Mike Davis will resign as head coach of IU’s basketball team according to a story at the Indy Star (and elsewhere.) I have seriously mixed feelings on this. I’m certainly not one who was calling for Davis’s head from Day 1. I liked Coach Knight, but did not resent Davis for replacing him. I was particularly excited when Davis led the Hoosiers to the championship in 2002. I don’t really think that would have happened under Bob Knight. 2003 was a decent season. Since then, however. No NCAA bids. It looked like it was going to turn around this year. We were 12-3 and ranked in the top 10. But since then we’ve gone 1-6 and lost 5 games on the road in the Big Ten including games at Penn State and Minnesota.
If this truly is the end of the Davis era, I think I’ll view it as a dramatic rise followed by a long, slow decline, beginning in December of 2002 when he ran onto the court to berate the officials at the end of the Kentucky game. After that, his teams didn’t seem to have the same spark somehow. His team finished the 2002/2003 season with a whimper followed by poor performances from 2003-2005. This 2005/2006 season looked to be different. I don’t know if it was the loss of DJ White or something else. Purely on the merits, I think it is appropriate for Davis to step down. But I feel a little bad about it because there are a lot of fans who never really gave him a chance. They’ll feel vindicated about now, I suspect. But possibly things would be different if they were not calling for his head from Day 1.
Fully cognizant of its firestorm potential, I’m going to deal the race card with a prediction: the next IU coach will be white. I have always felt that a large part of the criticism of Davis was race based; the most recent example being the rumoured “black-out” protest. Let’s not forget that southern Indiana is still “copperhead” territory.
I certainly won’t argue Indiana is a paradise of racial harmony and maybe I’m naive, but I never got the racial vibe from the Mike Davis story. It never occurred to me as a factor. I think it was primarily hardcore devotion to Coach Knight that caused a backlash to Coach Davis from day one regardless of his potential merits.
And, of course, the lackluster performance of the basketball program in the past few years has added to the anti-Davis crowd. But the motives of folks judging Davis on solely on his performance are not mysterious, so the motives of the people who were against Davis from the beginning are more interesting. I think it was fealty to Bob Knight much more than any racial animus that motivated such people. But, I’m a white man living in the aptly named White County. So I could just be ignorant.
Here in Southern Indiana, I heard from many Bob Knight fans about Mike Davis. When I pointed out that while I don’t follow basketball, I do like Make Davis because of his attitude and faith, I heared an odd remark: “Mike Davis is a racist!”.
When I asked “What makes you say that?”, I heard every one say “He is down on the white players, and he promotes the black players.”. I heard this from every person that I heard personally complain about him.
Now, I don’t know the guy in person, but I still don’t beleive those remarks. Everything I saw of him showed him to be a person that wouldn’t do anything like that.
My guess is that either perhaps Knight WAS placing white players over black ones, and Davis would not do that, OR that the people I talked to were just racist and didn’t like a black coach at IU.
I hadn’t heard such comments myself from anti-Davis people. But I have to agree that I would presume racism on the part of the people you describe.
It just dawned on me that two prominent African-Americans at IU have resigned before the end of their committments, Mike Davis and President Adam Herbert. Coincidence?
BTW- Cincinnati AM radio is saying Bob Huggins is the new IU coach…who knows.
Huggins? That would be horrible. He’s got a reputation for running a dirty program that graduates nobody.
That just cannot be. Bob Huggins is a disgrace and IU should not even let his name be associated with the university.
It was one of the sports shows on Cincinnati AM radio, I certainly hope it isn’t true.
BTW-did anyone else listen to the press conference? The AD (can’t remember his last name) said that he would “announce” the new coach after the final four. Am I correct in reading that as they have already found one and are waiting to announce it? Wouldn’t they have announced that a search would begin at the end of the season rather than the naming of a new coach?