Hoosiers Basketball: Indiana’s Overrated Season Ends in Fitting Fashion

Breathe easy, IU lemmings. Syracuse has liberated you from the Hoosier Hallucination.

The bottom predictably fell out of college basketball’s most embellished house of cards on Thursday, a thudding 61-50 loss in the Sweet 16 that leaves bands of Hoosiers yes men wondering how they got sucked into the craze.

Maybe it was those hypnotic warmup pants, or the acts of misplaced entitlement on display throughout the season. This is the same team, after all, that pretentiously cut down the nets after losing on its senior night. Whatever the case, this blender of pretenders likely had you fooled. And to little fault of your own.

Mar 28, 2013; Washington, D.C., USA; Indiana Hoosiers guard Victor Oladipo (4) walks off the court after losing to the Syracuse Orange 61-50 in the semifinals of the East regional of the 2013 NCAA tournament at the Verizon Center. Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

Mainstream media heads sanctified the Hoosiers as college basketball’s can-do-no-wrong troop. Riding the reputation of a speciously enhanced preseason billing, Indiana became the first school in more than a decade to retain the No. 1 ranking in the AP Poll after losing in the week prior. Narrative spinners involuntarily brushed off each passing loss, owing any slip-up to the peerless quality of its conference. Before long, IU was the protagonist of an ESPN-authored legend — an artificial juggernaut looming larger than it actually is in the shadow of the Big Ten image.

Long exonerated for what they did wrong, the Hoosiers now leave us pondering what exactly they did right to justify the hyperbolic hype. Indiana bailed in the Big Ten tournament, fell short of the Final Four, even lost on senior night to a team it trounced several weeks earlier. Truth is, Indiana was a garden-variety team showered in bouquets of undue praise.

ESPN’s favorite play toy was never worth the shelf price. We told you as much on these pages last month, then reminded you again this week why Indiana is more glitz than substance. Frail inside, brittle on the wing, broken behind the clipboard — hints of a fateful ending were visible to those who tuned out the mainstream hype machine.

Victor Oladipo was never MJ. You can wrap a cape around his neck but that doesn’t make him superman.

Cody Zeller, the most overglorified collegiate center of his generation, made his best audition for Charmin poster boy. A world-beater in transition and match-up problem when isolated at the pinch post, Zeller betrayed the rest of a center’s responsibilities — scoring on the low block, finishing in traffic, sealing off bigger opposing pivots, protecting the rim, playing tough — in favor of a narrowly-focused finesse style of play.

The elephant stomping in the room all season: IU’s backcourt was severely undersized. The pair of 6-foot guards were taken to task by Syracuse’s taller, longer and more athletic guards in the regional semis. Jordan Hulls couldn’t get off a clean shot — which renders him useless since he lacks the lateral mobility to stay in front of quick ball-handlers and the length to contest jump shots — while Yogi Ferrell couldn’t get off a clean pass. The combination of Hulls and Ferrell went scoreless on Thursday, combining for five turnovers without the compensation of a single point.

Freshman point guards are seldom reliable in delivering coveted hardware in April. Only four rookie floor generals have led teams to national titles since the tournament expanded to 32 teams. IU’s first-year point guard in his last two tournament games: zero points and seven giveaways. Expecting Ferrell to pilot a championship team was ambitious in October, downright delusional four months later with the benefit of having seen him play.

Speaking of inherently unreliable, Tom Crean, ladies and gentlemen. The always-pacing head coach had four days to diagram a viable game plan against Syracuse’s fixture defense, and this is what he came up with? Crean’s fruitless blueprint led the nation’s most efficient offense astray, lost in an unfulfilling game of swing the ball around the perimeter. The result? The fourth fewest points by a 1-seed in the shot clock era. If you lent Crean a full offseason and a free tutorial on the hotspots of a 2-3 zone, he’d still screw the pooch. Then he’d cut down the nets to celebrate the exploit.

Hoosiers hoops may be back, Hoosier Hysteria in full bore, but consider the Hoosier Hallucination forever exorcised.