Actually, I take that back. Certain words can express my excitement, such as the ones written by Dana O’Neil (thanks @ryancorazza) a few days back at ESPN.com.

Since I don’t have much time today for writing, I will give you an excerpt, a link to her story, and then some other intriguing Friday afternoon links.

I love the NFL and the MLB playoffs, but I will always be a college basketball fan at heart. I’m ready for Year Two of the Tom Crean Era (i.e. The Purge Kelvin Sampson From the Memories of All IU Fans Era) and it cannot get here soon enough.

So why bother? Why sign on with a program that is just laying the first bricks of rebuilding?

“We’re going to hang banners and win awards before we leave here,” Elston said. “But we’re also going to change the program. We’re going to be the team people talk about for a long time, the ones that brought Indiana back. That’s something a lot of people don’t get the chance to do.”

IU’s fresh faces offer hope for fans — (Dana O’Neil, ESPN)

Here is one more excerpt to whet IU fans’ appetites for the coming season(s):

But when Hoosiers coach Tom Crean went out to find the pieces to begin rebuilding his roundball phoenix, he targeted a certain kind of kid.

OK, for starters, he wanted good players. That was helpful, and he got them. Creek played in the Reebok All-American game; Watford is listed as No. 26 in the ESPNU top 100; Hulls was an Indiana Mr. Basketball.

More than that, Crean wanted kids with strong character, the kind who wouldn’t hang their heads when things got tough and wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the expectations of a fan base patiently waiting to get back to the business of winning.

It took just one weekend’s worth of practice to assure Crean he has the right guys.

I am pumped already. No, I am not expecting miracles this season. I would be satisfied with a .500 record after last season’s debacle, with any postseason play a success. The expectations obviously increase for next season, Year 3 of the Crean Era, but for this year I just want to see something that resembles IU basketball again. The kids played their hearts out last year and I appreciated every second of their effort, but the talent just wasn’t there.

Coach Crean is bringing the talent back to Bloomington. The wins should follow.

In other basketball news, everyone’s favorite NBA writer has a new NBA column out. Read it while you’re shirking your work responsibilities (you know you are!) this afternoon:

• Welcome to the NBA Preview, Part 1
• Welcome to the NBA Preview, Part 2

According to an article published tonight on IndyStar.com entired “Gordon: Drug Use Wrecked IU Season”, Eric Gordon said that a faction of players on Indiana’s 2007-08 team used drugs and created a separation among the team. The comments came during Gordon’s first visit back to the Hoosier State as an NBA player.

Gordon explained that he was not a member of the clique of players who were into drugs, and neither was D.J. White nor the players still at IU, which includes only Kyle Taber and Brett Finkelmeier. He said that former head coach Kelvin Sampson tried to stop the drug use, but “was just so focused on basketball and winning and everything.”

IU fans will remember a number of suspensions that were handed down by Kelvin Sampson last season. The reasons for the suspension, if I remember correctly, were never confirmed; and the rumor mill was ablaze with rumors that it was either grades, or more likely, drug use that caused the suspensions.

In a quote that could not be more indicative of what many IU fans saw on the court last year, Gordon said:

“Sometimes it felt like it wasn’t even a real basketball team because of all the turmoil that went on. I was just thinking about that the other day. It was so crazy that all that stuff threw off a good season and made it a waste, basically. It was really tough for us to be around each other all the time off the court because we were so separate.”

In another sad and telling quote, the IndyStar article quotes Indianapolis North Central High School basketball coach Doug Mitchell, who had three players on IU’s team last year including Eric Gordon. Mitchell said, “”I’m extremely disappointed in what appears to have been the lack of monitoring and supervision of the players’ behaviors.”

So apparently Kelvin Sampson tried to stop it, but, at least according to Mitchell, did not exercise enough oversight of the activities of his players. Hmm, sounds familiar. I think lack of oversight was basically an epidemic that plagued Indiana’s entire basketball program and athletic department last year.

I don’t want to get into quoting rumors and trying to name names in terms of who might have been involved in the drug use on last year’s team. All I will say is that a number of players who had eligibility remaining all left the program in the wake of Kelvin Sampson being fired. Those players include Jordan Crawford, Jamarcus Ellis, DeAndre Thomas, Eli Holman, and Armon Bassett. All transferred to new schools before the start of this season.

Armon Bassett transfered to UAB to play for the coach who recruited him to Indiana Mike Davis. Recently, Bassett left UAB among a swirl of controversy. The “official” stated reason for his departure, according to another IndyStar article I read, was to tend a family matter. However, members of a popular UAB basketball forum certainly are convinced, as you can read here. Bassett is one of four players who will not be eligible to play for Mike Davis at UAB in the second semester of this season. I mention this only because many IU fans are convinced that the seeds for the 2007 debacle in Bloomington were planted by Mike Davis, Kelvin Sampson’s predecessor.

I got to know Mike Davis a little bit personally during my time at IU, and found him to be a wonderfully nice and engaging man, so I don’t want to get into drudging up the past and blaming him for IU’s failures. But discipline in the IU basketball program has certainly been on the decline since the departure of Bob Knight (as has the consistency of the play on the floor), and Mike Davis has done nothing at UAB to assuage the concerns of many IU and UAB fans that he runs something less than a tight ship.

I appreciate the remarks of Eric Gordon, if for no other reason than it provides a little bit more closure to the horror of last season. Never before has a team I love and root for pulled the rug out from under me like last year’s IU team. From 17-1 and a top-10 ranking to first round exits in the Big Ten and NCAA Tourney, and then a cloud of controversy all off-season. And Gordon was not really breaking any news — all IU fans “knew” that drug use was a problem on last year’s team. But in a way, it is nice to have some confirmation and something a little more concrete as to why the team fell apart so quickly.

And the memories of last season, and of the end of the Mike Davis and Kelvin Sampson eras, only make me more excited about what we have going on now in Bloomington — despite the team’s 5-5 record this year and underwhelming collection of talent. What we do have is a fantastic, capable, and passionate coach in Tom Crean who is getting every ounce of potential out of an undermanned team filled with guys who are displaying oversized hearts every time out. I don’t know how many games we will win this year, but we are finally building a foundation that can lead to long term success at IU again. And that is something that has been missing for a while, really since the 1993 season — which was my favorite sports team of all time, and featured an immensely talented group of players who played together, with heart, and exhibited discipline in every aspect.

I continue to feel bad for Eric Gordon, in that he took so much heat for his decision to spurn his original commitment to Illinois and play for a snake like Kelvin Sampson. So much of the blame for last season got heaped on Gordon during the season, despite the fact that he was just a freshman, playing with a bum wrist, and embroiled in a tumultuous team situation with a coach who could not control it, or who did not really want to. I do think that as more stuff like his admission of the drug use on last year’s team comes to the surface, IU fans will retroactively adjust their impression of Eric Gordon and remember him more for the immense talent he displayed and the great individual season he gave us.

I feel bad for D.J. White too, one of my all-time favorite Hoosiers. He stuck it out in Bloomington through thick and thin and became a dominant player as a senior. He deserved to go out better than he did.

But most of all, I just feel a tremendous level of anger towards Kelvin Sampson and the players who did not appreciate the privilege of wearing the Cream and Crimson. I would have given anything to wear the candy-stripe warm up pants and play at Assembly Hall, and I would have done everything possible to honor the players, coaches, and fans who built the amazing tradition that IU basketball has. Unfortunately, Kelvin Sampson enabled a group of players who had no business joining the IU family, and will forever be Public Enemy #1 in Bloomington. It is a title that is well deserved and that he will never relinquish.

Kudos to Eric Gordon for being strong enough to be honest about his experience at IU last year. Sure, it’s old news; but it’s one more layer of closure on the darkest era in the history of IU, one of the brightest stars
in the grand tradition of college basketball.

And thankfully, the current steward of that great IU tradition, Tom Crean and Crimson, appears to hold it in the proper esteem; and, most importantly, appears to have the integrity, coaching acumen, and leadership ability to return IU to prominence.

According to ESPN.com, the NCAA has decided to not to place a postseason ban on Indiana but will uphold the self-imposed penalties that Indiana levied against itself in the wake of the Kelvin Sampson phone call scandal that rocked the program last year. Indiana will received three years’ probation.

Kelvin Sampson, however, has received one of the stiffest penalties ever levied against an individual by the NCAA: a five year show-cause penalty, that will essentially ban Kelvin Sampson from coaching in college basketball for the next half-decade. The show-cause means that if someone wants to hire Kelvin Sampson, they will have to appeal to the NCAA to do so. I cannot fathom a set of circumstances in which the NCAA would allow Sampson back on the sidelines before the course of his punishment is up.

There is a 4:00 pm news conference scheduled by the NCAA in which they will officially announce the ruling.

The irony of the no postseason ban, of course, is that it is quite likely the Hoosiers will not be challenging for a postseason berth this season anyway. I am excited by Tom Crean, and have enjoyed watching the Hoosiers’ first three games, but IU fans everywhere understand that this will be a trying season. Crean basically had a couple of months to build a team around the only two returning players: former walkons Kyle Taber and Ryan Finkelmeier.

In my opinion, any win over 10 is a bonus this year — though I definitely think it’s possible. This team already seems to be taking on the personality of its coach in playing hard, being tough, and doing everything with enthusiasm. That is exactly what we need with such bleak hope for W/L success in 2008. Luckily, the foundation is already being laid for success in 2009.

My favorite part about today’s story is the five-year penalty against Kelvin Sampson. I don’t hate many people, but I hate Kelvin Sampson. Indiana has no one to blame but itself for hiring Sampson after he committed similar violations at Oklahoma; but Sampson is the one who took a giant dump all over the basketball program that I have loved since I was a kid, and I will forever hold a grudge against him for how far into the depths he forced IU basketball to plummet. It still sickens me to think about the chants of “Kel-vin Samp-son” that used to emanate loudly from the cheering IU faithful in Assembly Hall. We were so sure that Kelvin Sampson would lead us back to national prominence. And I was cheering the same at home right along with them. It literally makes me want to just stop writing and go vomit.

None of us realized that to get Eric Gordon and get back into the top-10 we would have to sacrifice the soul of the program we loved so much. No one would have made that deal if we hadn’t been forced to enter into fraudulently. And that sad fact is just as much the fault of Adam Herbert and the idiots who hired Kelvin Sampson as it is Sampson’s. He was a snake in the grass at Oklahoma, and he was a snake in the grass at IU. Oklahoma got fooled; unfortunately my beloved Indiana Hoosiers got exactly what they deserved, thanks to the inept people making decisions at the top.

Hopefully, this ruling will close the ugliest chapter in the history of IU basketball. We know have an excited and (God I hope) ethical coach on the sidelines who will do things the right, the IU way. We may not win many games this year, but I do believe that we will build a foundation for next season and for many to come after that.

Just stay up in Milwaukee Kelvin, you dirty, lying turd of a man. I curse the day you stepped foot in Bloomington and hope that you used some of your $750,000 buyout and six-figure NBA salary to buy a clue and some integrity.

Oh wait, those things can’t really be bought. You either have them or you don’t.

I wish that Indiana had realized this when they hired you. At least know we have someone who has both to clean up the mess you left.

(Stay tuned to the Indiana Hoosiers News Page for the latest updates regarding the NCAA ruling and how the Hoosiers are doing out in Maui.)

[tags]indiana hoosiers, kelvin sampson, ncaa, college basketball[/tags]