Mike Woodson is facing reality.
He entered the job as Indiana’s head men’s basketball coach in 2021 confident in his coaching abilities. He’d experienced both success and failure at the NBA level, and thought that experience could pay dividends and help him thrive in the collegiate ranks.
He experienced some success in his first two years in Bloomington, leading IU to back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances for the first time in five years. But in just about every way, his third season has been an unmitigated disaster. Saturday’s 83-74 loss to Penn State only further perpetuated that situation.
The Hoosiers faced an uphill battle entering February to reach any postseason tournament, and they’ve since gone 1-5. And Woodson appears to be realizing his coaching abilities have limits.
“I’m upset with the way we played, the way I’ve coached this team this whole season. We’ve lost more games at home than we’ve lost in the last two years. And that’s just not good,” Woodson said after the Penn State game. “I’ve always felt I could take any team and go win with them. We’ve had our struggles this year.”
It’s unfair to Woodson to completely ignore the last two seasons when discussing what’s gone wrong this year. He took over in Bloomington when the program was in a bleak state in spring 2021. Indiana hadn’t reached the NCAA Tournament in five years, and made the NIT in just two of those five years (although IU would have played in the NIT or NCAA Tournament in 2020, had the postseason not been canceled).
When Woodson became head coach, IU was as starved for men’s basketball success as it’s been at any point in 50 years. He came in, coached Trayce Jackson-Davis into an All-American, and broke the program’s NCAA Tournament slump. The 2022-23 campaign was one of Indiana’s six winningest seasons since 2000.
But this season, the wheels are falling off. Indiana’s roster had potential entering the year, and there’s been some individual success. Malik Reneau and Kel’el Ware have both enjoyed nice seasons. But on the whole, IU’s roster has proven to be a group of pieces that doesn’t fit well together, and one with potential far exceeding production.
The team hasn’t tangibly improved through the season. Indiana has struggled from the free-throw line for most of the season, and it’s gotten worse later in the season. After shooting 14 of 25 at the foul line on Saturday, IU’s free-throw percentage is down to 65.3 percent — a bottom-25 clip in the country.
And the Hoosiers are just as poor at 3-point shooting as they were in November. They went 2 for 15 from beyond the arc in State College, and Mackenzie Mgbako didn’t knock down their first triple until less than two minutes remained in the game.
“We’re getting good looks (from 3-point range). We’re getting a lot of good looks. I just think it’s from a mental standpoint. I’ve got to get them where they’re comfortable just making them, because we haven’t made them this season. We’ve had our ups and downs in stretches where some nights we have made them, but for the most part, we have not made them,” Woodson said. “The free throws is another big problem. We just have struggled to make free throws. Something we work on every day. We shoot threes every day. Guys just got to come in and feel good about themselves and make them.”
That’s one of the biggest differences between the NBA and college games. NBA players are more developed, both physically and mentally. The worst players on NBA teams would still be the best players on most college teams.
So Woodson is working with players far lower in quality than he was used to with the Atlanta Hawks and New York Knicks. When he expresses disbelief over IU’s bad 3-point and free-throw shooting and says he’s never seen anything like it in his career, it’s because very few teams in NBA history have ever shot this poorly.
This is his third season in Bloomington, so he’s had time to get acclimated to the differences between college and NBA. The Hoosiers performed better at the foul line in Woodson’s first two years, but it still wasn’t good — they finished 205th in the country in free-throw percentage last season and 233rd in 2021-22.
Woodson’s roster-building has been part of the problem. IU has been among the lowest-volume 3-point shooting teams in the country the last three years — partly because of Jackson-Davis being the focal point of the first two teams, but also because Indiana just hasn’t had enough shooters over the last three years.
But Woodson has regularly said the shooting issues are as much, if not more, mental than anything else. And for whatever reason, he’s had trouble getting his players in a better headspace to turn things around.
Those sorts of issues bleed into other areas of the game, and it’s part of the reason why IU has struggled so much this year.
“I think all coaches, when they coach, they think they can win. And I’ve struggled with this team this year,” Woodson said. “I won’t blame my players. I’ll always put it on Mike Woodson. That’s how it should be. I’m a big boy, and we’ll try to continue to grow this thing and figure it out. But we’ve still got a lot of work on our hands when it comes to our basketball team.”
Indiana is now 0-5 on the season against Northwestern, Nebraska, and Penn State. Throughout Woodson’s three-year tenure, the Hoosiers are 4-11 against those three schools.
Nuance is required with statistics like those — the Wildcats are in a relative golden age for their program, the Nittany Lions won an NCAA Tournament game last year, and the Cornhuskers are a threat to do that this year.
But struggling against those programs that historically bring up the rear in the Big Ten speaks volumes in Bloomington. It exemplifies the issue the Hoosiers have — they took steps forward the last two years, but they’ve taken several steps back this year. And that’s a difficult way to sustain progress.
For complete coverage of IU basketball, GO HERE.
The Daily Hoosier –“Where Indiana fans assemble when they’re not at Assembly”
- Find us on Facebook: thedailyhoosier
- You can follow us on Twitter: @daily_hoosier
- Seven ways to support completely free IU coverage at no cost to you.
