IU basketball 'is the sh**.' How video team immortalized Mike Woodson's oft-quoted line.

BLOOMINGTON — There were some tense moments for Indiana’s assistant athletic director for creative video Andrew Brown leading up to this year’s Hoosier Hysteria.

The event is an annual celebration of IU men’s and women’s basketball to kick off the upcoming season.

Brown’s team spent the better part of two weeks before the event filming an intro video for men’s basketball coach Mike Woodson. The idea centered around Woodson’s quote from last year’s Hoosier Hysteria that Indiana basketball “is the sh**.”

Once the video was complete, the final step in the process was getting Woodson’s seal of approval.

"They had pitched it to him ahead of time and he wanted to see the video, see how it all turned out,” Brown said.

Brown hoped for the best after handing the video off to senior associate athletic director for strategic communications Jeremy Gray. It didn’t take long for him to get a thumbs up from Gray, who would later say it was a cameo toward the end of the video that won Woodson over.

“He said Woody was sold when he saw the dog,” Brown said.

The video was also a hit with the 10,000-plus fans in attendance at Assembly Hall when it played on the jumbotron at Hoosier Hysteria. It was posted on social media later that night and has more than 100,000 views

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"It's always great to see and hear a crowd react,” Brown said. “It’s like the tipoff hype video that plays and seeing how that’s become such a thing with the students chanting along with Isaiah (Thomas). That stuff is really cool for me, it’s fun to contribute to the atmosphere.”

Mike Woodson’s words resonated

Woodson’s past entrances at Hoosier Hysteria have been pretty memorable.

He came out in a vintage IU-themed convertible in 2022 that was wrapped with photos of past teams, a basketball hoop steering wheel with Bob Knight’s signature on the horn and ‘76PRFC’ license plate.

Brown was the brainchild for Woodson’s 2021 entrance, a video that recreated the opening montage from the movie “Hoosiers.”

“We knew it would be a big moment, it was basically his first public moment back with the program as a former player coming home,” Brown said.

That was Brown’s first year as the creative lead for men’s basketball. He got his start as an intern for Indiana’s creative department working on men’s soccer in 2018 and landed a full-time role before even graduating.

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He accepted a role overseeing the whole department this fall —  they have a staff that includes a dozen interns — but retained his role with the basketball program and was tasked with coming up with another intro video for Woodson.

“That’s when the brainstorming process started,” Brown said.

Brown kept coming back to the comment Woodson made at last year’s Hoosier Hysteria when he was asked why he committed to Indiana as a player and responded by saying, “Indiana basketball — excuse my language — is the sh**.”

“It was one of the memorable moments from the event for most people,” Brown said. “It had a big impact, why not try to emulate that?”

Video was family affair for IU athletics

The final video that aired at this year’s Hoosier Hysteria was only 56 seconds long, but it was a hectic shoot.

“There were a lot of moving pieces,” Brown said.

The aforementioned dog had one of a dozen speaking roles with a cast that included students, former players and some young fans.

Brown had interns canvas the area outside of Assembly Hall for students willing to say the line while many of the other cameos went to people with ties to the athletic department.

The family sitting on the couch at the start of the video watching Woodson’s comments from 2022 was assistant athletic director for strategic communications Greg Campbell, his wife Jennifer and their kids Mallory and Brooks.

“I think my daughter practiced her line for like 24 straight hours,” Campbell said, sans the swear word he noted.

The other child in the video was assistant director for strategic communications Charlie Duffy’s daughter while the dog belonged to assistant athletic director for graphic design Holly Weber.

“We tried to get her to say spit, but that didn’t quite work cause she kept spitting when she would say it,” Duffy said, of his three-year-old daughter.

Former Indiana basketball stars Jalen Hood-Schifino and Cody Zeller used their phones to record themselves and texted the videos to a point of contact in the department.

Woodson's intro was an extension of the larger emphasis athletic departments have placed on video content that doesn't show any signs of slowing down.

"We were really starting to shift towards social media content when I started out as an intern, it's been exciting to see that transformation and see the importance of it,” Brown said. “Now with rule changes, we can even do video shoots on recruiting visits, so we work with the staff on that.”

While schools are producing more of content than ever, Brown’s goal is to ensure that they are putting out “quality content.” He knew they hit the mark with Woodson’s video when he started getting texts from his counterparts at other Big Ten schools when it was posted on social media.

“They were all like this is awesome, I can’t believe this went out,” Brown said, laughing.

Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on Twitter @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana basketball creative video team leans into Mike Woodson's quote