Last rites in Bloomington

 So, you think you've seen bad? You don't know bad, mister.

Bad is when you're 0-7 against your oldest and most bitter rival, and you're getting farther away from turning the "0" into a "1" with every meeting.

Bad is when your big-deal freshman class scores six points on 1-of-6 shooting, turns the ball over five times and looks more like No Deal than Big Deal.

Bad is when you haven't won more Big Ten games than you've lost in four seasons. When you can't throw it in the ocean from the ocean, especially from the 3-point arc. When you miss 18 of the 23 shots you attempt from there against that aforementioned bitter rival -- further proving that, in Bloomington, In., these days, the arc is less an Arc de Triomphe than an Arc de Splat.

Because of that and some other stuff, Purdue beat Indiana again yesterday, 67-58. The Boilermakers have beaten the Hoosiers nine straight times now. And the dog bit the man, and water is wet.

This does not bode well for the current occupant of IU's flamin' hot seat, Archie Miller, whose team has now lost five in a row, is 12-14 and 7-12 in the Big Ten, and will miss the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time in Miller's four years. And you think that's bad?

Bad is when you still have a pulse and they're already planning your funeral.

Miller's still IU's basketball coach, after all, and no one in a position to say otherwise has said otherwise. And yet I tuned in local sports-talk radio the other day, and they were speculating on who the next IU coach would be.

At first I thought I'd somehow missed the news that Miller had been fired. But, no. This was just the basketball version of last rites.

And so on the radio, and all across Indiana, people are dreaming their dreams. They're wondering what it would take to buy out Scott Drew at Baylor, or Celtics coach Brad Stevens. Steve Alford, that hardy perennial, has emerged in conversation again. Or what about Dane Fife up there at Michigan State?

Indiana needs an Indiana guy, the thinking goes. Which of course ignores the fact that the most successful coach in the program's history had no Indiana ties whatsoever.

And, listen, Scott Drew is a pipe dream, too. He has Indiana roots but, after 18 years in Waco, he has deeper roots in Texas. He's Mr. Baylor now, just as Bob Knight was Mr. Indiana even though he was an Ohio State boy. So no matter how much money Indiana could throw at Scott Drew, Baylor would no doubt match or exceed it.

Ditto Brad Stevens. The Celtics are having an awful year, but Stevens is still one of the brightest coaching minds in the NBA. He's not coming back to college.

So who, then?

I don't know.  What I do know is the IU job doesn't have nearly the cache it used to, no matter what its delusional fan base thinks. Baylor has more basketball bonafides now, which is another reason Drew wouldn't leave.

And in any event, this entire discussion feels creepy anyway, given that Miller's corpse isn't cold yet. Hell, it's not even a corpse.

What IU fans are chasing, however, is a ghost. What they really want is another Bob Knight, and there's only one of those. Everyone else the alums are going to crab about -- which is why they ran off Mike Davis even after Davis got IU to its only Final Four in the last 28 years, and why they ran off Tom Crean even though he won two Big Ten titles and got the Hoosiers to three Sweet Sixteens, and coached teams that won 29 and 27 games, respectively.

Think Crimson Nation wouldn't take that in a heartbeat right now?

Think it's thinking, "Dang, we screwed up"?

That would be a "yes" to No. 1. And a grudging "maybe" to No. 2.