Just another L

 This is some perilous country Mike Woodson is traveling now, because it's not a country a basketball coach at Indiana would ever want to see or ever should see. That's because it's a country with which Indiana football is entirely familiar.

Call it the Country of Diminished Expectation.

It's a place where alums in Memorial Stadium watch Indiana almost beat Ohio State or Michigan or some other heavyweight on occasion, and leave thinking they've gotten their donation's worth. "Hey, the boys put up a fight," is what you hear in this place. Also, "Look at this, we didn't get pushed around like usual! That's progress, right?"

Listen very carefully, and you heard some of that after Illinois 70, Indiana 62 yesterday.

The boys played hard! They didn't get pushed around on the road by the No. 10 team in the nation! This was PROGRESS!

That sort of thing.

Now, the Bobbyheads and diehards undoubtedly hated that with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. They're probably still grinding their molars to dust over it this morning. And you can't really blame 'em, because moral victories are regarded as shameful cop-out at places like Indiana, where past glories are never really past.

It's why the Hoosiers are on their fifth coach since Bob Knight ran himself off 24 years ago. It's why the bar is set by the more delusional at a height that's absurdly unrealistic in this era of college buckets. 

But you know what?

It's not at all unrealistic to set it higher than it seems to be now.

What we saw in Champaign yesterday was yet an IU team that's glaringly out of step with basketball as it exists in 2024, and that's on Woodson. He put a team together, after all, that can't make a three to save its life. In fact that's exactly what happened yesterday, when the Hoosiers went 0-for-9 from behind the arc and had to rely on an inside game that was missing Kel'el Ware.

Malik Reneau (21 points before fouling out) and Mackenzie Mgbako (12 and 12 boards) did what they could, but getting outscored 21-0 from Threeville was too much to overcome. And just to rub it in a bit, a Fort Wayne kid (Luke Goode) splashed three of the Illini's seven triples. Here's a little present from the Hoosier state, Indiana.

Your bottom line to all this?

You can't win in the era of  Steph Curry 'n' them if you can't hit a barn door from distance.  And the Hoosiers can't.

Woodson can't do anything about that right now. What he can do is demand a consistent effort, and sometimes that isn't there, either. It's why The Boys Played Hard is a balm now for some Indiana fans, soothing syrup to make another L go down easier.

Not that another L should ever go down easy, in B-town. Nor should The Boys Played Hard be anything but a given.

That the first seems to be happening, and the second is not, should be what keeps Woodson awake nights. And probably does.