With the Indiana men’s basketball coaching job set to open this offseason, could the Hoosiers take some lessons from two programs of similar stature in the same region?
Both Kentucky and Louisville had vacancies at head coach last offseason for wildly different reasons. The Cardinals were moving on from the utter disaster that was the two-year Kenny Payne era while the Wildcats were the stunner of the offseason when longtime figurehead John Calipari fled for Arkansas after yet another early bouncing in March Madness.
Just like Indiana, both of these programs swung for the fences with their first few names. Both actually reportedly looked into Scott Drew, with the Baylor coaching saying no twice.
Louisville was linked to Dusty May, the former Indiana manager who took Florida Atlantic to the Final Four, but he ended up at Michigan. Kentucky did not stop big game hunting and turned to UConn’s Dan Hurley, who responded with a firm no.
After further rumors, some involving Chicago Bulls coach and former Florida icon Billy Donovan, Kentucky turned to proud program alumnus and then-BYU coach Mark Pope, who has never won an NCAA Tournament game as a head coach.
Well, neither had Kelsey.
Both of those programs, one being arguably the most visible in the entire sport, went with options from the mid-major route (BYU was at the time, with just a single season of Big 12 play under Pope) for coaching openings after swinging for the fences and getting a round of no’s.
Kelsey had been on lists for multiple jobs for a while thanks to his work at Charleston and Pope was a fun name to toss around as Calipari’s eventual successor due to his connections with the program before that process went into overdrive.
Both have had very, very solid first seasons in their new roles.
Kelsey has breathed life into a Louisville program in desperate need of some sort of lifeline after the Payne years and has the Cardinals tearing through the ACC in year one. Pope owns a slew of top-10 wins in just a few months and has kept the high standards up at his alma mater.
It’s also worth touching on the fact that Kelsey made Indiana’s extremely talented roster look like a buy game opponent with his patchwork portal crew in the Battle 4 Atlantis and the Hoosiers will have to contend with Pope for years to come thanks to a scheduling agreement agreed to by his predecessor.
So, what can Indiana learn from all of this?
The program should probably take some big swings at first like these two did and because, well, you simply never know. But these searches proved that there’s perfectly good, even great options that aren’t on the initial call list.
So if and when the Brad Stevenses, Scott Drews, Bruce Pearls and such of the world say no, don’t fret. The coaching search doesn’t end there, it just begins.
There are plenty of reliable options. Indiana itself is just a year removed from hiring Curt Cignetti for the football program. That worked pretty well.
Let the process play out and the decision-makers do their jobs.
