I couldn’t bring myself to read the article in my e-mail about IU’s loss to Minnesota last night until just now, when I got home from work; and what I found when I read the article is that Verdell Jones III was apparently booed by the fans last night at the Assembly Hall. That ain’t even close to cool. Sure, dude had an off night—maybe the mother of all off nights—and didn’t score a point. The article says that Jones III got booed when he came back into the game with less than a minute to play—how’s that supposed to make him feel when it’s crunch time and he’s a senior whose best moment of the night might be the last sixty seconds of the game?
I didn’t see the game, or even listen to it on the radio, so I don’t know how the whole thing went down, nor what Jones III might have had the chance to do in that last minute; but I just don’t see how you boo the guy, especially when the game is close and you still have the chance to win. The season is barely half over, and this remarkable Indiana team has already given us so much more than even the biggest believers thought was possible when the season started. They hung the first loss of the season on then-#1 Kentucky, on what might have been the most dramatic shot in Indiana basketball since Keith Smart drained a baseline runner to win the national championship over Syracuse in 1987; they gutted out a win over then-#2 Ohio State, to become the first Indiana team ever to beat both a #1 and a #2 in the same season; and they’ve even done the little things that aren’t so sexy, like winning road games—something they did not do very often during Tom Crean’s first three seasons as Indiana’s head coach.
They play hard every night, but this is the Big Ten, kids; and for all of their achievements, this remains an Indiana team that is, in many ways, dramatically overachieving. They’re going to have their off nights. They’re going to lose games. Did I mention this is the Big Ten, maybe the deepest conference in the country? It also needs to be noted that Minnesota, despite the fact that they had not won a league game before last night, lost their first three league games by a combined 16 points—and Illinois needed two overtimes to beat the Gophers, in Champaign. Minnesota only lost to Michigan, in Ann Arbor, by 5. They were 12-1 before opening league play, and that included back-to-back wins over Virginia Tech and USC. Much as I hate to see Indiana lose, Minnesota was due for that first league win—and Indiana was probably due for a loss at home.
And there will be more losses. Some of them will be at home. Indiana has come a long way from the rock bottom they found themselves in after the Kelvin Sampson tornado blew through; and Tom Crean has done what can only be described as an amazing job picking up the pieces and bringing Indiana basketball back to national prominence, where it had stood proudly for so many years under Bob Knight; but there is still a long way to go, and there are going to be bumps along the way, off nights for everyone, from seniors like Jones III to freshmen like Cody Zeller.
But don’t boo them. These guys deserve way better than that, especially the guys like Verdell Jones III, who have been around for the entirety of the post-Sampson era. It’s those guys who have played hard, and fought, and hustled to get Indiana back to being the kind of place where kids like Cody Zeller want to come to play basketball. He could have followed his brother Tyler to North Carolina, one of those programs that never seems to have an off year. My buddy Scott likes to say of those kinds of programs that they don’t rebuild—they reload. I don’t know if Indiana is ever going to be that kind of program again, but thanks to guys like Jones III, who kept on fighting even when the losses were coming in droves, Indiana is…well…we’re back, baby!
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