Tom Crean is a Maverick

First appeared on November 19th, 2008
in The Lebanon Reporter

Indiana basketball fans will be happy to know that during the 2009-10 season the Hoosiers will be putting one of the top 5 recruiting classes in the nation on the floor. Until then….well let’s just say for the first time in history the people of Indiana will know what it feels like to brace for a major hurricane. The men’s basketball season, which has been lurking somewhere over the proverbial Atlantic like a Category 5 storm, is about to come ashore.
It has become so cliché for sports columnists or part time sports columnists or even writers pretending to be part time sports columnists for that matter to make predictions about the future that we feel an intense amount of pressure to conform. If the Hoosiers can win 10 games this season fans should be very happy; if they win more than that-Crean is a genius on the same level as Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein or Peter Sellers.
For proof see his team. There are five players who were actually recruited to play basketball and all of those are freshman. There are seven walk ons, one of which has already been drafted to play major league baseball (see his picture in Webster’s under “glutton for punishment”). There is one player who has division one experience and one who hails from the Gambia. Vegas will likely run the over under for Hoosier wins against the number of announcers who actually pronounce Tijan Jobe’s name correctly during the season.
Now, predictions aside, we’re here to speak on the resurrection that is underway in Bloomington. In eight short months Tom Crean has managed to restore some semblance of pride and unity within Hoosier Nation. This after all they stood for was absolutely torched by Kelvin Sampson. On an ultra-quizzical side note, with everything Sampson has been accused of, he is back in basketball as an assistant with the Milwaukee Bucks. If you would like to drop him a note thanking him for all the work he did in burying one of the most storied programs in NCAA history, you can reach him at fanfocused@bucks.com, or since it is Kelvin Sampson we’re talking about, you might be better served calling him at 877-428-BUCK.
In a word Crean has been electric. He has been pushing buttons nonstop since his April hiring. The man has literally been everywhere. From giving a public lecture on leadership to doing numerous radio interviews, he’s logged thousands of miles on the recruiting trail, made an appearance on ESPN’s talk show Rome is Burning and even somehow found time to squeeze in a 500 practice session at the track. To be clear, Tom Crean is inexhaustible.
The Hoosiers kicked off the season with “Hoosier Hysteria” and Crean made it an extra special evening by inviting former players back to Assembly Hall. The guest list included representatives from multiple generations of Hoosier teams. After their first win over Northwestern State (see cupcake in the dictionary) Saturday night Crean continued building support for his program by spending time afterwards flat handing fans and thanking the students for turning out.
From hiring Sampson in the first place, a move that made about as much sense as the Today show burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel while sending their anchors around the world in a futile effort to highlight the need for us to be more “green”, to hiring Crean, the Indiana athletic department has come light years in escaping the dreaded land of zero tolerance. Forget the outcome of this season, from everything we’ve seen to this point Tom Crean appears to be a great hire.