Author: Dustin Dopirak

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — It was fitting that it ended here. Indiana’s NCAA Tournament hopes were down to their last legs when the Hoosiers walked into Mackey Arena on Saturday afternoon, but the slim possibility of an upset meant they couldn’t be entirely counted out. Purdue already appeared headed for a No. 4 seed before Saturday’s game, and beating the Boilermakers would mean a Quad 1 win for Indiana that would at least get it back in the range of the bubble before the Big Ten tournament. And maybe, just maybe, some magic in Indianapolis might get the Hoosiers the…

After four straight losses including two to fellow bubble team Michigan State, Indiana is quickly fading away from the NCAA Tournament discussion. On more and more brackets, the Hoosiers (12-13 overall, 7-11 in the Big Ten) are not only out of the field, they’re not one of the first four out either. They’re more likely to be found on the lists of next four out, meaning the distance between the Hoosiers and the field of 68 is getting larger. They’re down to No. 60 in the NET rankings and according to BracketMatrix.com, they’re only in the field in two of…

When Fred Glass hired Archie Miller, he said he believed he could be “a 20-year guy” who would define an era with the Indiana basketball program. He seemed to check every box Glass could possibly ask for. He’d grown up the son of a Western Pennsylvania high school coaching legend and was the sort of player Indiana fans tend to adore — an undersized but heady and gritty point guard and lights-out shooter. He spent eight years as an assistant coach, working under Herb Sendek, Thad Matta and his brother Sean, and six years as a head coach at Dayton…

Race Thompson didn’t have to sit out the first time he got popped in the nose, but the second time might cost him Saturday’s game at Purdue. The Indiana redshirt junior forward was injured before the Hoosiers’ Feb. 24 loss at Rutgers and has been wearing a mask in games since. He took another shot to the nose on Tuesday night against Michigan State and that apparently did enough damage that it required a procedure, according to IU coach Archie Miller on his radio show on Thursday night. “Poor guy fractured his facial area around his nose before the Rutgers…

When he was growing up, D.J. Matthews didn’t know much about Indiana’s football program at all. As a Jacksonville, Fla., native the Hoosiers didn’t resonate with him much and for good reason. The Hoosiers went to exactly one bowl game between 1993 and 2015. “I really do know Indiana University for basketball,” Mathews said in a Zoom press conference with reporters Thursday. “I called it Oladipo’s School. That’s really all I knew about Indiana.” But while he was at Florida State, where he started his career as a four-star recruit in 2017, he started to notice Indiana’s football program and…

Jay Franklin had started compiling a list of critiques for his little brother that he was planning to hit him hard with when he trudged up Assembly Hall’s east grandstand when the game was over. Indiana was going toe-to-toe with a top-10 Iowa team, but for once, sophomore guard Armaan Franklin didn’t have much to do with what was going right. He’d missed all five of his shots in the first half, picked up his fourth foul with 15:43 still to go in the second half, and it took him almost 35 minutes to score a point. Their mother, though,…

Britt Beery, a redshirt junior offensive lineman from Carmel, has entered the NCAA transfer portal, he confirmed on his Twitter account Wednesday. The former all-state defensive lineman at Carmel High School moved to offensive line in 2017 in his first season at Indiana. He redshirted that year and appeared in 23 games in the last three seasons but did not start. The 6-foot-6, 315-pounder earned his SPEA management degree in December. Beery was ranked the No. 9 prospect in the class of 2017 in Indiana by Rivals and the No. 55 strong-side defensive end nationally by 247Sports. To see a…

Archie Miller claimed to have either missed or forgotten the moment. He was asked about what went wrong for his All-Big Ten big man Trayce Jackson-Davis on Tuesday night, and specifically why he seemed to be so visibly upset during a huddle during the under-12 media timeout in the second half. “I don’t remember the incident you’re talking about,” Miller said. But the Big Ten Network cameras caught it, so it will be much more difficult for Indiana fans to forget. For the moment it’s impossible to know exactly what Jackson-Davis said and why and to whom because it was…

At some point, strength of schedule and the long coattails of the Big Ten cease to be enough to carry a team without enough wins to an NCAA Tournament berth, and if the experts are to be believed, Indiana has hit that point. It’s odd, perhaps, that the Hoosiers’ least surprising loss of the season appears to the the one that has pushed them over the edge. But it’s more the combination of Saturday’s loss to No. 3 Michigan along with collapses against Rutgers last Wednesday and at home against Michigan State the previous Saturday that have driven the Hoosiers…

Joey Brunk wasn’t ready for closure yet. Indiana’s fifth-year senior center hasn’t played and apparently won’t play in a basketball game this season. He hasn’t decided yet if he wants to return to Indiana to play next season. But he isn’t sure that he won’t, and he didn’t participate in Senior Day festivities surrounding Indiana’s loss at home against Michigan on Saturday because he felt like that would be sending the message that he was in fact finished. “I chose not to participate because I felt if I participated, that’s kind of a closure deal for myself, how I felt,”…