war.

When he arrived in Bloomington last April, Crean inherited a program with problems as deep as the Monroe County rock quarries. IU basketball had lost its shine, and Crean was determined to restore it. He recalled what “beating Indiana” meant when he was an assistant coach at Michigan State in the 1990s.

“Because when you beat Indiana, it was something. It was absolutely something,” he said in his introductory press conference. “And that hit me as I flew in here last night. We are going to have that. We are going to have a presence in here.”

But the Hoosiers haven’t regained that aura yet. The program is still laying the foundation for its return to glory one day.

Wednesday was not the day. The Wildcats won in Bloomington for the first time in 41 years.

Crean said he learned three things from Ralph Willard, under whom he worked at Pittsburgh and Western Kentucky, that a good coach establishes in his or her program when he or she takes over: work ethic, style of play and enthusiasm.

Backed by a resilient fan base, Crean said, “Our fans have taken care of the enthusiasm.”

With eight freshmen and two returning players, Crean said, “Our work ethic is coming.”
As for the team’s style of play...

“It’s not here yet.”

Style of play comes with how you defend, Crean said, something the Hoosiers haven’t done well this season. They rank 316th in the country in field-goal-percentage defense.
Nevertheless, the Hoosiers won’t sit back and accept their fate. Crean said the team would continue to work on a daily basis to do “something about everything.”

“Right now the best thing we can all do is understand what our record is but never come in here and act like it is that way,” Crean said. “I know I’ll never coach that way. I have a staff that will never coach that way, and I want a group of young men that will never feel that way. But it has to change.”