Indiana Head Coach Tom Crean On The Game Against The Terps In College Park
Tom Crean is the head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers Men's Basketball team and also brother-in-law of Jim and John Harbaugh.
Coach Crean joined Ed and Steve to talk about his team's game against the Terps at the Xfinity Center in College Park tomorrow tonight.
Tom started off by talking about whether or not John Harbaugh will attend the game tonight saying "I think he is, I think the plan is that he is coming...don't know if I'll see him before the game." As for who John will be rooting for and where he'll be sitting Coach Crean said "I know he loves Maryland... we have to have him behind the bench." He talks about the Harbaugh family and some of the sporting events that they've been through together including Super Bowl XLVII.
The guys discuss the eye poking incident from Sunday's Terps game with Iowa. Tom Crean doesn't believe the incident was malicious or intentional but does admit that he hasn't seen the other footage of Woodbury jabbing two Wisconsin players in the eye either. The two incidents in the Iowa-Wisconsin game, as Steve and Ed said, looked much more intentional than the incident with Trimble. "There's things that happen in games at all sports levels that are malicious and I just don't see it like that." Crean said, "I'm not being an apologist, I just really don't. I don't see it like that and really I don't have any concern about that when we play them."
Coach Crean talks about his team that just dropped out of the Top 25 last week. "What I like about this team is they're resilient... we are very very young and extremely young in the sense that when those KenPom Rankings come out they've always got us at 335 when it comes to experience which I think there's about 347-350 Division I teams. But what we're doing is growing up because they're learning. We're learning from losses. We've built on wins. We've got to take the next step now being harder when it's not going as well for us. That's what's scary about tomorrow night. We know that they're going to be very good anyways. They're outstanding at home. We know they've been shooting for this game. We've been reading some of the comments since we played them here." He goes on to talk about how his team needs to improve, playing through the ups and downs and runs of games.
Tom also talks about what it's like to coach at a school like Indiana and in a place like Assembly Hall. He discusses how high the pressure can be and the good that comes from the fan passion and support. They talk about how tough that kind of internal and external pressure can be on a coach and how his brother-in-law Jim was dealing with it even though he was having a high rate of success.
