They butted heads, sure. Just as Dee Brown butted heads with Bruce Weber when Weber succeeded Bill Self at Illinois, just as Rashad McCants butted heads with Roy Williams when Williams succeeded Matt Doherty at North Carolina.
So it was not unexpected, nor was it a cause for screaming headlines. It was, quite simply, inevitable.
It is what happens always when a new coach lands at a school and inherits his players and begins imbuing those players with his style, beliefs and ways of doing business.
So it was no surprise that there were some fractious moments when Kelvin Sampson succeeded Mike Davis at Indiana and began prodding point guard Earl Calloway to alter the way he had long operated.
“At the beginning, I was just playing the type of ball I was known for,” remembers Calloway, who had operated only at warp speed.
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“I didn’t know whether to call him apple or blueberry or pineapple, because all I saw were turnovers,” Sampson remembers. “Early in the season, Earl was chasing two rabbits, and if you chase two rabbits, you aren’t going to catch either one. He was uncomfortable. You could just tell.”
And what caused that?
“Having a new coach putting new demands on him,” Sampson succinctly says.
That is why Calloway can now serve as a symbol of the Hoosiers, who can safely be called one of the surprises of this Big Ten campaign. A transition year is never easy for either the new coach or his players, but already they have accepted Sampson’s approach and emerged as the best of their league’s rest behind Wisconsin and Ohio State.
Relatively speaking, it has been a smooth transition in Bloomington, and that is a credit to a group of players who recognized Sampson’s message early and embraced it with a minimum of fuss. Not that there wasn’t some, especially back in the fall.
“There were,” Sampson explains, “certain things we wanted done a certain way.
“You have A, B and C to move to a certain point, and I was bound and determined that they were not going to go to B until we were good at A. There were certain days in practice we did just one thing. . . . They thought they were working hard in October. But there’s always another level to how hard you can play, and the challenge for the coach is to get them there.
“That’s where you usually butt heads. But hard work and how hard we play are not negotiable items here. That’s not something we sit around and talk about. The thing that helped is the kids. We don’t have any jerks. Every one of them is coachable. Every one of them wants to learn. Every one of them wants to do well.”
Forward D.J. White echoes: “There’s no selfish players here.”
But still there were some moments on the way from then to now. Many of them occurred at practice, where Sampson was dissatisfied with his Hoosiers’ collective effort.
“OK. Come tomorrow at 6 o’clock,” he would tell them on those occasions, ordering them to a morning practice.
“Do that two or three times, then practice again that afternoon, guys start to think, `OK, practice is important to him,'” Sampson explains.
“Hard,” Calloway says when asked to describe those days, and then he smiles. “No. It was cool. It helped us. . . . He wants you to get better. He wants you to improve every aspect of your game. When you think you’re being pushed to a certain level, there’s still always room for improvement. That’s what he did. He made us improve.”
A testament to that is Calloway himself, who in seven Big Ten games has handed out 37 assists and committed just 12 turnovers for a glittering ratio of 3.08-to-1. That is far better than his ratio of last season (1.35-to-1), which shows just how quickly he bought into Sampson.
“We have a chance to be a pretty good team because of Earl,” Sampson says.
“Somewhat,” says Calloway when asked if that belief adds pressure to his shoulders. “It’s good, though. I understand what he’s trying to do. He wants me to be an extension of him on the court.”
Which means you do what?
“Be intense and think what he’s thinking,” he says.
Can anyone be as intense as him?
“I try to be. I try to be,” says Calloway, smiling.
Since no story these days is complete without a Super Bowl reference, here is what Sampson had to say about Sunday’s game. “Being from Indiana, you pull for the Colts. But you’re a little torn because I like Rex’s (Grossman) father. He’s been really nice to me since I’ve been here. So I’m pulling for Rex to have a great game, but I’d like to see the Colts win. The Bears also have a lot of kids from Oklahoma that I know, so I’d like to see the Bears play well. Tommie Harris and my son Kellen went over to Africa this summer on a mission trip.”… While Indiana is the surprising success in the Big Ten, the surprising disappointment is Penn State. Expected to challenge for an NCAA tournament bid, the Nittany Lions are at the bottom of the conference standings. . . . Illinois’ loss at Purdue was not that much of a surprise. The Boilermakers were picked early as a team on the rise and have lived up to that selection, which means they do a good job at home while still looking for a way to win on the road. . . . After its near miss Saturday at Ohio State, it will be revelatory to see what Michigan State does on its Tuesday trip to Illinois and at home Saturday against the Buckeyes.
Game of the week, Wisconsin at Indiana on Wednesday. The last tough test for the Badgers until they travel to Michigan State on Feb. 20.
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