Same IU. Different day.

There are two ways you can look at what happened to your Indiana men's basketball team in the Bahamas yesterday, which was basically the basketball version of falling asleep on a beach in the Bahamas and waking up with an epic sunburn:

You can look at it and say, "The hell was that, Indiana?"

Or you can look at it and say, "No, really, the hell was THAT?"

That was a rump-roasting, is what it was. Also a lamination, a floor-waxing, Wile-E.-Coyote-getting-run-over-by-an-Acme-truck.

The final was unranked Louisville 89, No. 14 Indiana 61, and that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was Louisville's first-year coach, Pat Kelsey, easing off the throttle the way you would against some Hyphen Directional Tech State.

With seven minutes to play.

With seven minutes to play, see, Kelsey began clearing his bench. This is because Louisville led by 38 points at the time. Had Kelsey decided not to let the Hoosiers up easy, the Cardinals might have won by 50.

As it was, it was still the worst loss by a ranked Indiana team against an unranked team in 70 years. according to Stathead. And why was that?

Because Mike Woodson's Hoosiers, who landed the No. 2 transfer portal class during the offseason, still played like Mike Woodson's Hoosiers.

Which is to say, the new guys still performed all of Indiana's old tricks. They were inexcusably careless with the basketball, turning it over a staggering 23 times. They guarded the perimeter the way Sgt. Schultz used to guard Colonel Hogan, resulting in 10 Louisville3-pointers. And they couldn't throw it in the ocean on their end, missing 13 of their 20 threes and shooting 33 percent overall.

The Hoosiers imported backcourt studs Myles Rice from Washington State and Kanaan Carlyle from Stanford to remedy a lot of this, but the remedy looked like the same old malady against Louisville. Among the three of them, Rice, Carlyle and Trey Galloway shot 1-for-15 and turned it over nine times while managing just two combined assists. Galloway in particular was wretched, going scoreless with one rebound, zero assists and two turnovers in 20 listless minutes.

And now?

Now the Hoosiers get No. 3 Gonzaga, which was upset in its game at the  Bad Boy Mowers Battle 4 Atlantis.

(No, really. That's the name of the tournament. You think I could make that up?)

In any case, what this means is it's not likely to get much better before it gets worse. And that means the heat is going to cranked up that much more for Woodson, who was already under fire from Indiana's perpetually crabby fan base because his boys don't, you know, play like Bob Knight's boys used to. Or like the fan base seems to remember they did.

Now, if you wanted to cut Woody some slack, you could say for all the talent he imported this year, talent isn't team. Presumably it's going to take awhile for that to happen, for the new guys and the old guys to become that one fist coaches love to talk about. So the inclination among the less rabid is to give it a few more weeks and then see what Woodson's team looks like.

However.

However, it should be noted that Louisville turned over nearly its entire roster this offseason, and has a new coach besides. And unfamiliarity with one another didn't stop the Cardinals from functioning like a machine at both ends. 

Therefore ...

Therefore, this dreary assessment: SIUDD.

Same IU. Different day.