The pick. (With questions)

 So I'm watching Michigan put Florida State's season on the shelf, and I can see this now. Sort of. Maybe.

I'm looking at my TV, and there is Juwan Howard with his NBA resume, and there is Phil Martelli with his college resume, and I see what Indiana's thinking. If it could work in Ann Arbor ...

And so to the Hire, to Mike Woodson coming home to Assembly Hall as Indiana's fourth head coach since Bob Knight, to a 63-year-old NBA lifer who's been a head coach for more than 600 NBA games, most of them losses. He's Indiana's version of Howard, albeit 15 years older. Thad Matta, also hired yesterday as IU's associate AD for basketball, fills the role of Martelli, sort of. 

Gotta think that's the thinking, anyway.

Gotta wonder, also, how long-term is Indiana's thinking, given that if Woodson fulfills his reported six-year deal, he'll be nearly 70 when it's time to re-up it.

So there's my first question.

My second question is why Indiana would again do something that feels like an experiment, when athletic director Scott Dolson said Indiana was done with experiments where its basketball job was concerned. But that's not really so much a question as an observation.

So is this: College basketball is not the same game it was 40-some years ago when Mike Woodson played there. Which is what makes me think this could actually work, maybe.

Look. It's great Woodson's a legacy Hoosier and all, and that he played for Bob Knight, whose shadow continues to enrich Indiana basketball's past while restraining its future. That at least will satisfy the diehard Bobbyheads. 

What will satisfy today's recruits, on the other hand, is entirely different. And that's where Woodson's NBA cred is a plus.

First off, anyone who thinks he's going to come in and install some version of Knight's prehistoric  motion offense will likely be sorely disillusioned, because you don't attract talent in 2021 by saying "Come to IU and set screens for four years."  Those days are done.

No, the college game looks and operates a lot like the NBA now. It, too, is professional basketball in everything but semantics, operating by the same business model and motivated by the same imperatives. Which means, theoretically at least, that the college game should not be nearly the alien landscape to an NBA lifer that it was 40 years ago.

That dovetails neatly with another reality: No one's going to come to IU because they've always dreamed of playing for Mike Woodson. To kids in 2021, Mike Woodson is just some old guy who played at IU when there were still laces on the basketball. What they'll come for is Woodson is a guy who's played and coached in the NBA for 40 years and knows what it takes to get there and stay there.

So IU buckets under Woodson will likely look a lot more like the NBA than the '76 (or '81 or '87) Hoosiers. And if Woodson was never successful with that model in the NBA, he did make the teams he coached better.

In Atlanta, he took the Hawks to the playoffs in 2007-08 for the first time in eight years, and got them to the Eastern Conference semifinals the next two seasons. And in New York, he went 18-6  after taking over the sadsack Knicks in March 2012, then wrung 54 wins out of them the next season.

Ultimately he lost his job in both places, because the Hawks were the Hawks and the Knicks were the Knicks. But both teams got better under his hand.

That's a salient point in Bloomington after four years of Archie Miller, during which the Hoosiers consistently got worse the longer the season went on.

That's not likely to recur if Woodson's track record is any guide.

And will that be enough for the perpetually disgruntled IU fan base?

Maybe. Sort of. We'll see.