My Two Cents: When Is the Appropriate Ending for the Mike Woodson Era at Indiana?
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — In a few weeks, Indiana basketball coach Mike Woodson turns 66 years old. His birthday is March 24, and it's fairly likely that Indiana's disappointing 2023-24 basketball season will be over by then.
I turn 66 this year, too. It's been a fun 45-year run doing what I love, but I find it harder and harder to work 100-hour weeks and 360-day years. I'm starting to plan for that finish line, somewhere down the road, and I often wonder if Woodson does the same kind of planning and thinking.
So, I asked him. Point blank.
As the final question of his Tuesday morning press conference, I asked him how long he wanted to keep coaching at Indiana, or if he had had enough.
He gave a very honest, very forthright answer.
“I came back to try to put this team in the best position possible. I’m going to continue to do that,'' said Woodson, the former Indiana great who's wrapping up his third season as the head coach of the Hoosiers. "I’m almost 66, but I feel good and I still move around and I think that I still think well in terms of the game and I still think I can teach the game.
"I don’t know, there are coaches that are coaching into their 70s. I don’t know if that’s something I’ll do, I don’t know. But at this point, I’ll take it a day at a time, a year at a time. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, guys. I’m just not. So I’m going to continue to build this team and try to put this team in the best position possible and see where it leads us.”
Woodson — a great player at Indiana under Bob Knight from 1976 to 1980 — returned to Indiana with much fanfare in the spring of 2021 after four years of failure under Archie Miller, who never made the NCAA Tournament and never had a winning record in the Big Ten.
Woodson ended Indiana's six-year NCAA tourney absence in his first year, beating Wyoming before losing to Saint Mary's. They made the NCAAs again last year as a No. 4 seed, beating Kent State before losing to Final Four-bound No. 5 seed Miami in the second round.
Woodson won 44 games in his first two years, more than EVERY Indiana coach in their first two season outside of Mike Davis, who won 46 in 2000-02. (Bob Knight, if you're curious, won 39 total games in his first two years in 1971-73.)
This year, though, has spun off the rails. The Hoosiers are 14-11 and just 6-8 in the Big Ten. They're better than this, and there is no question that they've underachieved. But there are reasons why, and a lot of them, really. But it's been bad enough for fans to question how much longer Woodson should be around.
Indiana has a very good front line in Kel'el Ware, Malik Reneau and Mackenzie Mgbako, who all have future-pro skills. But they also all have holes in their games, and none of them are NBA ready. Those failures have had something to do with those 11 losses so far.
There's a wide swath of Indiana's fan base that wants Woodson gone. They'd wish he would retire or — even worse — get fired.
Based on what Woodson said Tuesday, he's not about to quit. And it's unlikely that he gets fired. Woodson arrived wanting to hang another banner in Assembly Hall. That's not happening this year, and next year if the sixth miracle happened, he'd be past his 67th birthday.
Jim Calhoun won an NCAA title at Connecticut in 2011 and age 68, and Mike Krzyzewski was 67 when he won his last title at Duke in 2015.
So there's very little history of guys winning in their late 60s. Closer to home, it's easy to see examples of great coaches who simply burn out by then and walk away.
Bob Knight, Woodson's former coach and long-time mentor who passed away last November at age 83, turned 64 years old just prior to the 2004-05 season at Texas Tech. During that 2005 season, he went 22-11 and won NCAA Tournament games against UCLA and Gonzaga as a No. 6 seed before losing to West Virginia in the regional semifinals.
He went 15-17 the following year, and then 21-13 in 2007, losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. In the middle of the following season, he quit. Just walked away.
On the age timeline, that's next year for Woodson.
For all the angst currently swirling around the fan base, Woodson did make Trayce Jackson-Davis a better player. That's not me saying that — that's Trayce, who's having a good rookie season with the NBA's Golden State Warriors after finishing No. 3 on Indiana's all-time scoring list, and No. 1 rebounder and shot blocker. He signed a four-year deal worth $7.6 million. That's good work when you can get it.
He also helped turn Jalen Hood-Schifino into an NBA player after just one season. He was not supposed to be a one-and-done player. He wasn't a first-round pick on any preseason mock drafts, but he worked his way up there and wound up being drafted No. 17 overall by the Los Angeles Lakers. His four-year deal is worth just shy of $18 million. Also very good cash.
They both got dramatically better on Woodson's watch.
Throw in Race Thompson and Miller Kopp running out of eligibility and Tamar Bates, Jordan Geronimo and Logan Duncomb transferring, and the Hoosiers were due for a major roster overhaul this season. They've had serious growing pains with so many new faces, and it's shown, especially in the close, tight games that Indiana rarely wins this season. This Indiana team under Woodson is not as good as the sum of its parts.
Losing Hood-Schifino was huge, and unexpected, and Woodson talked that for the first time on Tuesday, as well. Hood-Schifinio's rapid development was a bit surprising, so much so that Matt Painter joked about it a few weeks ago, saying that Hood-Schifino's 35-point game against Purdue vaulted him into the NBA overnight.
He wasn't wrong.
This current Indiana team is dramatically different — and at least five wins better — if Hood-Schifino had stayed. I don't think that's an exaggeration. A 19-6 record sounds way better than 14-11, doesn't it?
All this ''Fire Woodson'' talk would have never started if Jalen had stayed. Woodson admitted Tuesday he never expected to Hood-Schifino to leave so soon, and it's had a massive ripple effect on Indiana's guard play this season. Xavier Johnson has been injured again for a second straight year — he's only played in 14 games after foot and elbow injuries — and freshman Gabe Cupps has been thrown into the fire far earlier than anyone would have liked.
"When I recruited Gabe, the deal was everyone thought Jalen wouldn't be a one and done. That was the whole deal,'' Woodson said. "You had X and you knew Gabe would come in and probably be a third point guard behind two veteran guys, Jalen being a sophomore now.
"When we knew Jalen was leaving, we desperately tried to find a back up point guard, starting point guard, to go along with Xavier and (Trey) Galloway. So we explored, we talked to different guys, and guys went other places based on they thought that was a better fit.''
Woodson wants to win here, more than anything. He remembers the past, and wants that future. Can he? That's the big question. On his watch, things have been better. This year, though, has been a disaster and that's on his watch, too.
The question now is how quickly it can all be fixed. It's going to take winning the Big Ten Tournament now to make the big dance, and that seems very unlikely. Woodson said ''we need to win them all,'' when talking about the final six games of the regular season. That also seems like a long shot.'
So that takes us into next year. He's not quitting, and he made that very clear when I asked him on Tuesday. So it's about loading this team with as much talent as possible.
You know me, and I like to think positive. I would love to see Kel'el Ware, Malik Reneau and Mackenzie Mgbako come back together for another year. (Yeah, I know, that's the next set of questions to ask.) I'd love to see Trey Galloway come back for a fifth season and I would really love to see how recruit Liam McNeely can mesh with these guys, and be the shooter this group lacks so much.
Have that core, then attack the transfer portal hard. Add a few more high school 2024 pieces, too.
This was a top-50 team in the preseason, and I thought they would be better. I was wrong. Very wrong I would like to think another year of improvement would be interesting to see in 2024-25. I'd love to see how good they could be.
We'll be 66 then, Woodson and I, and the clock will be ticking. That will be three years down for him, and how many more to go?
I guess we'll just have to take that one day — and one year — at a time.
