What more can be said?
If you’ve been following along with the IU basketball team at all this season, which saw its season end with a 73-63 third-round National Invitation Tournament loss Tuesday at home to Wichita State University, it’s pretty obvious how the Hoosiers have made it to this solemn departing juncture.
I could plug the word “disappointing” into thesaurus.com for the umpteenth time this season and use whatever new flowery synonym catches my eye to try and encapsulate what this campaign felt like to watch from afar.
Or I could just once again indulge you on all the talking points that people have clung to all season as the major cruxes to IU’s sporadic performances — a lack of outside shooting, a young, inexperienced core of players that had a nasty habit of catching the injury bug, a stagnant offensive system.
It’s all just white noise that you’ve heard too many times before.
I could give myself carpal tunnel syndrome filling ream upon ream of empty Microsoft Word pages with the cycle of excuses that have been brought up this year.
Sure, that’d be an easy way for me to call it a year and never look back on this often times mind-numbing slog of a season, but I’m not going to do that. At the end of the day, all those factors that have played into yet another fizzled-out, IU Head Coach Archie Miller-led team are just what I called them before — excuses.
I’m not arguing that a lot of those things aren’t true. Yes, there were many injuries that came about through the year, culminating in freshman guard Romeo Langford sitting out the NIT with a back issue but nearly every team in the country deals with injuries.
Yes, watching the statue-like movement off the ball in Miller’s half-court offensive system made me want to leave the gym altogether at times, but at some point, somebody, whether it’s Miller or the players, have to give in and find a way to make that system work.
Blaming this entire season on those things is ignoring just exactly what was lost in the process.
The fact that this team, that came into the year with one of the most hyped-up recruits in program history in Langford and a solidified star in senior forward Juwan Morgan, wasted away midway through the NIT in a home loss to a sixth-seeded Wichita State team is inexcusable not just on Miller’s part but the program’s as whole.
The talent and expectations were there. The execution simply was not and for Morgan’s, and presumably Langford’s, IU careers to come to this unsavory apex is an absolute shame
Maybe this was all unavoidable. Maybe all that talent that we once thought was there was never really there at all. Or maybe instead of this being the season for it all to blossom at once, we have to wait another year or two.
Even if this team was healthy and played at full strength for the entire season, would we be at any other final destination than this? I don’t think so.
Even though the Hoosiers did improve a bit down the stretch, it was still not enough to avoid an unceremonious thud.
Miller’s frenetic, little play-calling offensive system can work with the right personnel, but this cast of players wasn’t it. Even with a talent like Langford, it became apparent Miller didn’t know how to use him. Many of these players aren’t even his recruits and he didn’t know how to use many of them either.
Something just always seemed off, and that made everything ever more frustrating.
This team, though seemingly passing the eye test when it comes to athleticism and potential, was still a hodgepodge of random pieces largely left over from the Tom Crean era. It was like pulling the arms and legs off a G.I. Joe action figure and trying to replace them with the plastic limbs of a Barbie doll. It just was just going to be unnatural no matter how much we wanted it to work and be entertaining.
This isn’t to say it was all negative. It could even be said that this was a positive baby step in the right direction as Miller slowly tries to bring this program back to relevancy.
It just wasn’t the giant leap many once thought it could have been. Whatever excuses or reasons people want to give for that are moot points now.
It was still a lost season, and nobody is ever going to get it back.
