Hoosiers prepare for return to No. 1

With less than a minute to go, the game was not officially over. Michigan’s cries of desperation from beyond the arc were starting to fall as the Wolverines tried to pull off a miracle comeback in Assembly Hall.

But the Hoosier fans who had braved the cold to rock ESPN College GameDay earlier that morning before setting decibel records during Saturday night’s game could tell what was coming.

“We’re number one,” they chanted in unison.

The polls will not be released until this afternoon, but after the No. 3 IU men’s basketball team took down the No. 1 team in the nation for the second year in a row, combined with No. 2 Kansas’s loss earlier Saturday, the cheers that shook Assembly Hall as junior guard Victor Oladipo threw down a windmill dunk just after the buzzer to close out Saturday night’s 81-73 victory against the Wolverines might be accurate.

Rumors surfaced as early as last April that IU would emerge as the No. 1 team in the country, and after being selected as the top team in the preseason polls, the Hoosiers held onto their top spot until a neutral court loss to Butler in mid-December.

In overtime Dec. 15, the Hoosiers fell to the Bulldogs 88-86 and similarly fell in the eyes of the AP voters. Since that first loss of the season, Oladipo said the Hoosiers have been hard at work to make it back to the top once again.

“It’s a huge accomplishment,” Oladipo said. “We started there, and we’ve had a hard road to get back here, but we’re just taking it one game at a time. It’s not how you start but how you finish. We’re just going to keep working.”

Since then, three teams have held the No. 1 ranking, including Duke in two stints, during the five polls that have come out since IU’s loss to the Bulldogs. To some, it appears no team in the country wants to hold onto the top spot for long, but Oladipo said he and his teammates are prepared to take on the challenge of playing with a target on their backs.

“We’ll play with a chip on our shoulder,” Oladipo said. “We’ve had a chip on our shoulder since I got here. We’ll continue to keep playing with that chip cause it can be taken at any second. We’re just going to go back and continue getting better, not only in games but in practices as well.”

After the game, IU Coach Tom Crean said he thinks his Hoosiers have finally done something worthy of being named the top team in the country. He said back in April, when fans and the media first touted the Hoosiers as the next season’s team to beat, IU hadn’t proven itself.

Now, after battling to take down No. 1 Michigan with a wire-to-wire victory, Crean said his players are better prepared to take on the challenge of being named the No. 1 team in college basketball.

“We were picked No. 1 back in April, but we hadn’t done anything, and all of a sudden when you lose, it’s like ‘How do you lose? We picked you number one?’” Crean said. “When we weren’t number one in mid-December, they know what was said. They can feel all that. Were we getting worse because we lost by two? We didn’t play that great that day. It wasn’t like the sky was falling, and we had to come in here and make sure they understood that.

“These guys have figured out that if they aren’t improving, someone else will in the program, and all these other teams are really improving, so we have to.”

And now that the Hoosiers have dismantled another No. 1 team, Crean said he knows the target moves onto their backs, and his players have to stay focused on every single game if they want to keep their spot on top.

“We’ve got to be really good going into Illinois on Thursday night,” Crean said. “We played well tonight, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. It’s not coach speak. It’s facts, and the key for us is can we get better? Can we get better knowing we’re going to Illinois on Thursday and Ohio State on Sunday?”