Indiana’s Disastrous Late-Season Collapse Pushes Hoosiers Out of a March Madness Bid

CHICAGO — Most teams enter college basketball’s conference tournament week looking to play their way into the NCAA tournament.

Indiana spent Wednesday night playing its way out.

After a 13-point loss in a must-win game to Northwestern in its first game at the Big Ten tournament, the Hoosiers may as well make other plans for Selection Sunday. While theoretically not impossible the Hoosiers could get a miracle, they project to be a handful of spots from the cut line as of Thursday morning with the field likely to only shrink thanks to bid stealers in recent days. And even if Indiana somehow does sneak in, it will only be because of the futility of other bubble teams, not anything Indiana did while losing six of seven down the stretch. Year 1 under Darian DeVries will be in a very similar place to Mike Woodson’s last in Bloomington, Ind., which isn’t a comparison anyone in Bloomington wants to hear.

This was a woefully constructed roster, with whiffs at point guard and in the frontcourt on key portal spots. Davidson transfer forward Reed Bailey was an All–Atlantic 10 guy whose game didn’t translate. Tayton Conerway was brought in to solve the point guard position after winning Sun Belt Player of the Year at Troy and flopped. DeVries’s son Tucker DeVries and star scorer Lamar Wilkerson kept the Hoosiers in the picture for much of the season, but the flaws were simply too big to overcome. New executive director of basketball Ryan Carr comes with near-universal good reviews from his time with the Indiana Pacers, and his roster-building prowess is needed as soon as possible especially with Wilkerson and DeVries graduating. This figures to be close to a full reset in the spring. Freshman Trent Sisley seems likely to be a keeper, and the Hoosiers could also bring back shooting wing Nick Dorn, but it’s hard to imagine much continuity otherwise.

But flaws and all, watching this late-season implosion and the lack of fight that came with it still has to be jarring for Hoosiers fans, especially given the stakes at play. Since beating Oregon on Feb. 9 to get to 8–6 in Big Ten play, the results have been astonishingly bad: boat-raced by Illinois and Purdue, blown second-half lead at home against Northwestern, handled by Michigan State and Ohio State with a win over Minnesota in between … and now this.

In the game’s final 29 minutes, Northwestern outscored a Hoosiers team with everything to play for by 23 points. Indiana was helpless defensively against Nick Martinelli and Jake West, and Indiana’s offense outside of Wilkerson was often directionless. But perhaps most jarring was how much less physical Indiana looked than Northwestern, especially considering the Wildcats were without starting center Arrinten Page in the game. It was an all-too-familiar script of late, even with the Hoosiers attempting to go bigger by playing Bailey and Sam Alexis together for long stretches. That was part of Darian DeVries’s postmortem of sorts on a season that flamed out late, making clear he knows what Carr and he need to address this spring while building the roster.

Indiana guard Tayton Conerway brings the ball up court against Northwestern guard Jayden Reid. | Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

“Developing more depth and having more size and physicality for this league is going to be critical,” Darian DeVries said. “That was something we just didn’t have a lot of to sustain there over a 20-game league schedule. So that’s certainly something we have to prioritize just to give us a better chance on the interior to rebound, post and be able to get guys in and out and sub.”

But functionally, unless the selection committee surprises everyone and puts in a Hoosiers team for which the term “limped to the finish” would be generous in the field, this goes down as a Year 1 for DeVries without much in terms of things to build on. There’s no momentum from an NCAA tournament berth, no real returners of serious note, and a good-not-great high school class that might help a bit early but not change the game.

“Especially with the amount of seniors we had, we all came here to lay the groundwork for this program and the culture, really set the tone,” Tucker DeVries said. “But down the stretch of the season [we] just weren’t able to capitalize on some of the opportunities we had. It really sucks that none of us are really going to get to put this uniform on again, at least for a regular season or this tournament … it’s really frustrating.”

Is a degree of patience justified? Of course, though Hoosier fans may well be spoiled by Curt Cignetti’s turnaround on the gridiron to expect immediate brilliance. But there’s a line between patience and reasonable expectations, and it was far from unreasonable to expect a team that spent $10 million or more on its roster (a budget that put them at least in the top third of the Big Ten) could at least muscle its way to the NCAA tournament. That’s especially true given where the Hoosiers sat just a month ago at this time, a bid well within their grasp. Even just beating Northwestern twice would likely have been enough to make the tournament, check the box and start building the future.

The fact even that wasn’t attainable tells you just how far away the Hoosiers are from serious Big Ten contention … and with that, how much pressure DeVries and his new partner-in-crime Carr have to flip the script this spring.

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