Indiana Hoosiers Settled Family Business the Right Way

By dismissing Devin Davis and Hanner Mosquera-Perea, Indiana Hoosiers’ head coach Tom Crean did what he needed to do to save his own job, and remind everyone that these decisions are just business, never personal.

Tom Crean did what had to be done, finally.

After cultivating a culture of passiveness and half-measures over the last 15 months, the Indiana Hoosiers took a decisive step in preserving their reputation as a program by dismissing Devin Davis and Hanner Mosquera-Perea on Thursday.

While it may seem a bit draconian to some, the truth is, there really was no other way for this story to end. For some time now, Indiana players have done one thing or another to find themselves in the police blotters, and for a program and coach under siege for the last few seasons, arrests for alcohol or drugs were the last thing anyone needed.

More from Big Ten

In the past, Crean went light on such infractions, opting to go with benching players, or at the most giving four game suspensions (which is a game or so higher than recommended). But despite the lighter discipline, very little seemed to get through to the players.

Of course, winning is a panacea that seems to cure all, so as long as the Hoosiers were winning all would be forgiven. The problem here is that they weren’t winning, not to the level where it would be remotely acceptable that the inmates were, in effect, running the asylum.

It got so bad that athletic director Fred Glass had to make public statements about player discipline, something you rarely see ADs do, not over a head coach. Again, either the players didn’t get it, or they didn’t care, but in either case, nothing was changing.

Once the season got started, things seemed to stabilize, at least as it pertained to the police blotter. While the Hoosiers started off stronger than expected, a late-season flameout left them with a 9-9 record in the Big Ten and just managing to scrape their way into the NCAA Tournament. The season was less than hoped for, but not enough to cost Crean his job.

But when it comes to the players, Crean’s trouble was never during the season, but rather between seasons. Some in Bloomington thought it was a matter of time before a player messed up, with April and May being a prime danger zone.

When Davis was cited Monday for possession, Mosquera-Perea wasn’t. In the law’s eyes, he did nothing wrong, but it was the appearance of impropriety that got everyone talking, and at this point, despite the feel-good story about Davis’ recovery from the head injury he suffered in November, something had to be done, no matter what, because this was hurting the program.

Now here’s why Crean (and Glass’) decision to dismiss both players from the program was the right thing to do.

Unseemly though it may be, everything you need to know about effective personnel management, you can get from the Mob. While we don’t want to equate college athletics with criminal behavior, some of the rules and concepts are strikingly similar.

Indiana Hoosiers /

Indiana Hoosiers

For example, no one is greater than “the family”, by the same idea, no one player is bigger than “the team”. Indiana basketball has a long-standing tradition that has been deemed by some (mostly older fans still clinging to the memory of Bob Knight) to be tarnished. Anyone who gets in the way of that has to be set aside so that the program can grow.

Much like “family business”, decisions are made not on a personal level, but rather on a business level. While no one wants to see someone like Devin Davis be removed from a program while he is on the mend, one can’t forget the problem that put him there in the first place. In the case of Mosquera-Perea, he’s continually been in situations that show both a lack of judgment and care for his position as a student-athlete, and this is something that goes above whether something is, or isn’t legal.

College kids are going to drink and smoke. They’re going to get rowdy, but when you do things that cause problems upstairs, then upstairs has to do something about it before the top floor gets involved, because then it’s trouble for everybody.

Kent Sterling of CBS Sports 1430AM in Indianapolis shared an analogy that fits right into the situation when giving his take on the situation:

"“When an employee problem is repeated again and again, it’s a department head problem. When the department head problem isn’t corrected, it’s a manager problem. The discipline issues at Indiana had become a department head problem, and was about to lodge itself on the manager’s head. Glass is way too smart to allow that to happen.”"

Much like you’d see on the Sopranos, or in some Scorsese movie, often, when business is being threatened by one of the soldiers, the decision to take care of them is made, and it’s not because they’re hated. Both Davis and Mosquera-Perea are popular on campus and amongst the team, including Crean himself, but at the end of the day, it’s about the dollars, and when fans & alumni (who are actually the true Dons) get restless and start calling for jobs, something decisive has to be done.

Imagine, if you will, Crean, Glass and other coaches sitting around a table, deciding what needs to be done with Davis and Mosquera-Perea. Everyone wants a good outcome, but at the end of the day, Crean can stay, or the players can stay…but not both. What do you think that conversation would be like? More like a mob sit-down where someone’s fate is decided, plus or minus.

And so it goes.

Indiana will endure, and the hope is that they’ll get better as a result, because now the word is out, no more foolishness, no more embarrassing the program. While it’s easy to feel bad for the players affected, because life is so much bigger than some game, the reality is that the game must endure, and it will, far longer than any one player.

Best case scenario, Davis gets healthy, gets his degree and does his part to make sure future athletes don’t make his mistakes and end up with a serious head injury and their dreams dashed. For Mosquera-Perea, he ends up at a smaller college, maybe a JUCO somewhere, and he works his way to a contract somewhere overseas.

But their time at Indiana is done, and that’s a burden they’ll have to carry on their own. How they do it will serve as a lesson or a cautionary tale for everyone that follows.

Next: Pac-12 Conference: Left Out in the Cold

More from Busting Brackets

Home/Big Ten