- IU basketball coach Mike Woodson is stepping down, effective at the end of his fourth season, because there cannot be a fifth year. The program wouldn’t survive it. The fan base wouldn’t allow it.
- Woodson made it difficult on Indiana, but he never was one to accept help. He refused to listen to Thad Matta. He fired Dane Fife after one season. Woodson’s way or the highway: How’d that work out?
- As the season spiraled out of control, the IU administration wrested control of its men’s basketball program from the chairman of the IU Board of Trustees, former All-American guard Quinn Buckner.
Difficult to the end, Indiana basketball coach Mike Woodson has been pushed out of a job he never seemed to understand or embrace. He was the men’s college basketball coach at IU in name if not deed, bringing to Bloomington an NBA mentality that included a minimum of recruiting, and all the golf he could play.
Recruits in the state — even the ones IU targeted — will tell you they barely knew him. High school coaches in the state will tell you they didn’t much like him.
Coaches at other colleges around the Big Ten had a nickname for Mike Woodson:
Bigfoot.
Because no one ever saw him.
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When IU announced Woodson’s pending retirement Friday, it did so without a quote from Woodson. This is what I meant by the first four words of this story: Difficult to the end.
Discussions about the Woodson-IU separation had begun Wednesday and heated up Thursday, with an announcement expected mid-afternoon, but then Woodson did what he does:
He disappeared.
Bigfoot was gone. The school was left to wonder: What now?
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Are we going to have to fire this guy?
Tom Crean, Archie Miller, now Mike Woodson
One of Mike Woodson’s biggest issues: Refusing to accept help.
The school was trying to help him in the end, help him save face if nothing else by negotiating a way for him to announce his departure — a retirement — that would sound like it had been his idea. This day had been coming for weeks, starting with back-to-back 25-point losses to Iowa and Illinois in January, the latter coming at Assembly Hall, where the #iubb fan base turned on this team the way it had turned on Tom Crean and Archie Miller in their final days in charge.
In Crean’s case, it was IU missing the 2017 NCAA Tournament and then turning down a chance to host an NIT first-round game, not wanting a national TV audience to hear the IU crowd boo the IU coach. In Miller’s case it was thousands of IU fans hanging around to the end of the Hoosiers’ loss in the 2021 Big Ten Tournament just to boo the team and chant “Fire Archie!”
In both cases, the end was days away.
For Woodson, as the losses mounted and the fan anger grew, the IU administration began to wrest control of the men’s basketball program from the chairman of the IU Board of Trustees, former All-American guard Quinn Buckner. The Hoosiers were considered a preseason Top 25 team and Big Ten contender thanks to a roster built with better NIL resources than most programs in college basketball. The key to that had been the financial networking of Woodson’s rich alumnus buddy, Steve Ferguson, the former chairman of the IU Board of Trustees and another layer insulating Woodson from reality.
But IU (14-9, 5-7 Big Ten) had lost five of six heading into its trip Tuesday to Wisconsin, and when the Badgers raced to a 26-4 lead — and coasted to a 76-64 victory — it was over. Ferguson and Buckner had lost. Woodson was done.
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On Wednesday he was conceding to IU athletic director Scott Dolson that he would retire after the season, but the school’s goal of making that announcement by mid-day Thursday — a comfortable two full days before former IU student-manager Dusty May’s No. 22 Michigan Wolverines arrived Saturday at Assembly Hall — evaporated. Woodson had gone underground.
Around that time, coincidentally, news of Woodson’s pending retirement was leaked to a national reporter. That slip of the tongue — oops? — forced Woodson’s hand. There would be no coming back, no changing plans, after that news went public. Woodson was gone, whether he liked it or not. IU had tried to help, but Woodson doesn’t know how to accept help.
It has been this way since his first days on the job.
Mike Woodson didn’t want Thad Matta or Dane Fife
Thad Matta wasn’t Mike Woodson’s idea. Neither was Dane Fife.
IU had insisted on giving Woodson, a neophyte NCAA coach in 2021, support in the form of Matta for administrative purposes. Michigan State coach Tom Izzo had begrudgingly advised Woodson to hire Fife, who wanted to return to his alma mater, for recruiting purposes. Woodson accepted both.
Woodson froze out Matta, and fired Fife after one season.
Staffers laugh about the location of Matta’s office at IU that 2021-22 season — the farthest possible office from Woodson — when he served as associate AD for men’s basketball. To this day, colleagues honestly don’t know if Matta chose it because it was one of the biggest rooms on the hall, or if Woodson chose it because he didn’t want Matta anywhere near him.
Fife, an IU guard from 1998-2002 who had helped Izzo recruit Indiana from 2011-21, was fired for reasons that Woodson has never explained.
None of that stopped Woodson from amassing talent. Aided by Ferguson’s NIL crowdsourcing, Woodson had loaded rosters — but the results on the court these last two seasons showed the disconnect between the team’s talent and its scheme, effort and coaching. In that way, albeit in different eras, Woodson was similar to former LSU coach John Brady, who was well-known as an elite recruiter but poor strategic coach.
Woodson arrived in Bloomington clinging to his NBA notion of a “second unit,” swapping out three starters at a time like he was coaching the Hawks against the Jazz. When it failed he’d rue the shortcomings not of his second-unit philosophy, but of his second unit. But it had worked that one time, so …
“If you followed me closely in the NBA, I’ve always stressed that the second unit is just as important as the first unit,” Woodson said after his bench fueled a 74-52 blowout of UIndy in October 2023. “If you’re not getting it from the first unit, you can go get it from the second unit.”
What to know:Mike Woodson will not return to the Indiana basketball program next season
That was Woodson, clinging to the past, allowing success in an exhibition game against a Division II opponent to reinforce his beliefs — and ignoring what was happening in real games against Big Ten opposition.
“He doesn’t listen to anybody,” one staffer told me.
Well, not true.
He listened to Armond Hill.
Who did Woodson trust? Armond Hill
Woodson has had four assistant coaches in his four seasons at IU: His original staff of Kenya Hunter, Fife and Yasir Rosemond, and recruiting coordinator Brian Walsh after he replaced Fife following the 2021-22 season. Woodson has had five assistants, if you want to count the year Matta spent (far) down the hall.
But to hear people at IU tell it, Woodson’s sounding board and advisor — the only person he’ll listen to — is his director of operations: Armond Hill.
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Who’s Armond Hill?
Woodson’s golfing buddy with the Los Angeles Clippers, where they worked together under head coach Doc Rivers from 2014-18. Hill was an NBA assistant from 2003-2020. Before that he’d been the head coach at Columbia, where he went 72-141 in eight seasons. His last season there, Columbia was 2-25, 0-14 in the Ivy League — and Hill was fired.
That’s been Woodson’s right-hand man at IU since the first months of Woodson’s tenure here. And you wonder why it ended so poorly?
Thing is, it started so well. Woodson’s first priority when he was hired in March 2021 was convincing Trayce Jackson-Davis to return for his junior season. Jackson-Davis came back for his senior year as well, and the Hoosiers reached the 2022 and ’23 NCAA tournaments in Woodson’s first two seasons. Then Jackson-Davis left for the NBA, and the ceiling fell in.
Woodson wasn’t much for recruiting high school athletes, rarely seeing anyone in the state and preferring to use a booster’s private jet to see recruits elsewhere only if there were good golf courses around. He loved going to Las Vegas and other parts of the far southwest, for example. Can’t beat the courses out there.
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How did he grow his roster? Woodson used his fat NIL checkbook to get players, including Oregon transfer Kel’el Ware last season and Pac-12 stars Kanaan Carlyle, Myles Rice and Oumar Ballo this season. With Ware, the likely 2025 NBA Rookie of the Year, the Hoosiers missed the 2024 NCAA Tournament. And with Rice and Carlyle regressing this season, and the inconsistent Ballo routinely displaying poor judgment or effort or both, the Hoosiers will miss the 2025 NCAA Tournament as well.
Deep into the fourth year of Woodson’s tenure, it had become obvious: There could not be a fifth year. The program wouldn’t survive it. The fan base wouldn’t allow it.
Everyone realized it, even Woodson, though as usual he was the last to know.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel onThreads, or onBlueSky and Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar, or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
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