It’s senior night Sunday, and it’ll be a sort of weird one. Yogi Ferrell will be the lone senior who played four years of basketball at IU.
Heck, he will be the only senior who played more than two seasons for IU.
The seniors are an odd group, and an interesting one. One of the most interesting is senior forward Max Bielfeldt.
We’ve all heard and read the stories of Bielfeldt’s journey. Michigan nudged him out to make room for someone else going into his final season.
He’s a man whose family has a building named after them at Illinois, who went on a Final Four run with Michigan and who now ends his career rocking the cream and crimson.
Bielfeldt doesn’t even physically take classes on campus at IU. He is in an online graduate program with the IU Kelley School of Business. His ties to the University are primarily through basketball.
All of this makes his senior night and his speech possibly the most interesting of all. Bielfeldt will be speaking to a place he has only been a part of for about eight months.
He will be speaking about his experiences at a school that took him in when maybe his old school didn’t want him, as well as about playing under IU Coach Tom Crean, who saw what Bielfeldt could really be and followed through.
That’s the biggest thing with Bielfeldt. We knew he could provide a stable veteran presence down low. He joked in the fall about coaching younger players up on drills and having to catch himself because he is learning a new system as well.
It was easy to imagine him being a leader for this team. I just didn’t expect to see a fifth-year senior improving so much as the season went on.
Bielfeldt was a good player at Michigan. He rebounded well. He played pretty efficiently, but he wasn’t a star.
Early in the season with IU, he was fine. He was a good offensive rebounder and made some plays but seemed too aggressive on offense. It didn’t make sense sometimes why he was chucking up all of those 3-pointers and shooting on so many post-ups.
It seemed like Crean knew what was going to happen. He saw what Bielfeldt could grow into when he brought him in over the summer.
“We thought there was a lot left on the table for him to provide,” Crean said in December. “He’s getting better all the time.”
Correct. Bielfeldt has grown into a legitimate offensive threat for IU. He’s consistently become the guy to hit a tough shot when the IU offense has gone cold for a stretch.
He’s made more 3-pointers in 17 Big Ten games than he did in the past two full seasons at Michigan. He has this aggressive pump fake from the perimeter that doesn’t always work, but it is fun to watch.
His post game has
always been there, but it’s become a force as of late. He’s still one of the best rebounders in the Big Ten, ranking in the top 10 for both offense and defense, according to kenpom.com.
Maybe the oddest thing is he has the third-highest steal percentage in the conference. He just keeps improving in such a short span, yet he is playing his final game in Assembly Hall on Sunday.
As I said, Ferrell may be the lone senior to be able to speak on four years of playing for Crean. But Bielfeldt has as much to look back and thank Crean and IU for as anyone.
Brody Miller
