The Tom Crean Era

Okay. So I've had several days to digest Indiana University's hiring of Tom Crean as the new Head Basketball coach. I love it. I think it's a great hire. But keep in mind, I said the same thing when they hired Kelvin Sampson. They would have been hard pressed to find a coach I wouldn't be excited about, though they did come close. So let's take in the positives and negatives of Tom Crean. I'm obviously a positive guy when it comes to IU coaching hires, so let's start there.

Positives

1. Experience. He's been a head coach for nine seasons (during which he resurrected a dormant Marquette program), three of those years were in the Big East, and he once made it to a Final Four. You really couldn't ask for any more experience considering #2....

2. He's young. Indiana needs somebody who could be there for 20 years so they won't have to go through a coaching search again. In spite of all of Crean's experience, he's only 42.

3. He's clean. The worse thing about being pro-Sampson was that I had to defend the hire because of the phone-call stuff from Oklahoma. I had to assure people that he learned his lesson, and he couldn't get away with that stuff at Indiana anyway. It turns out I was wrong about the former but right about the latter. Anyway, Crean hasn't even been sniffed by NCAA investigators, and he graduates 89% of his players. Nice.

4. Big Media loves him. This shouldn't be important, but I do care about the national perception of Indiana basketball, and nobody had anything but nice things to say. For Big-Media love fests, click here, here, or here.

5. He was one of the first men to explore Antarctica.

6. He's a character. I think to survive under the microscope of Indiana basketball, you need the head coach to be a bit of a character. Crean is that. He's ridiculously animated on the sidelines, he's supposed to be a tireless worker, and the introductory press conference showed how smoothly he could work a room. Unfortunately, part of his being a character leads to his number one negative:

Negatives

1. He looks like Tom Arnold. I don't think I need to explain why that is a negative, but I will supply proof:
Um...maybe when Tom Arnold was 42. Plus, it looks like Crean will be hitting up some of the tanning beds around Bloomington, eh? I'll just pretend the tan is from recruiting in the Southwest.


2. Lack of post season success. It seems like a guy who has been to the Final Four wouldn't have to be defended about post season success, but his record can be a little underwhelming. In nine seasons he's missed the NCAA tournament four times. But the first two years he was rebuilding the program, so another way to look at it is that he's been to the NCAAs 5 out of his last 7 years. He did only have the one deep tournament run in 2003, but next year's Marquette team looked to be poised to make a bit of a run. So if he can put together teams that are capable of a Final Four run in five year cycles at Marquette, there is no reason to believe he won't do that at Indiana as well.

Now...I can finally ignore college basketball for a while. Although it is less than 6 months until Midnight Madness....