Victor Oladipo

But do his moves hold up off the court? You decide—here’s a two-year-old video of Oladipo, in a country-clubby cardigan, performing at an IU event as a freshman, making a suave through-the-crowd entrance and crooning the R&B singer’s “U Got It Bad.”

Legendary coach Bob Knight, Victor Oladipo, and Cody Zeller have all landed on the iconic weekly magazine’s cover, recently and over time. See the best of the rest IU basketball SI covers over the years.

Usually we can’t take our eyes off of Victor Oladipo, but today we couldn’t help wondering which lucky kids got the honor of surrounding him on the Sports Illustrated cover. Dustin Dopirak of The Hoosier Scoop tells us that most of the covermates are IU athletes, and tweets from IU athletic departments confirmed the appearance of baseball, soccer, football, and volleyball players and a (swollen-eyed) wrestler.

Oladipo threw down a huge dunk at Chicago’s United Center against a Fighting Illini squad that simply watched (presumably in amazement) from midcourt.

Fans seem to think that the game at Purdue on Wednesday will be an easy feast, and I can see why that might be—after all, Purdue is barely above .500. IU has lost just twice and now is finding ways to win with minimal point production from Cody Zeller.

The winner of the Big Ten will be a team like the Badgers who can score road wins and protect their own house. The problem is that by the end of the year, the highest ranked Big Ten team may not even be in the top 10.

Coming into this season, it seemed the most likely NBA draft prospects among the current Hoosier lineup were Cody Zeller (duh!) and Kentucky-killer Christian Watford. But two games into IU’s Big Ten campaign, with today’s tough matchup against eighth-ranked Minnesota looming (noon, Big Ten Network), another player is getting all the buzz: Victor Oladipo.