BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — In a few weeks, Indiana basketball coach Mike Woodson turns 66 years old. His birthday is March 24, and it’s fairly likely that Indiana’s disappointing 2023-24 basketball season will be over by then.

I turn 66 this year, too. It’s been a fun 45-year run doing what I love, but I find it harder and harder to work 100-hour weeks and 360-day years. I’m starting to plan for that finish line, somewhere down the road, and I often wonder if Woodson does the same kind of planning and thinking.

So, I asked him. Point blank.

As the final question of his Tuesday morning press conference, I asked him how long he wanted to keep coaching at Indiana, or if he had had enough.

He gave a very honest, very forthright answer.

“I came back to try to put this team in the best position possible. I’m going to continue to do that,” said Woodson, the former Indiana great who’s wrapping up his third season as the head coach of the Hoosiers. “I’m almost 66, but I feel good and I still move around and I think that I still think well in terms of the game and I still think I can teach the game.

“I don’t know, there are coaches that are coaching into their 70s. I don’t know if that’s something I’ll do, I don’t know. But at this point, I’ll take it a day at a time, a year at a time. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, guys. I’m just not. So I’m going to continue to build this team and try to put this team in the best position possible and see where it leads us.”

Woodson — a great player at Indiana under Bob Knight from 1976 to 1980 — returned to Indiana with much fanfare in the spring of 2021 after four years of failure under Archie Miller, who never made the NCAA Tournament and never had a winning record in the Big Ten.

Woodson ended Indiana’s six-year NCAA tourney absence in his first year, beating Wyoming before losing to Saint Mary’s. They made the NCAAs again last year as a No. 4 seed, beating Kent State before losing to Final Four-bound No. 5 seed Miami in the second round.

Woodson won 44 games in his first two years, more than EVERY Indiana coach in their first two season outside of Mike Davis, who won 46 in 2000-02. (Bob Knight, if you’re curious, won 39 total games in his first two years in 1971-73.)

This year, though, has spun off the rails. The Hoosiers are 14-11 and just 6-8 in the Big Ten. They’re better than this, and there is no question that they’ve underachieved. But there are reasons why, and a lot of them, really. But it’s been bad enough for fans to question how much longer Woodson should be around.

Indiana has a very good front line in Kel’el Ware, Malik Reneau and Mackenzie Mgbako, who all have future-pro skills. But they also all have holes in their games, and none of them are NBA ready. Those failures have had something to do with those 11 losses so far.

There’s a wide swath of Indiana’s fan base that wants Woodson gone. They’d wish he would retire or — even worse — get fired.

Based on what Woodson said Tuesday, he’s not about to quit. And it’s unlikely that he gets fired. Woodson arrived wanting to hang another banner in Assembly Hall. That’s not happening this year, and next year if the sixth miracle happened, he’d be past his 67th birthday.

Jim Calhoun won an NCAA title at Connecticut in 2011 and age 68, and Mike Krzyzewski was 67 when he won his last title at Duke in 2015.