BLOOMINGTON - Would you admit to watching, say, Housewives of Orange County? Tom Crean would. No, that doesn't mean the Indiana coach is so depressed about the state of the Hoosiers entering tonight's basketball exhibition opener against Anderson University that he's looking to reality TV for comfort.
The Hoosiers are, Crean insisted, reality TV. Nobody knows what's going to happen when you blend a new staff with a new roster.
“I was listening to the Kansas coaches talk about how bad their freshmen played (in an exhibition),” Crean said. “It was like, ‘Wow, those coaches are concerned with two or three freshmen. We have a whole team of them. We'll be a reality show.'
“The story will change all the time. We'll have to work through that. Everything will be new. There's no other way to do it.”
Reality meant six walk-ons tried out Wednesday because, “We want to give our team the best opportunity we can to get better,” Crean said.
It meant Crean won't reveal a starting lineup because, while he has one in mind, nothing is etched in stone when your only experienced player, forward Kyle Taber, scored just 28 points all of last season and is out with a knee injury.
“I'll let that play out,” Crean said. “Will it change? I'd bet it will.”
One thing Crean won't do, he said, is try different combinations for the sake of experimenting.
“We can't go in like, ‘Let's try this and see how it flies.' Not with this team. We'll play to win. Let's go at it. Games will be a learning process.”
That's fine with the players in general, guard Devan Dumes in particular. Anything to get them away from banging each other.
“We're tired of playing against each other,” he said. “We've been doing it since the summer.”
Anderson is an NCAA Division III school. It returns its top two scorers from a 15-12 team.
“They'll switch on defense and spread the court and do some things that will be a challenge for us,” Crean said. “Anybody would be a challenge for us right now.”
Another challenge will be filling Assembly Hall, because only about half the student allotment of 8,000 season tickets have been sold. As a result, IU officials have opened up 4,000 more ticket packages ($451 for season tickets, $23 per game except $38 a game for Illinois, Michigan State, Ohio State and Wisconsin).
Players aren't focused on that as much as trying to impress Crean.
“The intensity has turned up a lot,” Dumes said. “People are going extremely hard. A lot of people are getting called out by the coaches. If you're not up to the challenge, Coach will go by you.”
