By the time Tim Tebow completes his career he might go down as the best player in the history of college football. He also might go down as one of chief inspirations for the rebuilding of Indiana’s probation-ravaged basketball program.
How does Tebow motivate Coach Tom Crean and the Indiana Hoosiers, who finished 6-25 in the first year of an NCAA probation caused by former coach Kelvin Sampson?
“We used him in different video hits this year to show toughness personified, doing whatever it takes, great leadership, never flinching in the pocket …” said Crean, who came to Gainesville with his staff Friday afternoon to watch Urban Meyer and the Florida Gators go through their final practice before Saturday’s Orange and Blue Game (1 p.m., Ben Hill Griffin Stadium).
Crean is a big fan of Tebow, Meyer and the Gators. The connections to the Florida program are many. Crean is a close friend of Florida strength and conditioning coach Mickey Marotti. Marotti’s right hand man is Scott Holsopple, who was Crean’s strength and conditioning coach when he was the basketball coach at Marquette. His wife Joani is the sister of Jim Harbaugh (Stanford football coach) and John Harbaugh (head coach of the Baltimore Ravens of the NFL). Joani used to babysit Bryan and Lisa Mattison, the children of Greg Mattison, the former co-defensive coordinator at Florida (2005-2007) and now the defensive coordinator of the Ravens under John Harbaugh.
Through Holsopple, Crean keeps up with the Gators and he pays close attention to Tebow and “how much stronger he’s gotten.”
Friday, Crean got an up close and personal look at Tebow but the chief reason he brought his staff to Gainesville after spending the morning doing some recruiting was to watch how Meyer conducts a practice. He might be a basketball coach but he’s not above borrowing some technique or motivational tool to use on his basketball team.
“I learn from baseball, I learn from hockey and I probably learn more from football and it’s technique and it’s terminology,” he said. “It’s so much about leverage. The game is about bending your knees and dropping your shoulders. So anything you can learn from somebody else I want to do that. We recruited this morning and we’re right out here.”
While taking in Florida’s practice with hundreds of other coaches from around the country, he got to talk New England Patriots coach Bill Bellichick. He shuffled from practice field to practice field, watching each drill closely, taking mental notes and scribbling down ideas on note cards.
“I got pages of notes,” Crean said. “I’ve got cards of notes. What it does it makes me think of something we can do and that’s what you want. I don’t feel boxed in to just what basketball coaches are doing. I never have. I want to learn from the best. You come out here and see this and it means a lot.”
What impressed him about Meyer, who he met in person for the first time Friday, was the way he conducted a high-energy practice. Crean was wowed by the pace and intensity.
“The biggest thing I walk out of practice with is there was not one member of this staff from the head coach to the graduate assistants that wasn’t high energy for the two to two and a half hours, starting with stretching and ending with the meetings,” Crean said. “That reinvigorates me to exactly the way it’s supposed to look like.”
Crean will take the new ideas and thoughts back to Bloomington where he is charged with rebuilding an Indiana program that was practically destroyed by former coach Kelvin Sampson. Already sanctioned by the NCAA for what he had done as the head coach at Oklahoma (hundreds of illegal recruiting phone calls), Sampson repeated the same mistakes at Indiana and when caught, lied about what he had done to the administration and the NCAA. Sampson was fired and Indiana self-imposed scholarship reductions.
When Crean came to IU from Marquette, where he was 190-96 in nine years as the head coach, he immediately went about the business of cleaning up the program. That meant sending several scholarship players packing for failing to live up to academic standards. Left with two scholarship players, he brought in seven new ones and played the recently completed season with just nine on scholarship.
He has an outstanding recruiting class coming in for next season but he knows the rebuilding process has just begun.
“I think it takes time but it takes consistent time,” he said. “We have to be visible. We had to get the state back and it worked to get the state back so much in recruiting. That will take some time but the only thing you can do is be consistent, be diligent, work hard at it every day and be visible with people. It’s the same thing with our fans. I couldn’t have imagined what it was like … we had one Big Ten win but we had four sellouts inside the Big Ten. That doesn’t happen in many places.”
Getting the Indiana program back to the level of consistent success it enjoyed in the Bob Knight era (three national championship teams) means bringing back a level of integrity to a school that never had a hint of wrongdoing under Knight. And that’s another reason why he was in Gainesville.
Meyer has won two national championships in the past three years and he’s done it by following the rules, raising the team GPA to the highest levels in school history and by graduating his players (13 seniors, 13 graduates this year, for example).
Crean would like that kind of success at Indiana.
“We had to gut a program and try to rebuild it from scratch as much as any I can think of in recent memory,” he said. “We’re trying to build on a great tradition and build a foundation back up and learn everything we can possibly learn about what great programs look like and that’s why we’re here today.
“We use Florida football in a lot of examples as we build our program back up. It’s building the toughness and things like that.”