The Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team is the intercollegiate men's basketball program representing Indiana University (IU). The school competes in the Big Ten Conference in Division I of the NCAA. The Hoosiers play on Branch McCracken Court at the Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Indiana on the IU campus. Indiana has won five NCAA Championships in men's basketball (1940, 1953, 1976, 1981, 1987) — the first two under coach Branch McCracken and the latter three under Bob Knight. The Hoosiers' five NCAA Championships are tied for third in history with North Carolina (5), trailing only UCLA (11), and Kentucky (8). Indiana's 1976 squad remains the last undefeated NCAA men's basketball champion.
The Hoosiers are also sixth in NCAA Tournament appearances (36), sixth in NCAA Tournament victories (62), seventh in Final Four appearances (8), and 11th in overall victories (1,665). The Hoosiers have won 20 Big Ten Conference Championships and have the best winning percentage in conference games at nearly 60 percent. No team has had more All-Big Ten selections than the Hoosiers with 53. The Hoosiers also rank seventh in all-time AP poll appearances and sixth in the number of weeks spent ranked No. 1. Every four-year men's basketball letterman since 1973 has earned a trip to the NCAA basketball tournament. Additionally, every four-year player since 1950 has played on a nationally ranked squad at Indiana.
A 2012 study listed Indiana as the third most valuable collegiate basketball program in the country. Indiana has ranked in the top 15 nationally in men's basketball attendance every season since Assembly Hall opened in 1972, and often in the top five. When asked if Indiana basketball fans were the most passionate in the country, ESPN commentator Dick Vitale said, "I don't think there's any doubt about it. They eat, sleep and drink the game." Basketball sportscaster Gus Johnson called Assembly Hall, "the Carnegie Hall of basketball."
Indiana has intense rivalries both in-state, against the Purdue Boilermakers (see Indiana-Purdue rivalry), and out-of-state, against the Kentucky Wildcats (see Indiana–Kentucky rivalry). The team is currently coached by Tom Crean.
Read more about Indiana Hoosiers Men's Basketball: Season By Season Records, Current Staff and Players, Coaching History, Post-season
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“The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“He who will one day teach men to fly will have displaced all boundary stones; the boundary stones themselves will fly up into the air to him, and he will rebaptize the earth—as “the weightless.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)