Hoosiers Storm the Court on a Tuesday Night...Appropos

A few people (Seth Greenberg) on ESPN decried the hometown Hoosiers for upsetting the Wisconsin Badgers and then running out on Branch McCracken Court. Jumping and running amuck like banshees.

Oh, by the way...IU BEAT WISCONSIN 75-72!!! YEAH, BABY!

He more or less said that if this were Virginia Teach upsetting Duke, then it is merited, but not the other way around. Duke, he equating it with Indiana, should not celebrate with such raucous behavior as such a storied program, hence he thought IU fans were out of order for showing their jubilation in this manner.

But let me give you, who may wonder or more surprisingly may care about this polemic, three big reasons why the on court celebration was indeed warranted.

1. Indiana, even after being ranked number one in the country last year, [2012-13] many weeks (and sadly losing in the sweet 16 in March) did not beat Wisconsin last year. In fact, IU had not beaten the Badgers in basketball since January 31, 2007. That was Kelvin Sampson's second of three years as coach. He was then run out off town for violating phoning and texting rule limits that no longer exist.

2. We as a basketball program had not beaten UW for 12 consecutive games, and IU had NEVER lost to any program 13 times in a row. If at all 12. (More research required). Plus, they had been killing us in football, to boot. 83 points a few years ago? Yikes. We have a badger rodent problem in B-town.

3. Indiana is not Duke. Bob Knight begat Coach K (I may learn to spell his name by the time I am 60), and the student outshone the teacher. Duke, using talent from Indiana boys (see Plumlees) as recently as 2010, has won national championships four times since IU got its last in 1987. Duke has been to the Final Four many other times while Indiana was more recently eviscerated as a program with the nadir coming at the beginning of current Coach Crean's tenure with whole seasons totaling 6, 10, and 12 wins. Three years of futility we did not even experience while Mike Davis was running the program into the ground. See Kelvin Sampson, again.

And the charges against Sampson, leveling the IU program into the dirt?

Perfectly acceptable texting now.

Preposterous.

IU has been done wrong by many, and we have done it to ourselves.

No, we are not Duke, and someday we may win more than them, but in 2014 the fans will celebrate accordingly on the floor when taking down #3 Wisconsin, ending the streak, and bringing the old glory that a whole living generation of IU fans cannot remember, but only wistfully fathom.

Like me.

Ed