Mike Davis and his enablers: the gifts that keep on giving.

Maybe I should take it easy on Mike Davis. Perhaps I should adopt the media's conventional wisdom, and think of Davis as a nice, decent, shy, retiring man cruelly run out of town by pitchfork-wielding Hoosiers. Even if I don't adopt that line of thinking, perhaps I should just move on, give thanks for our current competent coach, and rubberneck as Davis drags UAB down to the cellar of C-USA. And then I remember the cost of Davis's last season. As I discussed during the NCAA Tournament, the indefensible decision to retain Davis in 2005, after he produced consecutively IU's two single worst seasons since the early 1970s, didn't just affect IU. That decision did, however, help create a monster in Columbus. In the summer of 2005, when IU's coach was a dead man walking, former Butler coach Thad Matta came back to his old town and obtained verbal commitments to attend Ohio State from Greg Oden and Mike Conley, probably the best set of teammates in the history of Indiana high school basketball. Would hiring a new coach in 2005, whether it would have been Kelvin Sampson or someone else, have guaranteed that Oden and Conley would come to Bloomington? Not at all. Thad Matta, by all indications, is a masterful recruiter, expert at the relationship-building part of the job. But at least IU would have been in the game. Instead, a probation-ravaged football school 150 miles to our west became the "it" school for college basketball recruits. Certainly, Matta would have succeeded at OSU in any event. But did we have to make it so easy for him? Lou Holtz used to say that "luck is where preparation meets opportunity." Matta's excellent recruiting skills demonstration that he provided the preparation, but the IU coaching situation enhanced the opportunity.

And that leads us to today's news. Deshaun Thomas, a freshman (sophomore to be) from Bishop Luers in Fort Wayne, perhaps the best player nationally in the high school class of 2010, verbally committed to Ohio State. It's also worth noting that Kelvin Sampson's sanctions may have played a role here, although if a player is going to commit as a freshman, what can you do? Again, I like Sampson. I think he's a very good coach. He is good enough to restore IU basketball to glory. But the monster on the eastern border makes it a much tougher job, and that monster was created in part by the IU administrators who coddled the incompetent ingrate Mike Davis.

OSU against Florida.

It's a replay of the BCS championship game, except that the two schools' fans actually care about football. I was very proud of my bracket entering this weekend, because for the first time in memory I correctly picked every Final Four qualifier. Unfortunately, I had Georgetown winning it all, so I'm not going to win any money.

It's odd. I really didn't give much thought to OSU, Oden, and Conley during the regular season. As Norm Dale would say, I support the IU team for what they are rather than dwelling on what they are not. Still, ever since IU was eliminated, the bitter factor has been increasing. I have nothing against Oden and Conley. They made wise decisions, electing not to entrust their careers to Mike Davis. But I'm petty, and I don't want them to win a championship. I don't want to see a new college basketball power on our eastern border that exists primarily because of the nonfeasance of the IU administration in March 2005. So be it. The future is bright at IU, but Kelvin Sampson has a tougher job because the administration waited too long to make a move on Davis.

Oden, Conley, and Mike Davis.

Birmingham News columnist Kevin Scarbinsky wrote a column today that has Hoosier fans a bit exercised. It would be easier for us to move on if the media would stop writing IU/Davis retrospectives. Scarbinsky seems to have interviewed Davis about his recruitment of Greg Oden and Mike Conley. Let's jet back to summer 2005 for a moment. From 1971 through 2003, IU never had a losing season--never came close, in fact. In 2004, IU posted its first losing season in 24 seasons and missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1985. IU finished eighth in a down year for the Big Ten (only the top three conference teams were invited to the NCAA Tournament). It was the first time IU had missed both postseason tournaments since 1977. While Davis certainly faced some criticism, he was only two years removed from the Final Four, and so he essentially was given a mulligan by most, but certainly not all, of the fans. In 2005, IU failed to rebound. Faced with a slim chance of playing into the tournament, IU was humiliated by Minnesota in the 4/5 game of the Big Ten Tournament. That game was followed by Davis's bizarre "we were the four seed. We were the four seed. We were the four seed. We were the four seed..." press conference. The season ended with a whimper, in the form of a beatdown by Vanderbilt in front of the smallest crowd in the history of Assembly Hall. The ridiculousness was just more of the same from Davis, whose career never seemed to recover from his running onto the court slapping his head at the end of the Kentucky game in December 2002. He made too many broken promises about mystery recruits to count. His real gem from the 2005 season was the claim that IU's blowout loss at Northwestern was inevitable because IU had prepared for NU's best player, TJ Parker, but when Parker missed the game because of injury, IU simply couldn't adjust to NU's walk-on point guard, Michael Jenkins. Seriously.

Jenkins posted a line any post player would love - 8 points and a team-high 7
rebounds, including 4 offensive boards. He had no assists in his first career
start but hit a pair of 3-pointers on Northwestern's backbreaking 18-8 run
midway through the second half.
"It affected us with Parker not playing,"
Davis said. "We had prepared for T.J. You could see our guys not focused and not
ready to come out and compete and battle."
Davis was then asked about
Jenkins.
"Who's that?" he asked.

I don't mean to drag Hoosier fans down a nightmarish memory lane here. I'm just pointing out how ridiculously absurd it was that after all of that, Mike Davis inexplicably was allowed to continue his stewardship of one of college basketball's historically elite programs, and to provide the context, lest anyone has forgotten, of the condition of the program when Conley and Oden were being recruited. At that point, Davis's IU career was beyond salvaging. The idea that someone like Mike Conley, a bright kid with involved and sophisticated parents, was going to entrust his career to that charlatan, was laughable. Yet the IU administration allowed Davis to come back, even though, by his own account, he no longer wanted to be at Indiana. IU's administration blew the last, best chance of signing Conley and Oden by giving Davis another years after had had proven his unfitness beyond a reasonable doubt.

Davis was self-absorbed to the end, as his interview with Scarbinsky makes clear. Even if he landed the commitments, he wouldn't sign them?! what a bunch of bunk. I know that it's politically correct to say that we wish Davis well, that we hope his is happy at UAB, and so forth. I don't. I hope he falls on his face, and I hope he does it soon. The sooner he flames out, the fewer careers and seasons he will be allowed to ruin. Good riddance, Mike.