Tom Crean’s excellent adventure as Indiana University basketball coach took a really weird turn in April, when Eli Holman, a 6-foot-9 sophomore-to-be, came to the office to tell the coach he was transferring. During the meeting, Holman became so agitated that Crean, fearing Holman might be “a danger to himself and others,” called the campus cops, who arrived too late to save the potted plant that Holman attacked on his way out the door.

Only at IU would Holman’s behavior generate a wave of nostalgia for a previous IU coach, and, no, we are not referring to the over-his-head Mike Davis or the dialing-for-dollars Kelvin Sampson. No potted plant was safe when Bob Knight was running the show in Bloomington. But it’s also true that nobody ever had to worry about graduation rates, NCAA violations, or competitive teams.

Under Knight, in fact, Indiana basketball became living proof that it was possible, at the highest level, to win while playing by the rules and graduating players. Knight’s occasional tirades notwithstanding, Indiana became the model for doing things right. Ask Mike Krzysewski, the former Knight player and assistant who took the model to Duke, where he has enjoyed a bit of success.

But now about all that’s left of Knight’s legacy are the candy-striped warmup pants. His successors, with the tacit blessing of an incompetent administration, have steadily and willfully frittered away everything that made IU basketball special. The landscape is so bleak that it’s a wonder IU was able to hire Crean away from Marquette, where he was running a program that would have made Al McGuire proud.

The immediate future looks so forlorn and hopeless that Crean already is the front-runner for national Coach of the Year in 2008-’09. That’s because he faces the most daunting rebuilding job of a major program since Rick Pitino replaced Eddie Sutton at Kentucky in 1989.

Forced to resign under pressure, Sutton’s legacy to Pitino was NCAA probation and a roster bereft of Kentucky-caliber talent. The best players – Rex Chapman, Chris Mills, and LeRon Ellis – all bailed out. The outlook was so bleak that Cawood Ledford, the legendary “Voice of the Wildcats,” predicted that if Pitino won as many as 10 games, he should be certified as a genius.

Well, the Wildcats went 14-14. They lost to Kansas by 55, but shocked a formidable LSU team built around Shaquille O’Neal, Stanley Roberts, and Chris Jackson. Unaccustomed to being underdogs, Wildcats fans embraced the team and savored every victory as if it were a vintage wine.

Two years later, the sophomores on Pitino’s first team – John Pelphrey, Richie Farmer, Deron Feldhaus, and Sean Woods – joined Pitino recruit Jamal Mashburn to come within a Christian Laettner miracle of upsetting defending national champion Duke in the East Regional finals.

A year later, Kentucky made the 1993 Final Four in New Orleans. And three years after that, the Wildcats won the national championship in the Meadowlands to complete one of the greatest coaching/rebuilding jobs in basketball history.

Crean might want to give Pitino a call.

The IU program began to slip under Mike Davis, a Knight assistant who was named interim coach after Knight’s dismissal. A likeable-but-naive sort, Davis was woefully unprepared to be the head coach in one of the game’s glamour programs. Despite one serendipitous trip to the NCAA title game – a fluke due mainly to the stellar play of Jared Jeffries – Davis couldn’t maintain Knight’s high standards either on or off the court.

Enter, Kelvin Sampson.

During his career at Oklahoma, Sampson proved he could recruit and win games. But his graduation rates were abysmal and, at the end of his career in Norman, it was learned that Sampson and his staff had made more than 500 illegal telephone contacts with recruits. The job offer from Indiana enabled Sampson to get out of Norman one step ahead of the sheriff, literally.

Many of Knight’s former players were shocked that IU would knowingly hire a coach who had a shaky track record in academics and who was in trouble with the NCAA. They considered it an insult to IU tradition. Kent Benson, the center on IU’s unbeaten 1976 NCAA champions, was particularly outspoken.

But IU’s administration – by then, Myles Brand was gone to the NCAA – was desperate for victories and the money that winning generated. So they took a gamble that blew up in their faces. Incredible as it seems, Sampson was twice found to be involved with the same kind of phone violations that had gotten him in trouble at Oklahoma.

Late this past season, Sampson reluctantly stepped away from a team that had “Final Four” stamped all over it. He was replaced on an interim basis by Dan Dakich, a former Knight assistant and Bowling Green head coach who had returned to IU to be Sampson’s director of basketball operations.

Dakich tried to rally the troops and put some integrity back into the program, but it was too late. The players, loyal to Sampson, laid down and quit. The once-bright season ended with a spate of losses and a first-round exit from the NCAAs.

And then it got worse.

As one of his last official acts as head coach, Dakich kicked Armon Bassett and Jamarcus Ellis off the team for unspecified violations of team rules. After taking the IU job, Crean reviewed the situation and not only upheld Dakich’s decision, but kicked off a third player, DeAndre Thomas, also for unspecified violations.

And just as Rex Chapman did at Kentucky as a result of Sutton’s transgressions, freshman whiz Eric Gordon decided to join senior teammate D.J. White in the NBA draft. Gordon, of course, is the kid that Sampson lured out of his commitment to Illinois, still a festering sore in Champaign-Urbana.

That, along with Holman’s bizarre departure, left Crean with three scholarship players (Jordan Crawford, Kyle Taber, and Brandon McGee and one walk-on, Brett Finkelmeir). The four combined to average 12.8 points per game last season, with Crawford, who started eight games and averaged 9.7 points as a freshman, the only proven scorer.

Under the conditions, his recruiting has been miraculous. Four true freshmen (Verdell Jones, Tom Pritchard, Matt Roth, and Nick Williams) will join Devan Dumes, a juco transfer from Vincennes, on next season’s roster. The 6-2 Dumes, who played a year at Eastern Michigan before transferring to Vincennes, and the 6-5 Williams, Alabama’s high school Player of the Year, both are expected to help immediately.

“Devan is a player that I got to see first-hand when he played at Eastern Michigan as a freshman,” Crean said. “He had 16 points against us and made quite an impression on the staff. Nick really addresses a need for us, and gives us a big, strong presence in the backcourt. He has done a wonderful job at making the transition as a perimeter player after beginning his career as an inside performer.”

But Crean is too smart to kid himself. His rebuilding job involves more than just winning games, which will be hard enough. It involves re-establishing the values for which IU became known under Knight – values that, once gone, are difficult to regain. The good news is that he already has bitten the bullet on the player decisions and opted to do things the right way instead of the most convenient way.

As for Holman, the potted-plant terrorist, he transferred to Detroit-Mercy after telling Crean that he wanted to leave IU in order to be closer to his home in Richmond, Calif. Hmmmm. The new coach at Detroit-Mercy is Ray McCallum, who had been on Sampson’s IU staff.

Since it’s against the NCAA transfer rules for any school to contact a player before he gets a release granting him permission to talk to a specific new school, it was no wonder that Crean was upset when he heard where Holman was headed.

“We were led to believe that this was a family decision and that he wanted to get closer to home,” said Crean, “but now it doesn’t look like that’s the way it’s going to turn out. I don’t think there’s any doubt that there was a certain amount of orchestrating going on. I don’t have a lot of respect for the way this has turned out.”