Former understudy aims for future Izzo-like season

Today is Tom Crean’s 370th day on the job as IU men’s basketball coach, which isn’t all that long – unless you consider the tenures of his immediate predecessors.

Speaking by phone Thursday, the first-year coach reflected on his first full season in Bloomington, one that was perhaps more important for what it wasn’t – full of controversy – than what it was.

Crean headed to Detroit this past weekend to take in a spectacle he himself has once seen through a head coach’s studious eyes. His position as Indiana’s most well-compensated and well-known state employee wagons in high hopes that he’ll peer through that glass again.

It wasn’t that long ago – just 10 years – that Crean himself sat beside Tom Izzo as an assistant at Michigan State.

Now he’s got a job that some might even consider more prestigious than that of his former employer, albeit one wracked with a lack of predictability at the moment.

But never before, perhaps in the history of college basketball, has a program’s worst statistical season been so well-received.

“They really helped us intensify the process and accelerate the process of trying to get this program back where it needed to be by the support that they showed,” Crean said of IU fans this year, who lined up almost lockstep behind the struggling program.

Fan support or no, this season was likely one of the most trying of Tom Crean’s career and easily his statistical worst as a coach.

To his credit, however, Crean rarely cast his glance beyond the losingest season in his program’s history to the riches that lay beyond – a top 10 2009 class, an immediately enhanced recruiting profile – heck, more than eight eligible scholarship players.

Yes, as every Big Ten Network announcer said repeatedly this year, help is on the way in the form of that six-man recruiting class Crean expects to be fully assembled in Bloomington by the second summer session.

It’s his hope, Crean said, that stirring in this year’s class with the young but seasoned roster already in Bloomington will create the kind of competition IU coaches insisted was lacking this season. Right now, he said, nothing is guaranteed.

“By no stretch of the imagination is the roster set right now,” Crean said. “People have to improve, they have to get better. We’re still going through an evaluation process. The spring is a really, really important time right now to develop our team.”

Malik Story’s decision to transfer, announced last week, changes that evaluation slightly, officially giving Crean room in his program to fulfill all 13 scholarship commitments for next season – the Hoosiers oversigned by one in their 2009 class.

Even so, Crean reiterated that when it comes to recruiting, “you never want to close the door on the ability to add to your program.”

But after spending 18 months in a state of broad, constant flux, IU basketball can finally take a collective breath and enjoy an off-season where Story’s transfer will likely be the biggest news out of Assembly Hall.

Crean said he doesn’t expect academics to be a problem for either his current roster or the incoming recruits, and reports from all corners suggest those new faces are excited to get to Bloomington.

And while Crean admitted that some current Hoosiers might be worried about the influx of talent about to hit the program, those returners who are excited are the ones Crean knows he can build his fledgling program around.

“I think the guys that are really competitors, and that really want to win, they’re excited, because they want to see the program take steps,” Crean said. “I think people that might be a little more insecure in their game, they would be apprehensive, or maybe not looking forward to that.”

Wherever he is Monday night, Crean will watch Izzo play for a national championship just spitting distance from Michigan State’s campus in East Lansing.

It’s too much to expect emulation from the IU coach next year when the season culminates in Indianapolis’ new headline arena, Lucas Oil Stadium.

But 12 months ago, IU basketball was spinning into the maelstrom. Now, it’s sailing toward the rising sun.