It took a few months, but it appears Mike Davis finally is establishing a fan base — just when he needed it most.
Although a 70-64 loss to last-place Michigan Tuesday dampened Indiana’s mood, two good efforts to open the Big Ten season — Sunday’s upset of then-No. 1 Michigan State in particular — have people believing in Hoosiers hoops once again.
As if Davis, Indiana’s interim basketball coach, didn’t have enough problems following in the footsteps of Bobby Knight, he ripped into his team and his own coaching following an embarrassing loss to Kentucky on Dec. 22.
After the loss, Davis told his team in the locker room that he hadn’t gotten them ready, and proceeded to tell the media his team had “quit” and he “wasn’t the man for the job.”
“I was down and disappointed and embarrassed with the lack of effort in the second half at Kentucky,” Davis said. “I asked each player, ‘What do I like as a coach?’ And they all said the same thing. ‘You like execution, you like effort, you like guys to work hard on every possession.’ So I told them, ‘OK, our season starts now.'”
The Michigan loss notwithstanding, Indiana’s play thus far suggests Davis’ words took hold.
“The last two games, I feel like the team has played really hard,” Davis said before Tuesday’s loss, which dropped the Hoosiers’ record to 10-7 (1-2 Big Ten). “I know (the players) care about me. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have stood up for me to be the coach.
“They want me here. And they’ve responded by going out and laying it on the line.”
RECKER RETURNS: Luke Recker has had a well-documented college career that has taken him from Indiana to Arizona and now to Iowa. And after two years away from the Big Ten, he finally got his chance to make an impact in the conference.
It wasn’t easy for Recker, who had missed two of the five previous games with tendinitis in his right knee. So his return in the Hawkeyes’ Big Ten opener against Penn State was dramatic, to say the least.
In a tight contest, Recker scored only five points in the first half. But he exploded in the second half, scoring 15 points, including two of the most important buckets in the game. With 54 seconds left he hit a shot to break a tie, and then with 1.3 seconds left, he nailed two free throws to give Iowa (12-2, 1-0) a one-point win.
“He’s really happy to be back on the basketball floor with great guys and great people around him,” Iowa coach Steve Alford said. “He’s never had a knee injury before, and I think it’s taken him some time to adjust to it, learn how to deal with it.
“He was sore after the game again but I thought he came up big in the second half. He’s starting to move like he’s capable of moving again.”
SMOOTH TRANSITION: Brad Soderberg, much like Mike Davis, inherited an awkward situation this year when Wisconsin head coach Dick Bennett suddenly retired in late November after leading the Badgers to the Final Four the year before.
But Soderberg made the transition to head coach as smooth as anyone could have expected, rattling off eight wins in a row before dropping Saturday’s game to Minnesota.
“In my opinion, (Bennett’s) overall reason for retiring was the cumulative effect of 35 years of coaching, all of which was as a head coach,” said Soderberg, whose team is 10-2 (1-1 Big Ten) and ranked 17th in the nation. “Anyone who has been a head coach, they know how difficult that is.”
Soderberg has talked about opening up the tight defensive style of play that carried the Badgers through last year’s NCAA tournament. Still, teams should expect the physical play that has been the hallmark of Badgers basketball in recent years, the coach said.
