COLUMBUS, OH — In what was possibly the final meaningful act of its season, we learned the most fundamental lesson about this iteration of Indiana basketball.
Handed a golden opportunity to make a statement to the NCAA Tournament selection committee Saturday night, the Hoosiers did. And because of it — barring a considerable reversal of fortunes next week at the Big Ten Tournament in Chicago — IU basketball will spend a third straight March spectating, rather than competing.
That makes eight misses in 10 years, the kind of return you’d expect from one of the Big Ten’s cellar dwellers. Maybe that’s what this program has become. A 91-78 loss at Ohio State certainly will not have offered compelling argument to the contrary.
Actions speak louder than words. The message delivered by Indiana’s uninspired performance was unmistakable, loud and clear if entirely unwelcome. How Darian DeVries responds to that will shape his tenure in the years to come.
That is not meant to put too much weight on any one game, but rather to acknowledge the collective weight of several of them.
Like so many of his predecessors, DeVries began his work at IU last March promising smart, serious, tough basketball, the kind his team too often failed to achieve across January, February and March.
The Hoosiers (18-13, 9-11 Big Ten) sat precariously on the bubble coming into this game because they could not manage any better, and they fell off it Saturday for the same reason.
Bruce Thornton’s pursuit of the all-time Ohio State scoring record, coupled to the Buckeyes’ late-season resurgence, sold-out Value City Arena and handed the home team the kind of atmosphere it has not often enjoyed recently in this series.
Ohio State (20-11, 12-8) rode all that momentum to a 50-point first half, and cruised from there. The most competitiveness Indiana managed to flirt with after the intermission was cutting the lead to a couple touchdowns, a cross-sport metaphor its newly football-coded fanbase might appreciate.
IU’s veterans didn’t stop fighting for better, but if this season had taught us anything by now it’s that they were going to struggle to make that count. DeVries’ first effort at roster building — hampered by the totality of required turnover — missed in too many key areas.
The Hoosiers shoot the ball better than before, but not as well as their overall construction needs them to. They are not good enough defensively and have not been for some time. After some early season overachievement, that defense has regressed glaringly, especially in the face of NCAA Tournament-caliber opposition.
“I would say in this stretch, outside of the Minnesota game, we’ve given up too many 3s, too high of percentages, too clean of looks,” Darian DeVries said. “That’s really caught up to us.”
Ohio State proved that. The Buckeyes are bound for the field of 68, and the lopsided nature of the final score of this game painted a crystal-clear picture of just how wide the gap between Indiana and that field is right now.
The trouble is what to do with that.
DeVries will lose six of his top eight players, including four of five starters, to attrition once this season concludes. His top four scorers are gone, including the two (Lamar Wilkerson and Tucker DeVries) that handle the lion’s share of that responsibility.
This season might have offered proof of concept for Darian DeVries, but it will come at the cost of continuity.
And now, in all likelihood, without the stabilizing boost of a tournament appearance in Year 1.
That’s the modern-day calculus in this sport. If a program is going to turn over so fully, if a roster is — even briefly, as is DeVries’ long-term hope — going to become so transient and transactional, then that transaction runs both ways. With no real investment in the people, fans can only judge outcomes.
Success and failure become defined purely by wins and losses much earlier in a coach’s tenure than they once might have.
DeVries doesn’t want it to be that way forever, anymore than he wants these kinds of heavy losses to become so normalized as they were under previous IU coaches. The hiring of Ryan Carr as executive director of basketball signals an embrace of the idea that IU basketball has to work smarter long term.
If it, and by extension DeVries, are going to be successful, it must also acknowledge a reality Indiana has for far too long avoided. This program cannot rely on its past to meaningfully impact its future anymore. Whatever IU basketball becomes, it does now on its merits and nothing else.
Far too often in the last decade, that has been something approximating this — a team too lopsided, too flawed, to meet even the basic expectation of reaching the NCAA Tournament.
It will take something close to monumental next week in the Big Ten Tournament to play beyond that into the bigger one.
“You get ready for that next one, and you play as long as you can,” Darian DeVries said. “Win as many games as you can, and that’s going to be our mindset. We’re about the one in front of you, and the one in front of us is going to be Wednesday, and that’s really all we care about at this point. …
“Our guys are going to continue to battle.”
It’s all the Hoosiers can control, and the most they can do. In context, a pair of unflattering truths.
Indiana came to Columbus this weekend fully aware of the opportunity at hand. It needed to deliver a message to the NCAA Tournament selection committee.
Damningly, it did. The consequences could reverberate into an offseason approaching faster than anyone wanted.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball sent a message to the March Madness committee it might regret this summer
Reporting by Zach Osterman, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
