Indiana coaching search: Dane Fife to stay at MSU, no longer rumored to Duquesne

UPDATE: Not so fast my friends. The #DaneTrain has stalled on its way to Pittsburgh and appears headed back to Michigan State, for now.

Please continue on with your Fife-to-IU fantasies.

While always a bit of a longshot, potential head coach candidate and current Michigan State assistant coach Dane Fife is closing in on taking over at Duquesne.

Fife has spent the last six years in East Lansing working under Tom Izzo. Many considered him to be a dark-horse candidate for the head coach position in Bloomington.

However, Thursday’s news signals where Fife stands amongst the college basketball world as Duquesne is coming off a 10-22 season and have not had a winning season since 2010-11.

This isn’t an entirely unexpected outcome, though, as we mentioned in our coaching profile released earlier this week:

Fife may be better in theory than in practice for IU. I’ve become more open to the idea recently, and I think Fred Glass should certainly extend an interview. But at the end of the day, I still think that there are more qualified candidates out there. IU fans were patient with Tom Crean during his first few years. While the program is in much better shape than it was 9 years ago, Hoosiers fans might still need to be patient with Fife as he learns to navigate coaching a big-time college program. And if Crean’s firing indicates one thing, it’s that IU fans don’t necessarily want to wait any longer before they are a winning program again.