The Mike Woodson experiment might already be over
As IU fans jeer, Friday night's trip to Ohio State suddenly feels existential
It seemed like a progressive idea at the time.
Indiana had just fired Archie Miller, the prototypical hot-young-college-coach-who-couldn’t-possibly-fail, after four dreary, tournament-free seasons, while former NBA fixture and first-time college coach Juwan Howard had Michigan atop the Big Ten. Athletic director Scott Dolson could be forgiven for thinking outside the box. What if, and let’s just spitball this here, you brought back Mike Woodson — as Indiana as Indiana gets, a spiritual avatar of the bygone Bob Knight era, but also a well-liked NBA journeyman who could be expected to run tactically solid stuff — and then splashed some extra money to surround him with a staff that could handle the collegiate details?
So that’s what Dolson did. He hired former Ohio State coach and renowned Hoosier-state prospect vampire Thad Matta as an associate athletic director, a role Dolson envisioned as akin to an NBA GM; Matta would have a big hand in scouting and acquiring talent. Dolson also pried away Dane Fife, a former IU player and longtime assistant under Tom Izzo at Michigan State, who would be peerlessly plugged in from the bench. (And, if things worked out, and given Woodson’s age, maybe even the head coach in waiting.)
Woodson, meanwhile, could focus on coaching and statesmanship. He could just … be Mike Woodson. It was a very modern setup, a nod to the changing nature of the sport, a paradigm that has been more fully codified in the four years since.
It was also an immediate failure. Matta left after the first season. So did Fife. Whatever weird power struggle produced this outcome — it’s funny to think about control of Indiana basketball like it’s a federal agency or the board of a Fortune 500 company — ended with Woodson in the traditional role of a college basketball coach, master of all.
That has also been a failure.
What’s sad and ironic is that the things Matta and Fife were hired for turned out to be the things the Woodson-led Hoosiers are actually quite good at: recruiting talented college basketball players to come play for Indiana. Woodson’s Indiana is amazing at that. It’s everything else that’s a mess.
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