Can Archie Miller fill shoes this big at IU?

It’s a little bit like Christmas whenever a blue-blood program begins a head coaching search. Excitement fills the air. Oh, the possibilities.

First, there are rumors – wild, unruly, unsubstantiated rumors- “I swear Steve Alford is coming back home again to Indiana [1]. They even offered him a contract. My buddy’s uncle’s neighbor said that he saw Billy Donovan’s wife checking out houses in Bloomington. I heard that Fred Glass is actively trying to coax John Wooden back from the dead to return IU to glory.”

And then, there is fact. And the fact is that Archie Miller is the head coach of the Indiana University basketball team. A round of applause to athletic director Fred Glass. What a find it was.

The 38-year took Dayton to four straight NCAA tournaments, twice as an at-large. You know who hasn’t been to four straight NCAAs? Most schools including Syracuse, Georgetown, Ohio State and, yes, Indiana.

But little Dayton has. They didn’t just show up for those four years either, Miller’s Dayton Flyers won five games, even advancing to the Elite Eight in 2014.

I don’t need to remind you which southern Indiana center for higher education hasn’t been to the Elite Eight in the last four years.

But it’s not that 2014 run that makes Miller’s resume pop. It’s the consistent amount of overachievement that does.

Miller coached at Dayton for six seasons. Five times they won over 20 games. The one season they didn’t, they still finished above .500.

Wouldn’t that be nice, Indiana, to have a team that consistently plays at a high level?

And he did it without any four- or five- or six-star recruits. No one-and-dones there. Miller consistently molded unheralded players into perennial tournament participants.

Now Miller will be facing much higher expectations. Those five banners dangling in Assembly Hall carry a heavy weight. Two of his predecessors (Mike Davis and Tom Crean) couldn’t fulfill those expectations [2]. How Miller will handle it is yet to be determined.

Can he keep the Trevon Blueitts and the Romeo Langfords in state? Keeping the Hoosiers’ lead recruiter, Tim Buckley, on staff would be a good start.

Can he successfully urge his teams to play at the über alles [3] level that Hoosier fans demand? Hard to tell, but recent history shows that he could.

If you’re interested in all those advanced metric mumbo-jumbos, out of 350 programs, IU ranked thusly over the last four years: Efficiency: 41.5, offense: 54.8 [4] and defense: 100.8. That defense number is obviously terrible. 

Dayton ranked as follows: Efficiency: 45.5, offense: 77.3 and defense: 39.8. The numbers show that both Indiana and Dayton finished in the upper third nationally in each category, only separated by four spots overall.

That these two schools were that close speaks volumes about how Miller ran his program. Dayton, with a fraction of IU’s budget, a fraction of IU’s resources and a galaxy away from IU’s overall prestige, held their own against mighty IU on the basketball court, even vastly outperformed the Hoosiers on the defensive side of the ball.

I’m going to preface this next paragraph with this: I’m not comparing Miller to Bobby Knight.

Go back in time: Before the banners and the cut-down nets. Before Damon Bailey, Steve Alford and Isiah Thomas. Before Quinn, Scott, Bobby, Kent and that rest of the Undefeated ’76 squad. Go back to before all of that, and you will find a 31-year-old who won 67 percent of his games during a six-year stint at Army.

No one knew that Bobby Knight would become one of the greatest head coaches of all time. We don’t know what will become of Archie Miller. We don’t know how many, if any, banners will be added to the quintet already in place.

But what IU does have is a 38-year-old who won 69 percent of his games during a six-year stint at Dayton. And that, my friends, is as good a place to start as any.