This season’s greatest failure would be for IU basketball to allow it to happen again

BLOOMINGTON – A frustrating team met what will probably be cast to history as the beginning of its frustrating end Saturday, in IU's 85-71 home loss to Penn State that was every bit as disastrous as it sounds.

It would be less accurate to say the 2023-24 basketball season slammed into a proverbial wall, in this program’s third-straight loss to the Nittany Lions, than it would be to say that season never gathered meaningful momentum to begin with. The Hoosiers (13-9, 5-6) started the season young, soft and underformed, and they’ve never really become anything more than that since.

A four-point halftime lead was reversed in a matter of minutes in this game, Penn State starting the second frame on a 22-7 run and never relenting. Not for the first time this winter, Indiana buckled rather than pushing back.

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“Second half, we were so flat coming out,” IU coach Mike Woodson said. “I want more fire from my guys. They didn’t fight the second half. That’s kind of disappointing.”

Saturday’s loss puts this season firmly on course to miss the NCAA tournament for the first time in Woodson’s tenure, though it was already pointed in that direction to begin with. What matters now will be what IU learns — or doesn’t — from the rest of it.

Defeat in the manner handed out by Penn State just underscored this team’s many weaknesses and failings.

The Nittany Lions (11-11, 5-6) did a little bit of everything. They undercut what had been a strength, hitting 12 3s against what was previously the best 3-point defense in the league in Big Ten play. They turned IU’s two-big lineups around, countering with quickness Indiana declined to match. Five Penn State players scored in double figures.

And facing a team without its sixth-year point guard due to injury, the Nittany Lions turned up coach Mike Rhoades’ preferred pressure, running out a 1-2-2 press with reigning Atlantic 10 defensive player of the year Ace Baldwin the tip of the spear. By game’s end, Penn State had scored 17 points off 13 IU turnovers, Baldwin had 22 points all his own, to go with eight assists, and the last 10 minutes of a game the Hoosiers had led by double digits at home multiple times in the first half were a procession for the visitors.

“They were just playing harder than us,” senior guard Trey Galloway said.

That line was as commendable in its honesty as it was damning in its assessment.

Galloway, one of Indiana’s two captains, did his best to wear the blame where he could postgame Saturday. Kel’el Ware, scorer of a game-high 25 points, sat next to Galloway postgame and yet answered no questions, not because Ware wouldn’t engage with them but because Galloway effectively refused to make him face any.

It was as if Galloway had decided that today, he would answer for his team’s failings. But the final score Saturday served as a reminder no one could shoulder that load alone.

Like Galloway, Woodson will not stop fighting for this season. That’s fine. They shouldn’t be expected to do any less.

Barring a tremendous course correction, that fight will be lost. Saturday effectively closed any even semi-reasonable path to the NCAA tournament for this team, if one existed to begin with.

When the end arrives — and it is about to start coming into view — Woodson will reach what now becomes the critical juncture of this season.

His first two years did not anoint Woodson’s his alma mater’s savior. A difficult third does not automatically make his tenure a failure. There must always be room for the occasional down season, and more fundamentally for nuance.

So long as lessons are emphatically learned. That will be the legacy of this season.

If Indiana takes the right lessons from this, then there will have been an extent to which it benefitted the Hoosiers long term. But that is the minimum requirement now. This season’s greatest failure would be to allow it to happen again.

The Hoosiers are far too reliant on their two-big lineups.

They don’t get enough impact — in shooting, scoring, game management and on defense — from their guard rotation.

They’re too soft on the glass for how big they play.

Their youth has not been mitigated by individual or collective toughness.

Scoring droughts are too common, and too pronounced.

And it is long past time this program learned to shoot 3s with both accuracy and volume again.

Some of this can be solved through player development. The arrival of 5-star wing Liam McNeeley from Montverde (Fla.) Academy should at least in theory help address that last point. And for a program with considerable resources in the name, image and likeness space, the transfer portal must yield serious results for the Hoosiers come spring.

More broadly, Woodson and his staff must recognize why this season didn’t so much go off the rails as it never even got out of the station. This roster was compiled against the challenges associated with losing four starters, two NBA draft picks and half of a scholarship complement to attrition, the pros or the portal. It was always going to have to thread a few narrow needles, and in the end, it failed.

There has to be some capacity for that. What no one is allowed is the earnest refusal to learn from that failure, to grow from it so it isn’t repeated.

Between now and the end of the season, there will be a lot of discussion of where this team went wrong, of Ware’s draft stock and possible portal departures, and where Woodson takes a roster clearly needing major surgery.

But without what by this point would constitute a remarkable turnaround, this season will end comfortably outside the NCAA tournament. A coach who talks in Big Ten championships and Final Fours will not need telling that doesn’t meet the minimum requirement.

Moments like this one should be cause for sober reflection from all involved. What do Indiana’s individual players want out of the rest of this season? To what level are they committed to righting this winter’s wrongs?

More importantly, to what extent is the coach who built, developed and, ultimately, failed with this roster prepared to do the same?

Because make no mistake, Woodson will be judged on that failure, just as he was the relative success that preceded it.

It matters when a program stumbles, but it matters more whether it can pick itself back up. That will be the legacy of this season, for better or for worse.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball will need to learn hard lessons from failed season