BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – There are a couple of drink cups on the wooden bookshelves in Archie Miller’s office. Oh, and a couple of Indiana University work bags, the kind with the logo on them that you dish out to staff members – those are still wrapped in plastic.

And that’s it.

Everything else is bare. Blank. Clean. Which, for the moment, is exactly the way Miller wants it – both his workspace within Cook Hall, and everywhere else in his new program.

It is fresh-start time at Indiana – for the coaching staff, for the players, for the fans as well. Tom Crean salvaged Indiana basketball, pulling it off the slag heap of NCAA probation and other off-court issues, but never took the Hoosiers to the Final Four in nine seasons. Both the coach and the program likely will benefit from a fresh start.

Thus Miller has been given the task of elevating one of college basketball’s bedrock programs back into the company of the consistently elite. There are five national championship banners hanging in Assembly Hall that will silently remind the 38-year-old coach of the aspirations and expectations daily. Human reminders will be audible.

But this spring, right now, Indiana basketball might as well be Archie Miller’s bookshelf. It’s time to reboot – to start with nothing and build from there, a concept the new coach laid out for Yahoo Sports in his office last week.

“The big thing is to create the first identity opportunity,” Miller said. “Not culture.”

I stopped Miller there. Coaches love talking about culture – it might be the most popular buzzword in the profession today. What’s with the avoidance?

“I think culture is earned,” he said. “You don’t start talking about culture four weeks down the road. Our culture at Dayton was built over the course of hard wins and hard losses, overcoming adversity. Culture is resiliency, not ever bending away from what you want to be about. But identity is different – we can start to implement identity right away, every day.

“Culture is five or six years down the road – whatever they say about Indiana at that point, we’ve earned. But we don’t have one yet.”

Archie Miller was 139-63 in six seasons at Dayton and took the Flyers to the NCAA tournament the last four years. (AP) More

So identity opportunities will be offered daily to the Hoosiers by their hyper-intense new leader, youngest product of a famed coaching family. Those identity opportunities will have a heavy accent on toughness and its natural byproduct, defense.

Indiana was a woeful defensive team for much of Crean’s tenure, just twice ranking among Ken Pomeroy’s national top 50, to the dismay of many Indiana fans. Last year’s team was a deal-breaking 104th in defensive efficiency.

Miller’s last three Dayton teams, all of which won at least 24 games, had an average Pomeroy defensive rating of 30th. And the undersized Flyers scrapped ferociously.

“We didn’t try to trick you,” said Indiana assistant coach Tom Ostrom, who followed Miller from Dayton. “We played half-court defense, we played as hard as you can, and we had a certain amount of grit and toughness.”

So the question is, can the defensively indifferent (or ineffective) players Miller inherited guard like his Dayton players?

“They’re going to try,” he said. “I think the hardest thing to do is to instill that defense is important. It didn’t happen overnight at Dayton – it took years, and it took winning games. I don’t think people are going to look out and immediately say, ‘Wow, they’re awesome on defense.’ But we’re going to never deviate from what’s important in this program.

“The identity and culture over time has to start and stop with playing real hard. We have to be one of those teams where everyone we play knows, ‘This is going to be a little different tonight. It’s going to be hard.’ That doesn’t mean we win every game, but everyone has to know it’s going to be hard.

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