BLOOMINGTON — For the third time in 10 years and the second in Scott Dolson’s tenure as athletic director, Indiana goes searching for a new men’s basketball coach.

This time, the process will begin with a respectful farewell to a program legend, while discreetly, Dolson and IU’s administration identify Mike Woodson’s eventual replacement , and reinforce the infrastructure around him to give the Hoosiers ’ next coach every chance of success.

Where it ends is anyone’s guess. The overwhelming majority of noise and fury filtering through the IU basketball ecosystem right now is, to use an industry term, crap.

A lack of news, though, does not mean a lack of action.

Dolson and his inner circle have already begun in earnest the process of seeking Woodson’s successor. Having managed the delicate task of Woodson’s stepping down at the end of the season, Dolson now trains his eyes on the horizon.

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Within a matter of weeks, Dolson will hire IU’s 31st men’s basketball coach. Here’s how the Hoosiers got to this point, and where they might go next.

How Indiana basketball coach Mike Woodson stepped down, and why it was disorganized

Woodson first approached Dolson with the intention of discussing an end-of-season departure following a dispiriting 12-point loss Feb. 4 at Wisconsin . The Hoosiers had been noncompetitive from tipoff, falling behind 24-4 in the game’s first six minutes and never bringing the game genuinely back into the balance again.

Afterward, a clearly frustrated Woodson said the Hoosiers were “pushing and pulling and scraping and just trying to get what we can get” and questioned his own team’s toughness.

“We’ve got to get it fixed,” he declared. Within 24 hours, he was discussing with his boss whether the best course of action might simply be to step down.

The ugly scene during a 94-69 home loss to Illinois on Jan. 14 was still fresh in the mind. During what concluded as the second-worst home loss in Assembly Hall history, IU students heckled their coach to chants of “Fire Woodson,” and even booed Hoosiers players over mistakes. That night’s events brought speculation over Woodson’s job performance and security to full boil, the temperature never really coming down until two weeks ago.

“I thought at that time we were playing pretty good basketball,” Woodson said later of the Illinois game. “And then all hell broke loose.”

Indiana made every effort to respect Woodson’s wishes once he made them known. The somewhat piecemeal way in which the news of his eventual departure leaked — coming in waves of rumor and speculation before a Friday afternoon statement from Dolson — reflected the department’s desire to let Woodson dictate the timeline as much as possible.

The Herald-Times and IndyStar understand Woodson will receive a compensation package from the university. Terms have yet to be finalized.

Woodson would have been owed an $8.4 million buyout if he was terminated without cause following the season. He signed an amended contract in August 2023 that gave the university the option to spread that amount out in $1 million annual installments.

Internally, news filtered through the program across Thursday and into Friday. Players learned about Woodson’s decision after practice Thursday. Within roughly 24 hours, all of college basketball would know.

IU’s announcement contained no comment from Woodson by design.

Before the start of his postgame news conference the next day, following a loss to Michigan , a program spokesman announced Woodson would address the factors that led to his decision at a date to be determined. In the days since, no further comment has been made, and access to Indiana players has been limited solely to a joint postgame media session including Woodson and junior forward Malik Reneau following a Feb. 11 win at Michigan State .

This was one last gesture of respect from Indiana to its sixth all-time leading scorer. It probably did not matter much once the announcement dropped. “What happened?” was almost immediately replaced by “What’s next?”

That’s the question now consuming one of college basketball’s most-passionate fan bases.

What will Scott Dolson look for in hiring next Indiana basketball coach?

If Dolson’s intention through discussions over Woodson’s stepping down was to respect his coach, his remit now is discretion.

No successful coaching search plays out in public, until it is over. Equally, Dolson is keen not to distract unnecessarily from a season that’s not yet over. It’s why he’s refrained from talking with players about the future with games left on the schedule.

That radio silence doesn’t mean there isn’t any concrete information available about what his process might look like. The most instructive details are available for fans willing to revisit Dolson’s last major search.

When Dolson was invited to speak to the Bloomington Rotary Club last March, he wasn't sure what he was going to talk about. The organization gave him an open platform to address members as a guest speaker at their regular weekly meeting.

He touched hot-button topics including name, image and likeness, and the Big Ten's then-upcoming expansion. But with spring football in full swing he closed his speech offering those in attendance a peek behind the curtain into the search that led IU to Curt Cignetti .

Dolson spoke at length about a study members of his staff produced at the time that became instrumental in the hiring process.

He directed his team to analyze the last three decades of Indiana football to identify areas of consistency when the Hoosiers were successful. The group asked the same questions about like-programs — including North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, Purdue and Illinois — to see what common factors were present when they were winning.

Dolson leaned on that research to come up with an initial pool of candidates that included Cignetti.

The athletic department also hired prominent search firm TurnkeyZRG to assist them. Dolson has gone on record describing them as “invaluable” to the process in the past. At that Rotary Club meeting, he said the firm worked off criteria he provided them, criteria which came directly from that study, to identify candidates.

Indiana will follow a similar blueprint in the coming weeks, as it seeks Woodson's replacement.

Indiana basketball NIL, revenue-sharing spending to align next coach with president, AD

What will undeniably look different — not just at Indiana but everywhere in the Power Four — is the infrastructure now required for success at this level. The looming intersection of NIL, player freedom of movement and revenue sharing will require athletic departments to be nimble and innovative in the coming years.

Pros and cons: How good of a coaching job is Indiana basketball?

IU’s administration firmly believes its next men’s basketball coach will have the tools necessary to hit the ground running, thanks to work already done behind the scenes over the last 12 to 18 months.

Indiana is committed to sharing the full $20.5 million allowed under the pending House v. NCAA settlement. Revenue sharing with athletes is currently expected to begin at the start of the 2025-26 academic year, with Big Ten schools already signing athletes to revenue-sharing agreements.

Indiana is expected to be among the schools that dedicate the largest chunk of that number to men’s basketball. At minimum, IU expects to allocate double the league average men’s basketball rev-share budget.

All that comes on top of what’s believed to be among the most robust NIL setups in college basketball. Indiana has virtually since the inception of name, image and likeness reform aggressively leveraged those opportunities to sign and retain men’s basketball players.

Last year, the Hoosiers finished with the No. 2-ranked transfer class in the country, per 247Sports . Woodson signed three of 247’s top 25 available transfers to lucrative deals, and the NIL resources available allowed him to retain talented players like Reneau, Mackenzie Mgbako and Trey Galloway.

But that support goes beyond just dollar figures.

Infrastructure and alignment are of equal importance. Indiana’s next coach will walk into Cook Hall with a ready-made system in place at the university level that recently helped the Hoosiers’ football team lock up core returning talent — they didn’t lose a single player who earned All-Big Ten honors with eligibility left — and bring in nearly two dozen impact transfers, including one of the best quarterbacks available in the transfer portal .

That was reflective (though not solely because) of a strong working relationship between the north end zone facility, and Bryan Hall, where Indiana’s university administration is housed.

IU President Pam Whitten has since her first days in her job been an aggressive and enthusiastic supporter of athletics. Her support empowered Dolson both politically and financially to be able to make the move from Tom Allen to Cignetti, one that returning immense and immediate success.

Cignetti has responded in kind, repeatedly thanking both his president and his AD for the support necessary to keep his staff together, and his roster competitive, after a historic season.

Whitten and Dolson regularly attend IU athletics events together. They have publicly traded praise for successes realized by the department’s many programs. And they are broadly believed to be in lockstep on the level of commitment — in all ways — necessary to flourish in an ever-changing landscape.

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Lastly, Woodson deserves credit for modernizing certain elements of IU’s staffing structure, which now more closely resembles the NBA model for scouting, game planning and developing players.

Indiana’s next coach will get to determine his own operation, but he will have a healthy support system in place to back him up.

When will next Indiana basketball coach be hired?

Just who will eventually take that wheel remains to be seen. The more pertinent question — given virtually any candidate IU might want to consider is working right now — is when.

The calendar will obviously inform that answer. College basketball’s regular season concludes the weekend of March 7-9. Conference tournaments will follow, and then the three-weekend NCAA tournament.

Indiana itself might rally to make the field of 68, though the Hoosiers have considerable work to do to their resume. More important will be the question of when any potential candidate falls out of that tournament, presuming they’re coaching in it.

Dolson won’t be rushed into a decision — Woodson’s stepping down gives him ample time to do his homework. But there are considerations outside his control that will matter to the next coach.

Primarily, the spring transfer portal window opens a week later, after the end of the first week of the NCAA tournament. But it has been shortened to just 30 days for players entering and, more importantly, it is currently expected to be intersected by the House settlement.

As things stand, that settlement, which will pave the way for revenue sharing in college athletics, is expected to be approved April 7.

Crucially for any program changing coaches this spring, as part of the settlement, the NCAA will create a clearinghouse tasked with analyzing the vast majority of NIL deals on the basis of their fair market value to ensure they aren’t being artificially inflated.

Why this matters to IU’s search: The NCAA’s current guidance suggests deals will become subject to the clearinghouse process beginning with the House settlement’s approval. Its date could always change, but officials in the NIL world are broadly operating with a hard deadline in mind.

Any NIL deal signed before April 7 (provided House vs. NCAA is settled then) will not be subject to the clearinghouse. That will give everyone involved time to study the process and better understand how to satisfy the NCAA’s fair market value requirements.

That date is not hard and fast in Dolson’s thinking. If he believes the right candidate requires IU to wait, he likely will. But the faster Indiana can move, the more time it will give its next coach to assemble a roster of his own liking with the maximum possible resources backing him.

In the short term, Dolson is likely to operate behind the scenes. Stressful as it might have been in the moment, Woodson’s decision provides clarity and room for deliberation.

When he hired Cignetti, Dolson moved swiftly because he had to. This time, he has time and, while he might not make much noise in the process, he will use it wisely.

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