Hoosier Headlines for December 13, 2009: postgame coverage of Indiana's loss to Kentucky, plus football and Big Ten expansion.

IU's Crean teaches until the bitter end against UK (The News-Sentinel - Fort Wayne IN)
"One last timeout. Why not? The game was lost, the teaching wasn’t. Indiana coach Tom Crean had a point to make with 80 seconds left against Kentucky and he gathered the Hoosiers around him, diagramming a play, pushing his message from mouthwash range, driving details great teams understand."

Column: Cats pass nerves test in first road game (The Kentucky Kernel)
"For the first time this year, UK played an opponent on its home floor. And UK’s schedulers didn’t ease into that first road game, either. Assembly Hall is one of basketball’s most hostile environments, stemming largely from a fiercely loyal fan base and a creative (if not a bit ruthlessly over the top) student section, even while coach Tom Crean and the Hoosiers are up to their eyebrows in rebuilding."

Kentucky 90, Indiana 73:  Postmortem (A Sea Of Blue)
"Congrats to the Indiana Hoosiers for playing a great first half of college basketball. Maurice Creek is definitely the real deal, and Tom Crean has this team playing at a high level considering how few true big people they have on the roster. Indiana is a team on the rise, and Tom Crean is quite likely a future Hall of Famer. This series will get much tougher for UK in very short order, I predict."

Cats 10-0 after beating Hoosiers 90-73 (Lexington Herald Leader)
"Prior to this convincing crunching of the Hoosiers, Calipari had consistently poured water on UK's best start to a season since 1992-93. UK's play merited a .500 record, he kept grumbling."

Young Cats turn in veteran performance (Lexington Herald Leader)
"It had played in a quirky chandelier-filled ballroom in Cancun. It had played against a defending national championship team in Rupp. It had played before Pat Riley, Michael Douglas, Oscar Robertson and the like against some Big East bangers at Madison Square Garden. But it had not played before a group of rabid Midwesterners, chafed by the cold, crammed into their own gym, out for blue blood. "This place," said Patrick Patterson, the veteran Cat, "is as loud, if not louder than Rupp."

Alvarez: Big Ten will push for expansion (ESPN)
IU doesn't play again until Saturday, so I'll have more to say about the expansion issue this week.