Tom Crean open to Kansas and Kentucky series in the future

The non-conference schedule has long been a point of annoyance for Indiana fans, present company included. It’s usually full of teams at colleges you’ve never heard of – honestly I’m a little surprised we haven’t played Crazy Go Nuts University yet. But this season, while most of the slate is still crap, we’ve got some bluebloods like Louisville, North Carolina, and tonight’s opponent Kansas in there as well. And Tom Crean says that may be a thing going forward – while some of it won’t be easy.

I think it is (possible). The people at home know some of our situations contract-wise. We have...the Crossroads Classic, that really takes the ability to do a home-and-road away, and that’s locked in every year. We have the Big Ten/ACC Challenge. We have the Gavitt Cup (with the Big East), which is five out of seven years. We just took a series with Louisville.

This would definitely be something we’d love, to get something going, even potentially down the road with Kentucky. I think Kansas would fit right into that, if we could make it work out. Especially in a home-and-home situation, I think that could be really good. Hopefully that’s something we can visit some time later this year. We’ll just see what happens.

There have been rumors for a few years that a regular series with Kansas was on the table, so this isn’t super surprising to hear. Neither is the namedrop of Kentucky – despite the hiatus, you get the feeling the two schools will get back together sooner or later.

Honestly though, I’m less worried about adding more top-10 teams and more interested in replacing some of the teams we’ve never heard of with real, live basketball teams. Beating the Greendale Human Beings doesn’t do a lot, but playing teams that are ranked higher than danged 290th in the Preseason KenPom rankings would help a lot on Selection Sunday.

This would be fun though, so don’t allow too much rain on this parade.