Bob Cook

Kelvin Sampson’s long, sordid departure is the latest manifestation of a new Indiana basketball tradition — the never-a-dull-moment way their coaches live out their final days on the job.

Bob Knight had four months of school-imposed “zero tolerance” of his volcanic temper before What’s-up-Knight-gate got him fired in 2000. Mike Davis set an unofficial NCAA record for twisting in the wind by narrowly avoiding firing for six seasons before showing himself the door soon after getting “sick” for a home game that featured a fan protest against him.

Sampson’s 2006 hiring from Oklahoma was shrouded from the start by NCAA allegations that he illegally made hundreds of calls to recruits, which put him on probation but didn’t stop him, according to NCAA investigators, from another 100 instances of illegal dialing at Indiana, a number roughly equal to the number of bad cell phone puns his conduct inspired from sportswriters. Oh, and he added lying to NCAA and Indiana athletic department investigators to his resume, a deciding factor in limiting Sampson’s tenure to not-quite-two seasons.

Indiana should take advantage of the extra time Sampson has given its head coach search to re-start a previous tradition — a coach who generates more excitement by his long, glorious tenure than he does by his long, inglorious demise.

There is no need to rush. Firing Knight just before the 2000-01 season started is how it accidentally got stuck with Davis. There is no need to hire the biggest name who will take the job. That is how Indiana, which has a relatively small budget for a school with big-time athletics, got stuck with Sampson.

There certainly is no need to hire back Knight himself. Yes, he’s available, thanks to quitting Texas Tech in midseason. But Indiana doesn’t need a 67-year-old coach who has declared himself too tired, and it doesn’t need to re-establish the school as Bob Knight University with the alumni and fan anger over his firing having finally subsided to a dull roar.

Indiana doesn’t need to hire anybody with ties to Knight. Bringing in someone like Steve Alford, doing a fine job at New Mexico after struggling with winning and handling player misconduct at Iowa, is too much pressure on the program and on the coach to pretend like it’s the good old days of Knight all over again.

Interim head coach Dan Dakich is ill-suited to the job, even when you take out his long connection to Knight — four years as a player, 12 years as an assistant. (In Indiana, Dakich is still remembered as the guy who shut down Michael Jordan during the Hoosiers’ upset of North Carolina in the 1984 East Regional round of 16, Jordan’s final college game.)

Dakich’s road to the interim job is completely accidental. Dakich came back to Indiana last year as director of basketball operations after 10 years at Bowling Green, resigning after four losing seasons in five years and reprimands from his school and conference over his profane criticism of referees (a chip off the ol' Knight block, he is). He became an assistant again only after Indiana fired Rob Senderoff, the scapegoat in the athletic department’s initial investigation into illegal phone calls to recruits.

Sampson in trouble at Indiana Hoosiers barely win in Dakich’s first game Indiana buys out Sampson, players don't mutiny SN: Indiana’s descent has only just begun Opinion: Time for IU to start fresh tradition Vote: Who should be Indiana's new coach Opinion: School betrayed by lying hypocrite Vote: Will Sampson coach again?  |    Discuss

Dakich had a chance to be a big-time head coach once before, in 2002, when he took the job at West Virginia. But he returned to Bowling Green after one week because of family reasons (Dakich’s take) or because he had discovered a potential rules violation and reacted by trying to immediately get a longer, more lucrative contract (the school’s take).

That doesn’t sound like someone you want holding the keys to one of America’s most storied college basketball programs. Perhaps Dakich takes the current 22-4 team, keeps winning, gets an NCAA title and becomes the Steve Fisher of his generation. Given how things ended up for Fisher, his probation-wracked Michigan program, and the subsequent sorry state of Wolverines basketball, that scenario should serve as a warning to Indiana.

Athletic director Rick Greenspan, who hired Sampson while the school’s then-president himself had one foot out the door in his long, sordid departure, has gotten the ol’ vote of confidence from current president Michael McRobbie, who is crediting Greenspan with unearthing Sampson’s conduct and not blaming him for picking him in the first place.

With the late Terry Hoeppner and successor Bill Lynch in football, Greenspan established a way to choose a coach that is easily applicable, and more important, to basketball. That is, hire an Indiana native with no direct ties to the university, but one who intrinsically understands how important it is to the people of the state, and to its alumni. That person should be an established winner who has been above ethical reproach.