He exited smiling, his team victorious, his tie still tightly knotted, his back getting abused as he passed through a cordon of his team’s fans. But later, in his first news conference as the head coach of Indiana, there was a certain melancholy about Dan Dakich.
“Not right now,” he said when asked if he could enjoy his inaugural triumph at his alma mater. “I have a lot of emotions about this. Feelings for (deposed coach Kelvin Sampson). I know what he and his family are going through. Feelings for our players. I know what they’re going through. No. No. Let me put it this way. I feel a lot better that this is my first win as opposed to this is my first loss. Now we move on and just continually get better.”
It has to get better for him and his Hoosiers, who faced Northwestern on Saturday night just 31 hours after Sampson, under a cloud for alleged NCAA rules violations, resigned as their coach. Dakich was announced as his interim replacement Friday evening, but before that star D.J. White and five others hadn’t attended the first practice he ran that afternoon.
“It just wasn’t the same not having [Sampson] around,” one of those half-dozen, guard Armon Bassett, said Saturday.
“He wasn’t like a coach. He was more like a father to us,” added freshman sensation Eric Gordon, who was not among those who skipped practice.
“I thought it was natural,” Dakich said when asked about those absences. “It isn’t like they boycotted. They got told at 11:45, I think. I finished up a meeting with them at 12:30, then to ask them to go practice, some do, some don’t. They’re 18- to 22-year-old kids. I mean, I’m having a hard time with it, and I’ve been through some things. …
“D.J. White’s issues had nothing to do with, were far deeper than just practice. This is the second time D.J. has been through something like this. (He also went through the change from Mike Davis to Sampson.) … I’m sure everybody out here has an opinion of how this should have gone, but your opinion is not based on being 18- to 22-year-olds, 25, 26 games into the season, the guy you’ve worked with, the guy you’ve loved, and now for whatever reason he’s no longer there. That’s a difficult thing. There was no chance I was going to demand they be there.”
That is how Dakich, who played for and coached under Bob Knight at Indiana and just last year was the head coach at Bowling Green, weathered that storm. By 9 p.m. Friday the clouds had cleared enough that all his Hoosiers were on hand for a final walk-through session at their Assembly Hall.
Their plane took off from Bloomington late Saturday morning, and their team bus from the airport pulled up to the curb near Gate U of Ryan Field about 1 p.m. Out of it spilled all 13 of his players for a shootaround.
That ended any idea they would boycott the Northwestern game, which the players had discussed. But when they appeared for it that night, they did have Sampson’s initials written on their shoes. Then during the game itself, it often appeared as if it were not the Wildcats who were on their minds. It was, instead, their old coach and the chaos of the last weeks.
But they hung on for an 85-82 victory and White, with his 17th double-double of the season, made crucial plays in the final seconds. But they missed foul shots. They made mental errors. They committed unforced turnovers. Their tempers flared at the slightest provocation. They closed slowly on Wildcats shooters and reacted lethargically to the Wildcats’ back-door cuts.
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These were not championship performances. These were signs of a drained and distracted team.
“I expected that,” Dakich said. “This is a loud team. This is a team that has real personality. This is the first time …
“Truly, I think, when the plane took off, you know how you get just drained. It has been a tough week on these kids and I knew it was going to carry over, quite frankly. … We knew this wasn’t going to be easy.”
Is it all behind them now?
“It’s [not] something you put behind you truly in 24, 48 hours,” he said. “Things take time. But this is a resilient group. … They’ve been taught that way.”
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