From the team’s season opener against Eastern Illinois on Nov. 13 to the Hoosiers’ final game in the Maui Invitational, IU will play six games in 13 days to kick off the regular season. In Crean’s first seven seasons in Bloomington, it took the Hoosiers between 15 and 17 days to play their first half-dozen games.
The longest rest IU will have during their first six games is a three-day break between being hosts to Creighton in the Gavitt Tipoff Games and their first game in Maui, Hawaii, but IU will have to make a long flight to Hawaii during that time.
At least three consecutive games in November will be against power conference teams — those that are a member of a power five conference, plus the Big East, which have been the top six conferences in college basketball in each of the last two seasons, according to kenpom.com — with the possibility of a fourth in the final round in Maui.
“We’ve got to be able to play through lulls and successes,” Crean said in July. “I think when you’ve got a chance to play three games in three days like this with the completion level that it is, it just force feeds that right into you. I think that will be great for us to prepare for, great for us to deal with when we’re going through it, and then invaluable to us after we’re done.”
IU plays Wake Forest in the first round of the Maui Invitational and Vanderbilt or St. John’s the next day.
IU will face Chaminade, Kansas, UCLA or UNLV in its last game on the island, depending on how the other half of the Maui Invitational bracket plays out, potentially adding a fourth game.
For perspective, IU faced a total of seven power conference opponents in the month of November from 2008-14.
That’s why Crean stressed the importance of the Hoosiers’ October practices when he met with the media Oct. 1, the day before IU’s first practice of the season.
“October’s got to be really, really important for us because this is gonna be maybe as challenging a November, certainly on paper, that we’ve had when you look at who we play,” he said last week. “When you look at Creighton coming here and certainly with Maui and the potential of those teams.”
Crean called the current stage of the season the preseason. When evaluating his team’s fitness level, he said his players are in “really good shape” for early October.
Freshman center Thomas Bryant has increased his vertical jump by nine inches since he arrived in Bloomington, and fifth-year senior forward Max Bielfeldt now squats 410 pounds — a 140-pound jump since transferring to IU in June.
As the team counts down the days to Hoosier Hysteria, its exhibition season and the regular season opener, Crean wants his team’s strength and conditioning to get even better.
“You want to continue to stay on that pace,” he said. “So to me, with starting it early, it’s more about let’s make sure we’re building up towards a timeline inside of practice rather than throwing it all out there right at the beginning — having these long endurance-tested practices right at the beginning.”
Rather than implementing detailed game plans for specific teams or matchups IU will face this fall, the Hoosiers are using their opening practices to prepare for concepts or certain strengths of their non-conference opponents.
It’s a mix of preparing what IU wants to do on offense and what the team wants to take away on defense, Crean said.
“As we get started with practice and really try to make this a great month of training,” Crean said, “... (we’re) trying to get them ready for the myriad of things they’re going to see as we get into the season and max it out. Keep the practices at a really good pace, at a build-it-up pace rather than a taper-it-down pace, so that we kind of do it in reverse order this year, so that’s why shorter practices, sometimes twice a day, and then still get our conditioning, still get our lifting in, all those types of things.”
IU has a November schedule on the horizon that’s unlike any the Hoosiers have faced since Crean arrived in Bloomington. The work starts now — in October.
