The charming older woman greets a visitor with a gentle reminder. “You know George McGinnis passed, right?” Inside the doors of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame and beyond the borders of Indiana, this is indeed sad news that needs to be shared with proper reverence. McGinnis was a Hoosier hero. In 1969, he and his Washington High teammates put together a perfect 31-0 state championship season, with McGinnis torching opponents for 148 points in his final four games.
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Much of that journey is on display at the New Castle-based Hall. While most museums of its ilk pay homage to the big-name famous, here it is all about high school ball, the essence of Indiana. Newspaper clippings and varsity jackets share wall space with unique relics such as the state’s first glass backboard, debuted by the Owensville Kickapoos in 1920.
If one artifact can encapsulate what basketball means here, perhaps it is the framed front page of the Indianapolis Sunday Star from March 20, 1932. The banner headline declares “NEW CASTLE CHAMP: BEATS WINAMAC, 24-17,” with a picture of the victors front and center. Beneath that lies the other news of the day: “LINK HIDDEN AUTO IN KIDNAPPING.” The kidnapping, in this case, referred to that of Charles Lindbergh’s son.
It is that adoration of high school ball, brick and mortared in the record-setting-capacity gyms that dot the state, that fomented the fervor of the college game, eventually coalescing around one Robert Montgomery Knight. Other schools had their pockets of success – Larry Bird and Indiana State in 1979, Gene Keady and Purdue in the 1980s and 1990s – but the strobe lights that beckoned recruits came in the red and white of the candy-striped pants, and the epicenter of all that basketball love sat squarely in Bloomington.
The love, backed by an ardent and large alumni base, still lives in Bloomington. But as 2024 dawns, it is fair to ask what once would be considered blasphemy: Does the actual power base still reside there? Or is it shifting 100 miles to the north, to West Lafayette?
Just down the road from the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, on the side of Indiana Route 3, sits a gigantic semi-sized sneaker. It ensures people notice the Steve Alford All-American Inn, even if they don’t choose to spend a night there.
The Inn is named after the very definition of an Indiana hero, a boy from New Castle who starred for his dad’s high school team and then took his talents to IU. Alford’s high school accomplishments – 37.2 points per game his senior year, Mr. Basketball honors and a run to the state tournament quarterfinal in 1983 – earned him a spot in the local hall; the seven 3-pointers he sank in the 1987 championship game against Syracuse merited the man a motel.
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“It used to be that every kid who grew up in Indiana dreamed of playing for IU,’’ says Mark Adams, the longtime director of the Adidas-run Indiana Elite travel program. Adams grew up in the pre-Knight era, watching the Van Arsdale twins and Jon McGlocklin star for Branch McCracken. The Van Arsdale boys, McGinnis, Alford, 29 players in all went from Mr. Basketball high school stars to Indiana.
Two of the last three to win the award (Braden Smith and Caleb Furst) are at Purdue. Three of the last four winners of the modern-era Indiana Gatorade Player of the Year (Trey Kaufman-Renn, Furst and Fletcher Loyer) are in West Lafayette, too. Furst and Smith are the first back-to-back Indiana Mr. Basketball selections to opt for Purdue since the 1960s, and the three consecutive Gatorade Players of the Year marks a first in program history.
Among the last five recruiting cycles (2019-2023), of the 92 Indiana high schoolers ranked by 247Sports, nine chose Purdue and six went to Indiana. Among the seven players ranked for 2024, Jack Benter has committed to the Boilermakers, four others have signed elsewhere, two remain undecided.
All told, 11 Indiana boys are on the current Purdue roster. Smith, Loyer and Kaufman-Renn are starters; Furst, Mason Gillis and Myles Colvin factor largely in the rotation.
Five Hoosiers play for the Hoosiers. Trey Galloway starts, CJ Gunn and Payton Sparks (who arrived via a transfer from Ball State) come off the bench. “You go to a game, or drive around the state, you still see the flags and the support for IU,’’ Adams continues. “That hasn’t changed. But Purdue’s success, it’s made it a tougher decision for kids. Everybody wants to play for a winner.’’
It would be unfair to say that everyone has intentionally pivoted away from Indiana, and toward Purdue. The Hoosiers weren’t interested in Smith or Loyer. Smith, who grew up in Westfield in a previously pro-IU household, said he kept hearing an offer was coming from then-head coach Archie Miller’s staff, but when one never arrived and then Miller was fired, the point guard prepped to commit to Belmont until Matt Painter showed interest late. “After Miller got fired, they stopped talking to me,’’ Smith says. “I also didn’t feel like, as a staff, they were as well -connected once I met with Purdue. Now, to me, there’s nothing better in sports than proving people wrong. I get to say, ‘I told you so.’”
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One source, a recruiting expert who asked not to be named so he could speak candidly, says Purdue’s persistence separates the staff. “When Painter locks on a guy, he usually gets him,’’ the source says. “And it’s him front and center, not his staff. That stuff matters. I’m not sure Indiana has worked hard enough.’’ It’s a common complaint lodged, particularly, at Hoosiers third-year head coach Mike Woodson. Yet he landed a top 20 recruiting class a year ago, signed one five-star in the Class of 2024 (Liam McNeeley) and is on the final list of another (Derik Queen). Both are out of powerhouse Montverde Academy in Florida. Woodson also has made good work of the transfer portal. Kel’el Ware (Oregon), Xavier Johnson (Pitt) and Anthony Walker (Miami) rank among the Hoosiers’ top contributors this season.
That, however, is not the way it was done in Indiana. And that’s part of the rub. “They’re frankly like 98 percent of college basketball right now – doing what you can do without any real play. Grab this guy, that guy and then worry later about fit,’’ says a former college coach, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “But that’s not how Indiana did it, or how Indiana is supposed to do it, right? On the one hand, you’ve got the old guard who says, ‘This is how we used to play,’ and the other that says, ‘Win, win, win.’ How do you please both? And then over here, there’s Purdue, just rolling along.’’
Knight recruited Dane Fife to Indiana in the late ‘90s, and the McDonald’s All-American was there during Knight’s messy exodus from campus two years later. It formed a lifelong understanding of the mechanizations of the state’s basketball passion, the school’s contempt for Purdue (he once mistakenly said he respected the Boilers) and later, the complications of matching reality with expectation.
He was not, however, born into it all. Fife grew up in Michigan amid the Bo Schembechler heyday. He remembers the hold the Michigan football coach – and by extension, the Wolverines – had on the state. Bumper stickers either showcased proud block Ms or proclaimed, “Honk if you hate State.’’ Michigan State had loyal, proud fans, but as Schembechler churned for two decades, the Spartans churned through five coaches, none able to match his success or statewide imprint.
Then, not long after Schembechler retired, Tom Izzo took over as head basketball coach at Michigan State. The Spartans were hardly bereft of history, but by the mid-90s, when Izzo replaced Jud Heathcote, they largely were riding the fading fumes of the 1979 title with Magic Johnson. The program needed a reboot. Izzo provided it. By his fourth season, Michigan State went to the Final Four; a year later, the Spartans won it all. Izzo offered something Michigan State needed – namely an identity – and inch by inch, the Spartans started to encroach on, if not entirely take over, the Wolverines’ territory, while simultaneously growing a broad national appeal.
To Fife, who spent 10 years working for Izzo, it all feels eerily similar to Indiana. Painter is not Izzo. Where the Spartans’ coach stews on a constant boil, Painter is a thinker, perfectly happy to dork out in the X’s and O’s of the game and blend into the wallpaper. But like Izzo, Painter took over for his mentor – in this case, Gene Keady – and modernized Purdue’s success. His cupboards were hardly bare, either. Keady won six Big Ten titles, won 512 games and recruited one big dog, Glenn Robinson, to campus. But the Boilers simmered beneath Knight’s shadow.
Painter took over not long after Knight left, giving him the elbow room to carve out his own identity while Indiana struggled to rebrand itself post-Knight. “Indiana has suffered for so long not having a permanent fixture that could replicate in some form or fashion what Coach Knight did,’’ says Fife, who spent a year on Woodson’s staff before being let go. “There’s been so much pressure on every coach to do it like Coach Knight. To win like Coach Knight. To act like Coach Knight. It hasn’t been fair. Purdue has always been there, but they couldn’t overcome the grip of Coach Knight. Matt Painter, in the meantime, took a good program and made it elite.’’
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Since Painter’s arrival in 2006-07, Indiana has fired three head coaches, tabbed one interim leader and is now working on its fourth attempt to get it right in Woodson.
Kelvin Sampson earned a ticket out amid NCAA violations, and his temporary replacement, Dan Dakich, didn’t get the full-time gig. Instead it went to Tom Crean, who methodically rebuilt the sanction-riddled Hoosiers into a winner. In 2013, IU climbed to the top of the national rankings and headed into March as both a 1-seed and a national champion favorite. Instead, flummoxed by Syracuse’s zone, the Hoosiers lost in the Sweet 16. That letdown weighed like an albatross around Crean, and coupled with the burden of expectation and chronic defensive woes, he was fired after nine seasons.
IU then brought in Miller, the first name on plenty of lists thanks to Miller’s success at Dayton. Miller mustered his best finish – 20-12 – during the COVID-shortened season, and his failure to ingratiate himself in the community, coupled with zero NCAA Tournament appearances, turned a slam-dunk hire into a divorce after four seasons. “The stability, the coaching stability versus Indiana, the fact that they had a coach in Paint for such a long time, that mattered,’’ says Kaufman-Renn, who grew up in Sellersburg, deep in the Southern Indiana Hoosier belt. “I wanted to know that things would be the same for me every year.’’
As for tradition? “I knew who Bob Knight was,’’ Kaufman-Renn says. “I’d never heard of Gene Keady.’’
Indiana’s five championship banners hang like artwork on the north end wall of Assembly Hall, front-lit and shining. “How many banners do they have?” one IU grad snidely asks when posited with the question about Purdue laying claim to territorial superiority. It’s a fair point. At Mackey Arena, they hang Big Ten championship banners because, aside from two Final Fours, that’s all they’ve got.
In a sport measured by March, the Boilermakers’ lack of titles long has been the line of demarcation between the programs. Purdue’s more recent flameouts have only fueled the fire that it doesn’t measure up.
“But here’s the thing about IU. People refer to it almost by rote as a blue blood,’’ says longtime sportswriter Mike Lopresti, who grew up in Richmond and has chronicled the two programs for much of his career. “I would suggest you look at the last 30 years. There ain’t a lot of blue in the blood there.’’
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To wit: The last championship turns 37 this year, and the most recent Final Four berth came in 2002, a national semifinal appearance in which the Hoosiers earned their ticket via an upset of less-than-mighty Kent State in the Elite Eight. Even at season’s end, Indiana failed to rank in the Associated Press Top 25. Since then, the Hoosiers have made three Sweet 16s, none since 2016, and 10 times missed the NCAA Tournament altogether.
Comparatively, Purdue’s big-game success is relatively prehistoric. The Boilers’ best team might have come in 1932, when one John Wooden led Purdue to a 17-1 record in the pre-NCAA Tournament era. Otherwise, the high-water marks begin and end with a national final appearance in 1969, when the Boilers were blitzed by 20 by UCLA (and Wooden) in the championship game, and a 1980 Final Four appearance. Yet the Boilers’ more recent history is considerably better than IU’s: Since 2016, Purdue has appeared in four regional semifinals and one Elite Eight and has failed to make a Tournament appearance only three times since Painter took over in 2005.
The asterisk, of course, is affixed in bold, and fills happy cups of schadenfreude in Bloomington. All of that regular-season success in West Lafayette has added up to zero Final Fours and instead, first-round losses to a 16-seed, 13-seed and 12-seed, and a Sweet 16 exit at the hands of 15-seed Saint Peter’s. The ramp-up this season feels all too familiar. Led by player of the year Zach Edey, Purdue appears destined to another high seed come March.
It is a classic case of tradition versus recency bias and which truly offers the measure of college basketball success. Within the state, where some 400,000 IU grads still live, changing perception is difficult. As fed up as they might be with the Hoosiers’ lack of success, giving the Boilers their due is still too bitter a pill to swallow. But devotion is not the same as true power. UNC has far more fans living in the Tar Heel state, but no one will argue that the Heels and Duke have close to a split in the state’s basketball supremacy race. “It would be interesting to see if Purdue broke through and got there, if that would change the dynamic even more,’’ Lopresti says. “If they were to win it all, particularly with the guy that captures as much attention as Edey? I’m not saying people in Indiana would think the epicenter would be in West Lafayette, but it definitely might change things.’’
A December day crafted by the scheduling suits and TV puppet masters served up Indiana hoops as a holiday gift to the state: the traditional blue bloods of Indiana and Kansas tipping off at 12:30 in Bloomington; the new(er) bloods of Purdue and Arizona going head-to-head at 4:30 in Indianapolis. Not even a flexed NFL Colts game, dropped directly into the Indy traffic pattern, could prevent an intrepid hoops fan from making the 50-mile ride up I-69 to watch both games.
The two fan bases streamed through the turnstiles en masse, an up-to-the-rafters 17,222 at Assembly Hall, and 17,315 more filling Gainbridge Fieldhouse. They cheered, they caterwauled – one Hoosier fan even rose from his wheelchair to give an official an earful. Just as the black-and-gold fans made their way to their seats, the candy-striped faithful headed to their cars. Indiana gave the Jayhawks 35 minutes of misery; alas, the game went the full 40. Kansas took its first lead with 4:53 to play and defeated Indiana 75-71.
Purdue, meanwhile, nearly followed the same script. The Boilermakers gave back a 15-point second-half lead, but Smith, the Indiana boy, drained a 3 and swiped a steal in the 92-84 win.
Two days later, Purdue rose to No. 1 in the rankings.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Dylan Buell, Brian Spurlock, Justin Casterline / Getty Images)