Missing Banners: Indiana basketball fans love their five championship banners. They just wish there were more. There could have been

by Tom Brew, Terry Hutchens

Indiana University basketball fans love their five national championship banners that hang so proudly in Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Indiana. But they also wish there were more. There should have been. "Missing Banners,'' written by award-winning Indiana sports writers Tom Brew and Terry Hutchens, takes a look back at five seasons where Indiana could have won championships, but came up short for one reason or another. The book is filled with dozens of never-before-told stories from magical basketball seasons in 1975, 1980,1993, 2002 and 2013. It spans five decades, so every fan will be remember many of these seasons vividly. The book is also filled with more than five dozen great photos from the past, courtesy of the Archives Department at the Indiana University Library in Bloomington. This book will bring back many great memories for IU fans ... and also plenty of heartache. But through the 302 pages, you'll also see a common thread that runs through these teams, a bond among players and coaches that was unbreakable. They poured blood, sweat and tears into trying to hang a sixth national championship banner at Indiana. They came up short, but still they have great stories to tell.

312 pages, Paperback

Published December 15, 2015

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an Indiana native and with two parents who are both IU grads, I grew up going to a lot of IU sporting events. And some of my 1st memories are of IU basketball games at Assembly Hall in the early 2000s.

We didn’t have tickets for long since IU basketball tickets are crazy expensive. But for the time we did, It was some fun basketball. It was really cool to read about the IU basketball teams I never got to see or watch as they were before my time. It was so interesting to me to read about how IU became one of the premier college basketball programs in the country. Because most of my memories are of the slightly meh teams Mike Davis had, to the program crash under Kelvin Sampson and the sanctions he brought to the program and it returning to a point under Tom Crean. ⁣

And it was also fun to read about the teams I did get to watch. Reliving the 2002 and 2013 NCAA runs was both exhilarating and heartbreaking at the same time. That ‘02 team is the first basketball team I can actually remember watching as a kid and knowing the players names. So going back and reading about them as an adult was awesome. ⁣

I think Tom Brew and Terry Hutchins did an excellent job on this history of what could have been in IU basketball. It’s still so sad to know that Hutchins was taken too soon a couple of years ago. I don’t know what he’d think of the program now, but I really wish we could. ⁣

Definitely a fun and insightful read for anyone who's a fan of IU basketball. Or even just a fan of college basketball in general.

[Jack Schultz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the book. Any IU fan would. There were several typos--nothing that impacted the content.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book to all Hoosier basketball fans, especially old timers like me. It was a lot of fun taking a stroll down memory lane reading about some of the great IU teams that were unable, for a variety of reasons, to hang a banner.