My last words on Davis - I promise.

While I might have the column space to write a thousand flowery, poetic, gosh-we’re-sure-gonna-miss-him, so-long-good-and-faithful-servant words about the impending departure of embattled-because-he-brought-it-upon-himself IU basketball coach Mike Davis, I don’t have the inclination to do so. Personally, I hope that the door doesn’t hit his butt on the way out, but that’s neither here nor there.

I do take issue, however, with this from the Indianapolis Star’s Bob Kravitz:

He clearly had to fight some racism.

Are you serious? Can you really toss around a charge like that with absolutely zero substantiation? (I didn’t clip the quote in the wrong place or anything like that – Kravitz snuck that sentence into the end of a paragraph before moving on.)

I do hope that before he leaves, if he'd fought racism as hard as Kravitz thinks he did, Davis does offer a list of soda fountains, restaurants, water fountains, etc. in the state where he was denied service because of his race. Sorry to make light of it, but that was really an uncalled-for quote.

I don’t pretend to speak for the rest of the IU fanbase, especially since I haven’t considered myself a part of that group of people since roughly September 2000 (my bandwagon jumping during the team’s run to the NCAA title game excepted). But I think the fanbase would probably be a little bit more forgiving if he had added any banners to Assembly Hall before this recent run of mediocrity. And I think that IU’s fans, by and large, don’t care if a person is white, black, red, yellow or purple with green polkadots, as long as he can coach and put up Ws. I’ll admit that maybe we’re not the most racially progressive state, but if someone as white-bread as Rick Majerus – or even “one of us,” meaning someone from Indiana, as Coach Quixote so eloquently uttered it – had coached this team and missed the NCAA tournament the last two years while threatening to miss it again this year, you don’t think he’d be ran out of town on a rail?

What, you don’t? OK, maybe Majerus was a bad example. Let’s pick someone else, then – someone who has the same amount of head coaching experience as Coach Quixote did when he was hired (that is to say, zero). Let’s even make sure that it’s “one of us” … someone who’s been a part of the IU program before. Let’s say that instead of Mike Davis following Bob Knight (I hesitate to use the term “succeeding”), let’s say that the administration replaced Knight with ………… Jeff Oliphant, former 12^th man during the Knight era.

Coach Oliphant then promptly goes and undoes a lot of the traditions that had been built over the last 30 years, has a modicum of success only with Bob Knight's players, and once they're out of the system, blazes a trail of mediocrity unseen in recent memory at the school. He installs a shitty pro-style offense that involves a lot of people just standing around - an affront to those of us in Indiana who appreciate good, fundamental basketball. And then, when his players that he recruited - and Coach Oliphant was an excellent recruiter, don't you recall - turn out to be unable to carry Landon Turner's jock, he places the blame squarely on the fans who are offended by the awful brand of basketball being played for them.

I don't think a Coach Oliphant (or a Coach Blab or a Coach Lindeman or a Coach D'Alosio, or Coach Zorb from the planet XY-950A) would have lasted nearly as long as Coach Quixote did.

Mike Davis got every opportunity to turn it around in Bloomington, and this was going to be the year. Instead, his team lost at Indiana State because they were outcoached, and I had a feeling that maybe the end would be sooner rather than later. Yeah, they stayed close to Duke and UConn (at home), but hell, Virginia Tech almost beat Duke at home this year, and I don't hear anyone proclaiming Seth Greenberg as a Coach of the Year candidate.

Like in a squatter's house after a flood, it'll take years to get that smell out of the basketball program. I'm just glad the process is finally starting, and I hope that IU doesn't screw it up again.