PTI's Michael Wilbon: 'Wouldn't Have Fired' Archie Miller at Indiana

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The national media, which has largely ignored Indiana basketball during the past four years of the Archie Miller era, jumped in on his firing on Monday.

Two prominent voices on ESPN with Big Ten loyalties, Michael Wilbon (Northwestern) and Scott Van Pelt (Maryland), didn't think it was right for Indiana to fire Miller.

During his PTI show with Tony Kornheiser, Wilbon thought it was wrong to pull the trigger on Miller this year, with all that's going on, and then made a painful comparison between Indiana basketball and Nebraska football.

"I wouldn't have fired Archie Miller this season because who the hell can tell anything about this season. Indiana sort of has that complex about basketball and that sense of superiority that a place like Nebraska had about football when they would fire a successful coach.

"Indiana, I guess they think that Coach Knight is walking through that door. He's not. Mike Davis got him to the finals, Tom Crean got them to the Sweet 16 three times, so I guess Indiana can play basketball still, I'm not saying they've fallen off the earth, but I don't feel good about it. Let's see if they can get somebody to take them where they used to be.

Wilbon, who was a student at Northwestern from 1976-80 the same time I was at Indiana, knows a lot about bad Big Ten basketball, so he does pay attention. Kornheiser, a longtime colleague of Wilbon's at the Washington Post and PTI, understood the sense of entitlement a bit more at Indiana, and weighed in on the question of whether Miller "deserved'' to be fired.

"Deserve is a very hard word to quantify. He was there four years and he never made the NCAA tournament,'' Kornheiser said. "If you say this is what we're here for, that this is a basketball and this is us, then I can understand it.

"They fired Mike Davis who went to the finals, they fired Tom Crean, who went to three Sweet 16s, and they fired Kelvin Sampson, there was a scandal there, and I bet they wish he was still there. I feel bad for Archie Miller but what Indiana is saying is that if you can't win, and win without cheating, we've got no time for you. I understand it. It's Indiana, it's not Binghamton.''

Miller went 67-56 during his four years at Indiana, and never had a winning season in the Big Ten. He also never played in the NCAA Tournament.

Later in the evening on his SportsCenter segment, Scott Van Pelt went big picture on the firing, too, wondering if the Indiana fan base was getting a bit delusional.

"I can't imagine that someone is ponying up $10 million to buy Miller out unless Indiana has already got their guy lined up, but remember that there were a lot of people, including me, that thought Miller was going to be that guy,'' Van Pelt said. "He arrived from Dayton coming off four straight tournament appearances, including an Elite Eight, but he was supposed to be the home run hire.

"I don't think there's a reasonable person who follows college basketball closely who doesn't believe this is a massive job inside the sport, but what I don't know is how reasonable the IU faithful are about what they are now within that game. Since the title game in 2002, when they made that title game appearance against Maryland, the Hoosiers have been more than twice as likely to miss the tournament entirely than they are to make the Sweet 16, and that is as far as they got.

"Now compare that to the programs with which they've been historically grouped, and it does not compare. And in a bizarre twist, Assembly Hall is going to be filled in the coming weeks with teams that did qualify for the tournament that the Hoosiers have won five times, but that last one was 1987, and that was a long time ago.''