CHICAGO — After months of speculation, the Indiana Hoosiers will not be playing in the NCAA Tournament this year. In a year that has brought so much athletic success in Bloomington, one of the school’s most decorated programs will be watching the madness from home for the third consecutive season.
Unless the Hoosiers accept an invite to a postseason tournament, Indiana’s season ends at the hands of Northwestern in a slow, painful, agonizing fashion, as the Wildcats dominated the second half, winning 74-61 and moving on to face Purdue. The Hoosiers failed to win a game in the Big Ten Conference Tournament for the second straight year and now face a long offseason of roster turnover and development after Darian DeVries’ first year at the helm.
The final score doesn't show the full story. The Hoosiers showed some early fight, jumping out to a 25-15 lead early in the first half. But, as has been the case in multiple outings this year, including Illinois, Michigan State, Purdue, Ohio State and Michigan, Indiana hit a wall and stopped competing.
After going into halftime with a one-point lead, the game quickly got away from the Hoosiers. Indiana went the final 6:10 without a single field goal, and in the second half, made only five field goals in 20 minutes. For Indiana, this has been a recurring problem this season, which should be a glaring red flag for the program. While Nick Martinelli (28 points) continued to dominate for the Wildcats as the Big Ten’s leading scorer, true freshman Jake West (18 points) propelled the Wildcats to the third round of the Big Ten Tournament by adding a viable second option for Chris Collins’ squad.
The Wildcats built a lead as large as 18 points in the second half. For the Hoosiers, it is the second consecutive must-win game they have lost in embarrassing fashion, where it seems the team quit on the hardwood. A worrying sign at the start of a new era of Indiana Basketball.
The final numbers tell a story of a team that was fundamentally broken on both ends of the floor.
Indiana has remained one-dimensional since the public first saw the team in October. Lamar Wilkerson finishes the season averaging 20.9 points, which is second only to Martinelli. Wilkerson added a team-high 17 points Wednesday, all while exiting the game in the second half and later returning due to a lower-leg injury. Wilkerson put the team's season struggles simply.
“I just feel like we've just got stagnant,” he said. “We just weren't playing our best basketball; we made a lot of self-inflicted mistakes that cost us the games through that last stretch. Yeah, we just weren't hooked up like we were supposed to be.”
Darian DeVries finished recruiting his current roster, the bulk of which he completed just 37 days after he was hired last March. While you couldn’t see the holes in Indiana’s roster then, you can see them now. Indiana lacks a true big man who can affect every aspect of the game, rebounding, scoring and defensively. The Hoosiers lacked consistency from Sam Alexis and Reed Bailey all season long, and desperately have to attack the transfer portal for a top big man in the coming weeks. DeVries recognized the lack of solid depth postgame:
“Developing more depth and having more size and physicality for this league is going to be critical,” he said. “I thought that was something that we just didn't have a lot of depth there to sustain it over the course of a 20-game league schedule. That's certainly something we have to prioritize to give ourselves just a better chance on the interior of the rebounding and being able to post.”
The most painful stat for the Hoosiers: Northwestern has now won seven games in a row over Indiana. For a once-dominant program, Indiana hasn’t experienced a fraction of their past success in recent history.
The road ahead is not just a rebuild; it is a total demolition. The 2025 Indiana Basketball team was assembled to only play together for one season. Indiana is set to lose a massive portion of its rotation. Seniors and graduates like Wilkerson, Tucker DeVries, Bailey, Alexis, Conor Enright and Tayton Conerway are all heading out the door.
While the 2026 recruiting class brings hope, headlined by Vaughn Karvala (SF), Trevor Manhertz (SF) and Prince-Alexander Moody (CG), relying on freshmen to fix a continued history of underperforming is a tough task.
Recognizing that the current roster-construction model failed in Year 1, DeVries looks to adopt a "pro-style" approach to build for the future in Bloomington. The program recently announced the hiring of Ryan Carr as Executive Director of Basketball.
Carr, an IU alum and former manager under Bob Knight, brings over two decades of NBA front-office experience from the Indiana Pacers. Carr brings an emphasis on roster building and has a tough task ahead this offseason. Carr was instrumental in building the 2025 Eastern Conference Champion Pacers roster, and his role will be to report directly to DeVries to find the depth, size, and physicality the coach admitted were missing this season.
Ultimately, this year won’t be remembered for Indiana Basketball. They miss out on the madness yet again and still leave more questions than answers in the first season under Darian DeVries. The uncompetitive halves, the seven losses in the final eight games, and the inability to maintain intensity have left the fan base restless.
One thing was true this year: Indiana Basketball received more grace from the fanbase due to football’s success. If DeVries and Carr can't find a way to inject competitive fire and defensive grit into this program by next November, the agonizing feeling of failure and outside scrutiny in Bloomington will only intensify.
