Arkansas and Indiana are meeting on the basketball court two decades too late.
Can you imagine former Hoosiers coach Bobby Knight invading Bud Walton Arena to tangle with former Hogs coach Nolan Richardson at Barnhill Arena in 1990 during the Hogs’ Final Four season or at Bud Walton Arena in 1995 as the Hogs were defending national champions?
Talk about epic.
I wonder what the over-under on technical fouls would have been. Somehow the tradition-rich programs never met during their heydays. In fact, Sunday’s meeting with the Hoosiers is just the third all-time and the first in Fayetteville.
Arkansas lost at Indiana in 1949. The Hogs beat the Hoosiers in the 2008 NCAA Tournament.
Neither team is ranked in the Top 25 entering Sunday’s game. Arkansas hasn’t advanced to the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 since 1996. Its lone national title came in 1994 with a loss to UCLA in the 1995 title game.
Indiana has had slightly better recent success reaching the 2002 NCAA National Championship game under former coach Mike Davis, and earning Sweet 16 bids under former coach Tom Crean in 2012, 2013 and 2016. Knight guided the 1976 Hoosiers to an undefeated title in 1976 and added two more in 1981 and 1987, respectively. Knight’s final Final Four appearance came in 1991.
The tale of the two programs is very similar. Each has struggled to regain prominence following the end of two legendary coaches who were fired amid controversy close to the same time in the early 2000s.
Davis Led Indiana to an improbable Final Four run in 2002 in his second season succeeding Knight, but he lasted just three more seasons before he was fired in favor of Kelvin Sampson.
Sampson enjoyed two successful seasons in Bloomington but was forced to resign after two seasons amid NCAA violations.
Marquette’s Crean took over before the 2008-09 season and endured four straight losing seasons. The Hoosiers finished 29-7 in 2012-13 and 27-8 in 2015-16, but IU fired Crean after an 18-16 finish two seasons ago.
Former Dayton Coach Archie Miller is in his second season at IU after finishing 16-15 last year.
Indiana’s coaching carousel following Knight is all-too-familiar to Hog fans. I don’t have to review the gory details of the Stan Heath and John Pelphrey Eras or the one-day tenure of Dana Altman.
Current Hogs coach Mike Anderson is 70-54 in his eighth season. He’s done just enough to keep his seat from heating but not enough to satisfy fans who long for the days when he sat next to his former boss, Richardson.
Few marquee wins, lost big-time recruits and three NCAA Tournament appearances never advancing past the second round. It’s not what former Hogs AD Jeff Long expected when he plucked Anderson from Missouri where he had enjoyed success.
And that brings us to Sunday’s game. While this may not be a marquee win for either team, it could help boost a resume in March. Indiana already has momentum starting the season 3-0, including a 96-73 blowout win against No. 24-ranked Marquette.
Arkansas lost in overtime to Texas at Fort Bliss, Texas, and routed UC-Davis Monday at home. A win at Bud Walton Arena may push the Hoosiers closer to a Top 25 ranking which would be big for Miller as he tries to move the program back to prominence.
Anderson is still trying to get a feel for his team whose only returning contributors form last season are sophomore superstar Daniel Gafford and junior Adrio Bailey. He’s less concerned about the nonconference than he is getting prepared for the Southeastern Conference slate which is all of a sudden rugged with revitalization of Auburn and Tennessee to go along with perennial power Kentucky.
However, if Arkansas wins this game, it could run through the rest of the nonconference unscathed with home tilts with mid-major UT-Arlington and ACC member Georgia Tech as the biggest threats to that run. A successful nonconference may increase the young, athletic team’s confidence.
Richardson may be in the building Sunday supporting his former pupil but Knight will not, and we can only dream of what might have been if the two had squared off when their programs were relevant and in their prime. Maybe by the time the two teams meet next season in Bloomington they will at least both be ranked in the Top 25.
