Trigger (un)happy

 Mike Woodson said at the top of the week he knew the fans love Indiana basketball, and he just hoped they still loved him. Then his Hoosiers laid down in Assembly Hall and let Zach Edey leave tire tracks on them for two hours, and went up to Wisconsin and embarrassed themselves in a variety of ways.

And now FireMikeWoodson.com is a thing, surprise, surprise.

Just like FireMikeDavis.com was a thing.

Just like FireKelvinSampson.com was a thing.

Just like FireTomCrean.com was a thing, and also FireArchieMiller.com, as if any IU fan could forget that.

Indiana's fan base is one of the most delusional in America, we all know that, pining as it does for the good old days when the boys never played like bums (they did, occasionally) and Sir Bob of Knight delivered national championships every other year (he didn't). So the candy-stripe brigade's stridency over what happened this week was as predictable as sunrise.

You get floor-waxed in the Hall by your fiercest rival, then go up to Wisky and not only lose but look like an unmade bed doing it, the wrath is a-comin'. Some of it actually is warranted; some of it is as unhinged as fan wrath always is.

Case in point: All the howling about how undisciplined Woodson's program is, a lot of which centered on CJ Gunn's Flagrant 2 ejection for elbowing Wisconsin's Max Klesmit. It was Indiana's seventh flagrant this season, the most in the nation. Disciplined teams don't do that, the howlers maintain, and it's hard to argue otherwise.

However.

However, the Blob has finally seen a clip of this latest crime against Indiana basketball. And it's a damn parking ticket.

Not only wasn't it a Flagrant 2 or anything remotely close, it shouldn't have been a foul. period. Watch it, rewind it, and watch it again, and all you're gonna see is two guys jostling each other the way basketball players do a hundred times a game. Klesmit leans into Gunn with his head  (not "wiping his sweat on him", as the narrative has it); Gunn pushes him away with an "elbow" that Klesmit sells like a vaudevillian.

Why the game official didn't just walk over and say "Knock it off, you two" is beyond me. Because that's all the whole thing warranted. 

Unfortunately, when you lead the nation in flagrants, you get a reputation, and reputation sometimes earns you a whistle. It's a reputation the Indiana fan base hates, because it violates everything IU fans believe about their program. And mostly they're right in thinking that.

But the rest?

Seems a tad over the top, a place with which the candy-stripers seem well familiar. Yes, these are not the Bob Knight Hoosiers, and they don't play the way the Bob Knight Hoosiers played, for the same reason no one shoots set shots anymore. Yes, they play sometimes without discipline or a visible plan or, worst of all, passion. And, yes, Woodson too often seems to downplay all that, vacillating wildly between either letting his players off the hook or throwing them under the bus.

In short, there's no consistency. About that, the fan base is right.

But to begin grumbling that IU needs to move on from Woodson three seasons in, as the FireMikeWoodson contingent already is doing?

That's the over-the-top part. Also the not particularly bright part.

It's now been 24 years since Sir Bob finally pushed IU into firing him, and Indiana is on its fifth successor. That's a new regime every five years on the average -- slightly less, actually. That's no way to bring back the glory days, which get more glorious in fable than in fact every passing year.

Continuity means something, or used to, but for a quarter century IU has shunned it like you shun your crazy Uncle Fred. With the exception of Sampson, a cheater who left the program a smoking ruin, this restlessness has been Indiana's own doing, driven by the restlessness of its fan base. Only with Crean did IU let a coach stick around long enough to learn his kids' names, and eventually Crimson Nation managed to run him off.

(Crean, it should be noted, took a program of walk-ons and had it ranked No. 1 in just five seasons. In his last five seasons, he won two undisputed Big Ten titles -- Indiana's first in a 20-year span that included Knight's final seven seasons -- and made the NCAA Tournament four times. Throw out the first two seasons, when the program was utterly prostrate, and his record in Bloomington was 150-89, a .627 winning percentage. But it still wasn't enough.)

Anyway ... Crean left, and Indiana hired Miller, and that didn't work. And then they hired Woodson, a former Knight player. And three years in, the bloom is off that rose, too.

Look. I get it. The landscape of college basketball is all different now, with the unfettered transfer portal and NIL turning it into a virtually lawless 24/7 bidding market. That's heightened the impatience that always been there in certain places, Indiana among them.

But it's also turned college buckets into more of a democracy than it's ever been, in the sense everyone has players now. That's why there have been six different NCAA champions in the last six years, and why there hasn't been a back-to-back champ since Florida 17 years ago. And why schools like Florida Atlantic are getting to the Final Four.

Florida Atlantic, which is coached by Dusty May, an IU grad.

Dusty May, whom some IU fans are already convincing themselves is Finally The Guy.

Can FireDustyMay.com be far behind?