Welcome back to Crimson Cast, Galen Clavio, Scott Caulfield
joining you. It is officially winter and
unfortunately Indiana's football season has come to a close.
The podcast that we wanted to put off as long as possible even
before this week finally arrives as we have to bid a due to IU
football as they lose in the College Football Playoff first
round at Notre Dame. We're gonna talk about that
we're gonna talk about the season.
We're gonna talk about some of the discourse in college
football right now, as bad as it is and said.
That we ended our season at Notre Dame in the College
Football Playoff. Those are real.
Like, we're not a fake podcast. That's real.
Yeah, well, and and we're gonna talk about some of that stuff
too. I mean, it's, it's been an
amazing ride all across the board.
And you know, I think the prevailing attitude or the
prevailing thought that I heard from a lot of IU fans while we
were out and about over the course of the weekend was we
really don't want this to to end.
We really don't want this ride to conclude and you know, all
good things have to come to an end, as they say.
In this case here, we find ourselves having to put into
context what we saw on Friday night, while also put it into
the much larger context of what we saw out of IU this season and
what we see in college football today.
So a lot to talk about and we're going to jump in and certainly
recap the game and certainly recap some of the other items
that were important in and around the game.
But first, let's get some business out of the way.
We'd like to say thank you to Home Field Apparel for just a
tremendous season. Once again, the presenting
sponsor of the Back Home Network and friends of ours and partners
throughout a bunch of different things that have happened this
season. Home Field Apparel, you know it,
it's funny, I was talking to somebody while I was up in Notre
Dame and then I was talking to another person after the game as
we had walked out and we'd gone to the cars and the person looks
at me. Separate people, two different
people. But the one after the game said
almost the exact same thing as the person I was talking to
before the game, which was like, man, home field apparel has
taken over college football. I, I, you, you walk around and
you've got Notre Dame people wearing home field apparel.
You had Indiana people wearing like 9 different years worth of
home field apparel stuff. I saw, you know, the kick was
good shirt right next to Indiana's those College Football
Playoff 2024 hoodie. It's it's just amazing the eras
that they have spanned here in the the relatively by corporate
terms, short time that they've been around and how much they've
ingrained themselves into the college football landscape.
You can't listen to another college football podcast without
having a home field ad. And it's just because of of how
perfect that marriage is. Folks that care about the sport,
folks that care about you as fans wearing and wrapping things
for your team. And they've been as good to
Indiana fans, if not better than to any fan base.
And I just want to tip my cap to them for all the support that
they had throughout the course of the season 4 IU football,
some of the great partnerships that they did that we were able
to take part in and just really, really couldn't be happier about
all the cool stuff that they've given us to wear and, and all
the different ways that we've been able to express our fandom
through home field apparel. You can go to Home Field
Apparel, use the code HOME 23, and take 15% off your first
order if you haven't already. But man, by the looks of all the
people that were at the College Football Playoff game, there's
not a whole lot of people left who can use that code.
But for those of you that are out there, use it.
Go to Home Field Apparel, grab some amazing IU merch and
commemorate Indiana's appearance in the College Football Playoff
for the first time. Everything you said is right and
you look at me, they have every school, but what is nice and
always fun is go look at all the other schools.
It's like one page of stuff, 2 pages of stuff.
You go to the. Indiana page, it's like 9 or 10
pages. Yeah, it is.
You know where their heart really is.
It's an Indiana 'cause they have like quadruple the amount of
things for Indiana compared to any other school.
Also, just a reminder folks that we are on Substack
crimsoncast.substack.com. You can check out our podcasts
there you can find out the the new things going on with IU
sports. We try to give you as many
updates as possible. We're obviously transitioning a
bit out of football and we'll be mostly focusing on basketball as
we move forward here over the next few months.
But we'll continue to be covering football as closely as
possible as there's news coming in about the transfer portal,
about recruiting, about spring ball.
We're we're going to try to keep our football coverage as high as
possible throughout the course of the offseason.
That's not something we normally do, but this program deserves a
higher level of attention and reporting and so we're going to
be trying to do that as much as possible throughout the course
of the season. Hopefully you'll stick with us
and one of. The things Sig said you didn't
hear, he's like, you know, Purdue sucks, Michigan sucks,
Ohio State sucks too. And by the way, I want more
coverage on Crimson cast. Crowd was so fired up, but he he
said it, so he got it. Got a little muted there at the
end. Absolutely.
We got Sig what he wanted. That's right, we're, we're,
we're here for him as as he is here been here for us.
But again, crimsoncast.substack.com over
1100 people have subscribed to the free version.
You can also subscribe monetarily $5.00 a month, $50 a
year just to help keep the lights on with the podcast, help
us being able to to continue to pay producers and try to make
the product a little bit better on a a week by week basis.
So we appreciate all you folks being in the mix.
All right, Scott, well, let's let's dive into things here as
we go. We're live here right now on the
back home network channel. And those of you who are
listening in afterwards, we'll, we'll try to keep this as kind
of broad as possible, but also getting into some specifics.
So Indiana goes into Notre Dame Stadium and loses 27 to 17.
We're going to be honest on this podcast and say it wasn't really
that close. Indiana scraping together a
couple of scores at the very end of the game.
But this was really a dominant performance by Notre Dame
throughout. It was one of those games where,
you know, you're in the stands. You know, the first thing that
really resonated with me was, wow, there were a lot of IU
people in the stands. A lot of IU fans had bought
tickets. Notre Dame was, I mean, those,
their fans were very loud. They deserve a lot of credit.
You always wonder, like if Indiana, other than that
interception, had had any kind of other play to get the crowd
fired up, like, would that have made a difference?
Those IU fans were ready to roll, and they just never really
had anything throughout the course of the game.
It's it's, it's frustrating in a lot of ways because, you know,
the the pregame talk was about, you know, who could win the
battle in the trenches. Indiana surely had learned their
lessons from that Ohio State game in terms of, you know, how
to conduct the passing game. And then you got into it and it
became clear early on that Indiana offensively was going to
struggle. You know, you felt maybe a
little bit on the drive after the interception that they might
have been able to do something. They had that nice pass to
Elijah Sarat for 28 yards. But you know, people, it's easy
to forget as early in the game as it was, that throw came on
1/3 and 14 after Indiana had, you know, had an A holding
penalty and had essentially not been able to do a whole lot in
the two times that they'd run the ball.
It just never got going for Indiana offensively, and once
Notre Dame scores that 98 yard touchdown, now you're behind.
This is where the quicksand starts and Indiana just never
was able to dig themselves out of it despite what I would argue
was a pretty good performance overall by the defense.
It was very bend, but don't break.
It was like 1 bad play. You take that bad play away and
you know, Indiana essentially let up 20 points in the game,
but they just couldn't score Scott.
And it was clear that Notre Dame was just a superior opponent
from both a talent perspective and from a tactical perspective
on the evening. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're
we're going to do this, but I was thinking this in the drive
home, you know, as we as we talk about it, you you have to
disentangle your feelings for the season and then this game
specific because they're, they're two totally different
feelings. And so everything I'm going to
say is has nothing to do with my feeling of the overall season.
But I, I speak for myself and I also speak for everybody in my
section because we were sitting right behind the band, a ton of
IU fans, 1 Notre Dame fan. We're like, how'd you get
ticket? Like, how'd you get in here?
Because it was, it was a it was alumni section.
But you know, knowing we could lose was always there, there
there's no question we could lose in the College Football
Playoff. There's no question you could
lose at Notre Dame. I I think what was disappointing
for me and what really kind of stung the most walking out is it
feels like that wasn't the IU team I had watched all season.
And it's had we played the way we normally play and lose, I
would have been like, OK, that's, that's fine.
But you know, the play calling felt very conservative.
It felt like, I mean, at the time, I remember thinking we've
got a passport, we've got a pass.
When I went and looked, we ran about as much as we ran against,
you know, Michigan State or Ohio State or Michigan.
So, so the stats don't totally back it up and, and I'm fully
aware Notre Dame is also playing football and they are, they were
doing a lot to make Rourke pick the run in the RPO, but the runs
were all kind of up the middle. It seemed like we had a lot of
long third downs, you know, and then just some of the way that,
you know, like we're fair catching everything.
You know, obviously we'll talk about the punt in the fourth
quarter. You know, a lot of for for a
team that have been kind of brash and and honestly fun to
watch, this was not a super fun game to watch.
And I think that's what was most disappointing is like, this is a
moment all the eyes are on you and a lot of people who have
been talking smack and, you know, people hadn't seen IUS.
I'm going to watch IU. And it's like, this is not us.
Like this isn't what you, this isn't what we did against
Nebraska. You should have seen that.
And I think that's what really bugged me as I would have loved
to have seen us losing at least the way we have played all
season, because it really felt like I was listening to one of
your previews on the drive up about Invasion of the Body
Snatchers in a good way. This almost felt the same way as
that, that the play calling just felt everything felt really
conservative. It felt, I mean, it just it did
feel like we were playing not to lose, which then we lost.
And, and what's so odd is really outside of a stretch for Ohio
State for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, I haven't seen that all year.
And for a team that always had their foot to the pedal, that
always seemed to have good plays called up and always pressing
the issue, it, it just felt so passive.
And that was my overarching thing.
Walking away is like, damn it, I can't believe we lost that way.
You know, I, I think that those are all really valid
observations. I guess I looked at it from a
slightly different perspective after I had some time to think
about it as I was driving home yesterday.
It felt to me to a large degree like, you know, you know, so
much of what Indiana did offensively this year was about
RPO, about making the right decisions.
Notre Dame did so much in their pre snap stuff to make Curtis
Rourke hand the ball off early on in the game.
Like they really made it so that they they almost took the
decision making process of throwing the pass off the table
because of the looks that they had.
It was a very, very smart game plan, I think by Al Golden
because I think he realized that he had the athletes to be able
to match up single on single in the running game and make
tackles. And that's exactly what
happened. And you could see that Indiana
just, you know, it wasn't every single time, but they often
struggled to win those one-on-one matchups, whether it
was blocking or whether it was simply a situation of somebody
making a good tackle on an Indiana player, sometimes in the
backfield, sometimes after a yard or two.
And it really did also feel like once Rourke threw that
interception early on in the game, it like fundamentally
changed the way that Indiana went about things.
And I just got the feeling that Indiana, their coaching staff,
at least on the offensive side of the ball, didn't think that
they could go straight up against Notre Dame and win.
And so they didn't. And unfortunately, it led to
what you were talking about. It led to a very passive looking
game in terms of game plan. It led to a very passive looking
game in terms of execution. But a lot of it was born just
out of a simple physical mismatch.
And this is where, if you think about the games that Indiana had
the most trouble, yes, obviously Ohio State, Michigan, as that
game went along even a little bit, the Washington game, you
know, which was a kind of a special case because of the fact
that that Curtis work was out. It goes back to the fundamental
issue with this Indiana team, which was that so much of what
they did this year, so much of their, you know, the the wins
that they collected, the style in which they collected those
wins was based upon execution and efficiency.
And the thing that disrupts execution and efficiency is
going up against players that are stronger than you are faster
than you, that can make plays athletically, that you can make
through being really smart in the way that you do things.
And, you know, in this game, it kind of snowballed.
You do wonder, you know, and, and again, it, it kind of goes
back to the same set of question marks that you had coming out of
the Ohio State game. Because when we talked about
that Ohio State game, it was, well, gosh, you know, what if
James Evans doesn't drop that punt?
You know, and what if it's a tie game going into halftime?
Or what if you don't have the special teams play that lets
Ohio State score again early on in the third quarter And now
suddenly the game's out of hand. And in this one, you could say,
well, you know, what if Indiana doesn't throw that interception?
What if they even, even if they just kick a field goal there?
Well, then you don't have the 98 yard touch.
And what if you stop that? What if they you, you bottle
Notre Dame up? So there's all these
hypotheticals, but ultimately the reality is the level of
talent that both Notre Dame and and Ohio State had compared to
what Indiana had was probably always going to carry the day.
It was going to take a sequence of, of really luck and
exceptional play on Indiana's part to be able to overcome
those things. You know, Bill Connolly brought
up an interesting point. Like look at the number of times
Indiana actually made it into Notre Dame territory.
And yet for the longest period of the game, all they came away
with that was a field goal. And that I think is as much of
an indicator of anything. Notre Dame was really good at
stopping Indiana when they needed to stop Indiana and
forcing Indiana into spots where they had to make high risk plays
in order to continue things. And I don't think Kurt Signetti
and his staff were wrong in taking the conservative options
there because I think that they were waiting for a spark.
They were waiting for a play that could potentially turn some
things around. It's just that it never
materialized. And so Indiana ends up coming
out of that game looking, to go back to your point, completely
different from how they had looked in most of the other
games that they had played this year.
And it's unfortunate. I'm just not sure, having
reflected on for 36 hours or whatever it's been now, that
there was a a realistic pathway to it being different.
Even if Indiana had tried to be more aggressive, we might be
talking about a 47 to 17 game at this point as opposed to a 27 to
17 game. No, you're right And and I know
I'm, I'm not going, I'm not arguing with you because I know
what you were saying when when you meant this, but I, I, I
always hate going down the path of, well, you know, if that
interception doesn't happen, you walk through three points
because any and you can do it. The Ohio State game too, But you
know, on the counter to that is always, you know, I, I think
part of the reason we started scoring against Notre Dame is
they just mentally took their foot off the gas a bit.
And so I mean you, it's that, and I'm not saying you were
doing this, but like, that's just, that's not a good place to
be. And it's like, well, this
happens, this happens kind of a win.
Like it's so, you know, you lost.
And I think you make a very valid point as well that if we
go in there and we're super aggressive, maybe work throws 3
picks and then we end up getting conservative and then we're, we
lose by 35 or 40. I hear all that, you know, I'll,
I'll and, and the, the thing that I'll say too is, you know,
Notre Dame just showed up on defense in a way that was kind
of start again. I was surprised at how much more
we threw. When I look back at the stats
and even the I was like, well, the first couple drives you ran
a bunch like, no, we actually threw a bunch the first couple
drives as well. But when you look at, you know,
the plays from scrimmage, you know, there there's stuffed
runs, 0 yards, yards, gains, which is like 2 yards and then
an opportunity run, which is 4 or more yards.
Against Michigan, we had 65 rushes, 38% of those were
opportunities, four or more Ohio State, which I, I'm just, I'm
tired of like I'm picking other games because I'm tired of going
using Ohio State as a measuring stick for everything.
But Ohio State we had 59 rushes, 47% were for four or more yards.
The Michigan State game, 61 yard, 61 rushes, 44% were of
that opportunity zone. Against Notre Dame, we only
rushed the ball 24 times. Kind of shocking 88 of those 33%
where opportunity runs, the other 83% either gained a zero
or two yards. I think part of that is the play
calling, but I think also part of that is what you said it is,
it is talent. And you know, I, I think what
you saw taking a high step back this season is when talent was
on par. We when we were better, we
kicked the living snot out of people.
When talent was on par, we won. You know, maybe, maybe we're on
par with UCLAI. I'm just picking, you know, kind
of like in that realm, we, we, or maybe we're a little better,
you know, we won handily or by a touchdown or two when, when
talent was slightly better, like maybe Nebraska.
But we still, I mean, we, we, we look like we're able to still
run our stuff. But when talent started getting
superior, that's why you looked at Michigan.
It's like you Michigan, you had to play pretty clean and you did
in the first half when you started playing not super clean.
I mean, not just a couple mistakes here and there.
It gets tough. And then when talent is really
at a major talent disadvantage, you know, that's where you get
the Ohio State and the Notre Dame.
And that is that is just something with football where
you have, you know, 11 people on each side and there's big talent
gaps. And you know, you you saw it in
both the Ohio State and the Notre Dame game.
Once you get in the second-half, it's like, man, we're the
trouble is we don't have the horses as always to to kind of
continue to to bring those guys in as people get tired.
What makes me comfortable for moving forward is I feel like we
are going to start getting more and more talent and it's going
to get us to a point where maybe the Indiana Ohio State game is
going to look like more of the Indiana Michigan game in a year
or two. But let's be honest, you know,
we're we're never going to be at a talent superiority to Ohio
State or Notre Dame. I mean, they've been recruiting
at a five star level for year on, year on year.
But I think what we can do. Is start recruiting guys that
fit our system. But anyway, sorry, long, I'm,
I'm off the rails. No, I mean, look, I, I, I hear
what you're saying and I, I think it's important to
understand like there's a difference between talent and
athleticism and the what, you know, the, the dividing line you
get a lot in college football is it's speed or it's, you know,
just raw athleticism. And that is ultimately what
Indiana just doesn't have. And, and that isn't a surprise.
I mean, it's if you think about it, about what Indiana did this
year, it was such a huge accomplishment that they took a
collection of lightly regarded players that they had recruited
lightly regarded players like so lightly regarded.
They ended up a group of five schools.
Cause in the, in the echelons of talent, if there's people that
perceive you as not having the athleticism or not having the
speed or the strength, like you go down the pecking order in
terms of the programs that you start with.
But you had a bunch of overachieving players whose
output exceeded what their raw numbers might have indicated in
terms of their physicality. And that's what made this
Indiana season so special. Indiana wasn't quite there in
terms of being able to take that underdog approach and actually
be able to, you know, go in and and win games against Ohio State
or Notre Dame. But I also don't think that
Indiana embarrassed themselves in either games.
And to some degree they they mitigated the types of damages.
That, for instance, SMU was unable to mitigate as they got
boat raced by Penn State. You know, so I do think that
there's some distinguishing characteristics here and as far
behind as Indiana has been and was coming into this season in
terms of athleticism and speed. The the types of things that
separate four and five star players from two and three star
players. The fact that they were able to
achieve what they achieved and win at the level they were able
to win and be as dominant as they were in so many games this
year against lesser or equal competition.
Going back to what you were saying is a great harbinger for
the future. And I think it's important to
not let what happened in the Notre Dame game be something
that makes you think, well, gosh, that's going to be a real
problem for IU. Like there was a comment and
Robert said, I'm afraid with this performance, IU's past
history is going to bite them in attracting better players.
It would really suck if this season turns out to be fool's
goal. Here's the thing.
Last year at this time, Indiana was coming off a three and nine
season where they lost at Purdue, had essentially nobody
believing they were going to do anything.
And yet. And then brought in players who
were able to mold themselves into a unit under the tutelage
of this coaching staff that allowed them to go 11 and two,
allowed them to be competitive in in so many games, allowed
them to get into the College Football Playoff.
I, I don't think that you can look at the performance in this
game and say, Oh no, this is going to cause people to not
consider IU. When a player is going to look
at what Indiana did this year or, or, you know, their high
school coach or their parents going to look at this and say,
wow, there's opportunities for my kid to go play with a team
that's clearly looking for top level players where they could
start and and accrue stats and put themselves in a position to
be considered for the NFL. That has happened with so many
of the players that trans that transferred into Indiana in the
last offseason. It's not just the Mikhail
Camaras and the D Angelo Ponzas, it's the CJ Wests too.
I mean, it's, it's players like that who used this canvas to
demonstrate that they could play at the highest levels.
I, I think it's nothing but a positive for Indiana moving
forward. I, I don't see a situation where
a player's going to look at that and say, well, I wouldn't want
to be part of that situation. I would take quite the opposite
approach right, quite frankly. No, I agree and I I do think
with talent getting better, I do think that's where you can look
at those single plays in the Ohio State Notre Dame game and
and and say maybe if we had a couple more athletic, you know,
five star athletic, 4 star athletic players, maybe that 99
run doesn't happen because couple guys are probably you
were there. It's just you know, that kid
just or Notre Dame out random. The the thing that I want to
come back to is something you said is, you know, the coaching
staff was kind of and and we've been very positive as signetti
the entire season. Again, disentangling looking at
this one game. Just I want to hit one thing
that really came that came up and in the stands was was was
tough to live with. You know, you said that they
were probably might have been waiting for a spark before they
got tried to show a little bit of aggression.
You did get that spark in the the beginning of the fourth
quarter. Notre Dame, who by the way, the
field goal kicker like felt very unfortunately felt very normal.
IU, a court kicker has been like 40% for the year.
So I'm like 47 yard or end of the half.
I'll just get that right through the middle of the uprights.
But we we block a field goal, we get the ball back.
We have a drive. It's not a great drive, 5 plays,
12 yards. You get into Notre Dame
territory, it's twenty to three start of the fourth quarter and
you punt and you've had a game where James Evans has been
punting not well, I mean pretty bad, like he's been had some
crappy punts most of the day. That is the one that I have a
real hard time coming up with an answer for.
And and you know, Signetti in the post game said, you know,
our offense wasn't really doing anything.
So I thought you maybe our defense will do something.
It's like I I I kind of get it, but it's kind of like you're
you're in their territory. Notre Dame is just in bleed the
clock mode. It it did.
And this is like a guy who is talking, who's talked mountains
of smack all over the place. It's not an awesome look.
And it kind of at that point, all of us in the IU section are
like, all right, well, I guess we're done.
I guess we're. Not I guess we're done and like
it was for a coach who had gone for it in so many times on 4th
down. That was a a real question call.
The only thing I will say, I'll let you retort here in a SEC is
that, you know, just like, you know, Signeti was an assistant
at Alabama, but he he's played at lower levels.
This is obviously, you know, no, none of our players have been in
a situation like this. Neither has signet where he's
the play caller. He's the one in the final
headset where he can, you know, make obviously when he was in
Alabama, he wasn't like Saban wasn't like, hey, Sig, take it
for a couple minutes. I'm going to go off and do
something else. You know, my my hope is that,
you know, Sig reflects back is like, that's not me.
Like, you know, it just it got the better of me.
I made a a bad decision. Like that's not the way I want
us to play. And next time we're in this
spot, I'm going to learn and get better.
And and that's my hope with it. But that was the moment where I
was like, that's really the play that crystallized.
I don't have a lot of answer for us.
And a lot of my friends who are not IU fans were kind of like,
man, how could you do that? He did something kind of similar
in the Ohio State game, another kind of funky punt at that time.
And it's it it's tough to answer to.
My only hope is you, you learn from it and you you don't get
conservative because again, that's what I love about this IU
team this year is they were always going for it and felt
like they were the aggressors. I mean, look, yes, and I was as
distraught about the punt call at the time.
It didn't make a lot of sense. I understand what Signeti was
trying to say in the post game I get and he wasn't wrong, like
his offense hadn't really done anything up to that point.
But the logical rejoinder to his statement that well, maybe, you
know, the defense was still fighting.
It's like, well coach, the defense would come on the field
if you attempted the 4th down and missed like they would have
a chance to turn them over there.
And that I do think that that was, it was unfortunate that
that was the decision that was made.
And I do think it opened up Signetti for a lot of criticism.
I, I, I'll, I'll say this, that a lot of people got really
indignant about comments that Signetti made before the game.
I obviously didn't hear them at the time because I was walking
around the tailgating lots around Notre Dame Stadium.
My thing is this, I, you can't have it both ways in college
football. College football is at least in
part, about making your opponents pay attention to you
and making the college football world pay attention to you.
It is such a sport that is driven by antics and attention.
Deion Sanders does a different version of the same thing at
Colorado, and Deion Sanders has been criticized.
It's not like Deion Sanders does it and doesn't get criticized
and Signeti does it and does. When you get to this level, you
make statements. You're trying to build not just
a program, but you're trying to build a reputation around a
program, and making noise makes sense because that's what gets
rewarded. As much as it gets complained
about by the pundit class or by fans, we reward programs and
coaches that demand attention and we ignore programs and
coaches that don't go out of their way to demand attention.
And I will point to you the entire history of Indiana
football prior to 2024 as a good.
Example of that. So I look real, real quick on
this like the the thing that drives me nuts about it.
You're right, like Dion for the most part is like, oh, I love
it. He's brash, he's fun, he's
cocky. And then it is such a double
standard 'cause there is this like, you know, then it's like
man Signetti. Some people are like, I hate
this, like I can't stand this cockiness.
And it it's weird that double standard.
I will also I always think of this.
I agree with you. I will always think of this in
the back of my head. And he talked.
He was not a huge IU fan during this process, but like Ryan
Rosillo always says, and it's true.
It's like, take a step back. What are they supposed to say?
Like you asked Signetti before the game, hey, how are you guys
going to do? Is he be like, man, Notre Dame's
good? Like they got a lot of athletes.
We're probably going to get our ass kicked and I'm probably
going to punt. Like, what's he supposed to say?
Like you're supposed to go in there and like, yeah, when you
ask him like he's supposed to fight for you to be in the
playoff, he's supposed to say we're going to kick everyone's
ass. Like that's what you're supposed
to say. So.
So keep that in mind as well. And I I hear you.
It's just it's The thing is he had matched it all season, even
not with just just with the play calls.
And so that's the only thing where it's like, but again.
Learning experience. I'm with you.
I look, they shouldn't have punted and it was a real
disappointment that that was what they did.
And I think, you know, you, you, you can't really look at the
last two drives and say, well, gosh, if they had just done that
earlier because clearly in order to aim at taking the foot off
the gas at that point, similar to what happened.
IU games have been like that where we play great teams and
like we backdoor our way into AI.
Mean that that's what I was thinking.
I'm like God this reminds me of so many Ohio State Michigan
games are like we're basically losing and all of a sudden it's
like dude if we get a 2 point conversion and an on.
Side like we have this like weird path where it's like we
could actually tie this game well and look, it does as much
as it as much as it's not an excuse in the moment, it does
matter for narrative purposes. Indiana ended up being the the
team that lost by the least amount of points in the first
round of the College Football Playoff.
And we'll talk more about that narrative here.
But there is some argument, going back to the question that
Robert had about does this hurt IU?
There is something to be said from damage mitigation and for
how you end up coming out looking compared to other teams.
It shouldn't be the primary goal.
The goal should be winning the game.
But it is in some small sense, much as it was in the Ohio State
game when Indiana put that drive together at the end and ended up
scoring and, you know, put themselves in a position where
at least they didn't look completely outclassed.
They scored in double digits in that as a result of it.
It, it does matter. And so you do have to think
about that in the back of your head a little bit.
And up to that point, there just wasn't anything offensively that
you would look at with Indiana and say, here's a good argument
for why they're going to suddenly play completely
differently in the fourth quarter.
Again, not defending the punt, but I understand what the
thought process was behind it. But it kind of goes back to the
larger narrative of the game, Scott and and I I was thinking
about this. It's like the most frustrating
aspect being in the stands. Every drive that Indiana had,
they they come out and you're just like, OK, this is the drive
or this is the play where something's going to happen.
And it didn't. And I think that, you know, you
just kind of felt, again, going back to the quicksand thing, you
could just feel yourself slipping further and further
down into the muck if you were an IU fan.
You know, halftime was insanely long.
And a lot of it was spent just being like, all right, is there
are there any positives that we can take out of what occurred in
that game or in that first half? And, and even, you know, you
think about the way that the game went after that, like it
was 17 to three at halftime. Indiana forces a three and out
from Notre Dame at the start of the third quarter and you're
like, oh, maybe this is it. Then they come out and they lose
9 yards over 3 plays and in order, Dave goes down and kicks
another field goal and it's you're like, well, that's good.
It's 20 to 3 still in it. It's 3 possessions, but maybe.
And then you go out and you gain 2 yards on three plays.
And it it was such a tease because, you know, Indiana's
defense and special teams not involving the punting did just
enough to keep you feeling like you were afloat, You know,
because again, it's like after that next three and out that
Indiana has the Irish drive down the field, 11 plays, 50 yards
and Indiana blocks the field goal And you're like, ah, there
it is. All right.
And then Indiana 5 plays, 12 yards, punts again.
And you know, that was the the one that you were referring to.
It just you, you held on as long as you could as an Indiana fan
in the game, but you just never there was never a spark.
It just never happened. And sometimes it be that way.
And in this case, unfortunately for Indiana, they just didn't
have the play in front of them on offense to make a dent in
Notre Dames defense. And I think their players
deserve a ton of credit. I think Al Golden deserves a ton
of credit. They absolutely smothered
Indiana in the crib until the very end, at the at which point
it didn't really matter. And it's a it's a shame, you
know, it's a really it's a tough way to watch them go out.
I was really happy that Omar Cooper got got a touchdown pass
there at the end. It was it was nice to see Miles
Price, after getting knocked out of a couple of weeks ago, quite
literally come in and and grab a touchdown pass.
Curtis work somehow ended up with more passing yards than
Riley Leonard did. But you know, I'll, I'll switch
sides here real quick as we continue to kind of wrap the
game real quick. I just want to say that that
point, because we, it was so funny the entire section in the
first quarter, it's like we get, you know, fired up and then, you
know, the 98 yard run, it's like, all right, we got to get
points on this. Like you need to now get points
on this drive and then we don't. And then Notre Dame scores
another touchdown and it's like, that's a 9 minute drive.
And we're just like, man, if they're going to start running
the ball like that's not well, we got to get points like now we
got to get points like now is that you keep pushing the own
goal posts. Like we got to get it now.
And then we, you know, I kept saying, but damn it, like Notre
Dame starts the ball the second-half.
So we got it like it just all of these things were like, this is
all, none of this is good. All the red indicator lights.
But like it was three straight drives where I just kept saying
to people around me, like, OK, now, like now is the time you
have to get points or else you really are in trouble.
And it was like, we didn't get it.
It's like, OK, but now like now is really.
And it's just you kept pushing it back.
And you're right, you were kind of waiting for that moment and
it just, it never came. And you know, defensively, I, I
think Indiana deserves a ton of credit for how well they played.
You know, you take away the, the 98 yard touchdown run from
Jeremiah Love and the Irish didn't have 100 yards rushing.
Now you can't just do that, but I think it's an illustration of
even with a a 98 yard run, the Irish only averaged 5.5 yards a
carry. Factoring that in, you know, if
you take that away, they they had a much worse average.
They did a really good job of using Riley Leonard effectively.
They passed the ball just enough that it kept Indiana off
balance. Indiana struggled with tackling
at a level I haven't seen them struggle this year.
I thought even against Ohio State, they tackled better and
and it turned a lot of 2-3 yard gains into 789 yard gains.
And again, it's like it comes back to that, the ideas of of
athleticism and speed and skill rather than just execution.
Indiana was in the positions they needed to be in.
They just couldn't quite make the plays to flip the field
enough to give Indiana's offense enough throws at the dartboard.
Well, no. And I I think the tackling thing
was it, it was odd to see. And again, not like it's like
this is not the team we saw all season, but I, I, I tipped a lot
of that to athleticism. I just, it looked like guys were
taking the right angles. It's just Notre Dame guys had
bursts of speed that they had not seen and good angles turned
into bad angles very quickly. Yeah, I know there's and and
Notre Dames players were slippery and you know, again,
they played really well. So as much as we didn't know,
and we talked about this in pretty much every preview
podcast we did, we didn't know how relative Indiana and the
Irish were because again, neither of them played tough
schedules. They were both really dominant.
They both were similar in FPI and FPI that all of the things
that you would indicate. Yeah, OK, this team didn't play
a tough schedule, but they dominated their opponents.
They look very similar. In this case, it was clear that
Notre Dame was the superior team, and that bore itself out
throughout the course of the game, at least when it came to
the way that Notre Dame's defense played Indiana's
offense. But if you look at it the other
way around, if you look at the way that Indiana's defense
played the Fighting Irish's offense, that Indiana acquitted
themselves very well in this game.
And again, if you can hold your opponent to 27 points on the in
their home stadium, you can't say to yourself, well, we didn't
give ourselves a chance. Indiana, we talked about was
going to have to score in that area to have a chance in this
game and they just weren't capable of doing so.
And that's unfortunate, but that's an illustration, I think
of the difference between the two teams in terms of the base
level athleticism. And that is fortunately
something that Indiana can improve upon as we move forward.
So that would be, that's kind of the biggest thing I took away
from it. I had a bunch of people text me
before, excuse me during and after the game asking me like,
how are you doing? Are you all right?
Honestly, I walked out of the stadium very frustrated.
But I drove home yesterday feeling pretty at peace with
everything because it was clear from watching Indiana in the
game that they were just not at the level that Notre Dame was.
And that's OK because no one expected Indiana to even be in
the conversation at this point. The fact that they were in the
conversation is a great first step.
This I look at is simply a step, though.
It's not necessarily the the end point of anything.
This is where you now look at what Indiana Indiana's now seen.
OK, That's what we're going to have to do.
We're either going to have to host one of these games or we're
going to have to significantly upgrade the athleticism and the
speed on the roster. The thing is we knew both of
those things before the game started, which is why I don't
feel as bad, I think as if I had gone in assuming that Indiana
was automatically on the same level as Notre Dame.
I, and we talked about it again in the podcast, it was if it
came down to a, a physicality versus physicality thing,
Indiana was going to lose. Indiana was going to have to out
execute Notre Dame if they were going to win this game.
They did not out execute Notre Dame and they lost the game.
Yeah. I mean, and to your point of the
defense, at the end of the third quarter, it's 20 to 3:00.
And if you said, hey, we're going to we're going to give up
20 points and three quarters in Notre Dame, they're like, I'll
take that. Like that's, that's pretty good.
The defense did their job. Just the three is not what
counts. I'm in a similar spot to kind of
taking a step back and reflecting.
I was talking to a a friend yesterday about this and he
parroted back to me something that I have been saying all
season, which I also agree with that.
I think Indiana showed that I'm just going to play with numbers
here. But you know, we're we're a top
10 to 15 team in the country right now.
And we were this year. We played like it, but there's a
gap between 10:00 and 5:00 and 5:00 and 1:00.
I I think we can play in that 10 and five space.
We're definitely not in right now in that space of the 54321
of the country. You can definitely see a gap
there. You saw it against Ohio State
and this probably, you know, Ohio Notre Dame is in that
category as well and they play like it at times they're there.
And I'm like, that's, that's what I've been kind of feeling
all year that I think we're a really good team.
I think we're, you know, 10:10, 11/12/13 in the country.
We're right there. We can play a little bit above
our head, but we're not in the point where we can play with the
Oregons, the Georgias, the Ohio States, and maybe now the Notre
Dames. And that's fine.
I mean, we were what, like 3:00 and 9:00 last year?
We fired our coach. We, we've had what, 4 winning
seasons in 30 years? Like the idea that we're not
able to play in the top six in the country.
But yes, I, I'm well aware we we are in the top 15 easily.
We are there now comes the hard work of grinding up.
Can you get to 8? Can you get to 7?
Can you be in a spot where you can play with those teams up
there? And I think we have the coaching
staff that can do it. So this I'm with you.
I was very frustrated walking out for the reasons I talked
about. I was a little bit bummed
yesterday, but I'm, I'm at that point now where like, I believe
what I believed early on, which is I never thought we were the
best team in the country. And I knew there were teams that
were just dramatically more athletic than us and that's what
we saw. And we can now work to get up
there. But we definitely pulled
ourselves up to a spot that I never thought was possible to
say. I I think definitively no
question that we are one of the top 15 teams in the country.
Beat everybody below us Lost to two top five teams on the season
in Ohio State, Notre Dame at at Notre Dame and at Ohio State.
We're asking to see what it's like playing at at Columbus.
Yeah, well, let's talk about that a little bit.
We're going to talk about the playoff discourse and what's
going on in college football. And then kind of the broader 1
back to before we do that, I do want to say just a quick shout
out to all the IU fans that were up in South Bend.
I got up there on Thursday evening and it was, it was a joy
just meeting so many people in person, getting a chance to, you
know, share the excitement about Indiana being in the College
Football Playoff, getting a chance to just enjoy.
People from all across the country that descended on South
Bend saw some people I hadn't seen in a long time.
Both Thursday and Friday, it was, it was cold on Friday.
It was cold in the stadium. It was cold before the game.
It was, it was really one of those experiences, though, where
I think Indiana, you know, we, we talk a lot about people
traveling to games and it being disappointing outcomes.
It was still cool to see so many people in the stands.
It was so amazing to see so many people out and about before the
game. That event that we had a social
cantina, which is packed with IU fans that were the IU Alumni
Association pregame tailgate, I heard was a lot of fun.
We had a great time in our tailgate area that a bunch of
people from various spots. So, you know, so many people
came up and like said thanks for the podcast and, and said, you
know, thanks for all the coverage on IU over time.
And I would just say the same back to all of those people.
It was such a joy having all you folks along for the ride
throughout the course of the year.
And it was, it was just such a fun experience and I'm glad so
many people got a chance to be there for the culmination of it.
It's a shame that that was where the ride ended, but I couldn't
be prouder of a fan base like Indiana's for coalescing around
this team so quickly and and becoming a force to be reckoned
with just in terms of of, you know, showing up at games and
buying tickets and buying into what's going going on with the
program. That was really, really cool to
see. We saw it obviously, throughout
the course of the year. We saw it at UCLA, we saw it up
at Michigan State, We saw it at Ohio State.
We saw it here even more so in South Bend.
And, and I just want to tip my captain, who's your nation for,
for being dispassionate about a football program that not a lot
of people had a huge amount of displayed passion for prior to
the year. We came up there on Friday,
there was a lot of people on driving on, sorry, driving up 31
that were honking and waving flags because we had our, our,
our flags on the car walking around the stadium.
A lot of IU fans like I, I was thinking like, man, this is like
5050 now in the stadium. It wasn't the same.
So a lot of IU fans might have just been there milling around,
which was awesome. It, it was to talk about the
atmosphere for a minute at Notre Dame Stadium, you know, same,
same for me. It was I bumped into a bunch of
people. In fact, my section it was Reed,
a guy I've talked about before who's sits like across the aisle
for me. He was literally 2 seats next to
me. So we were talking then all
around me everyone's like, oh, is that Scott from Crimson
Cancer? I know that voice anywhere.
Like it was super nice to to say hi to everybody.
It's so great. The only thing that was tough is
that you know, you and I are kind of different during the
games. I'm a little more quiet and
reserved and so people are like what, what do you think?
I'm like it's not good. We got to score.
It's got something very quiet and you want to talk about
disappointment? The guy in front of me, I think
it's Brandon, I'm sorry I forgot your name, but he's super nice.
His son, son was like 10 years old.
And the guy's like, hey, this is the this is the guy you were
listening to on the car ride up. This is him.
And you talk about like getting an ego, kicking the ball.
There was like kids like, OK, like, hey, you sucked on the
ride. You suck now.
Something similar happened to me earlier in the day.
It's fine. You know, the, the I don't the
youth most of the time the youth are like, I now I, I don't know
who this person is. I can't connect the voice of the
person. That's that's hilarious.
I will say most Notre Dame fans were were very friendly.
One had a great line. We're walking in and he's just
like, man, we're going to F and kick your ass.
It's like, but I still love you. We have the same driver's
license. That cracks me up.
A lot of like, and then we got a lot of like losers, right?
It's funny. Then just a lot of like, your
team sucks. I'm like, all right, work on
that, bro. And you know, your season ends
tonight. I will say this about Notre Dame
Stadium, if you don't mind, Just take a second.
I've never been there before. It was wild.
I was telling my wife, it's like there's parts of it where it's
like going walking through me. Like when her and I went to
Paris, Like, oh, there's the Louvre, like there's the ML
tower. It's like, oh, there's touchdown
Jesus. Like, oh, there's the golden
Dome. And like, oh, this is maybe
where they shot that Rudy shot of like the sight this to him
trying to jump in. Like it's almost like being in a
foreign country. There's so many sites that
you've heard about and seen and then you get there and it's
really cool to to be there and to see it.
The stadium itself, we were sitting right behind the IU
band. We are, we are higher than than
than Galen's wine and cheese crowd this time.
But but there was not a bad, I mean, it's a fantastic view.
There is not a bad seat in the stadium.
It would be really nice for them to move some speakers around
because that goddamn scoreboard was so loud.
And that, that's the two things that I will say that surprised
me. They've obviously done some
renovations, put in a couple more bathrooms because upper
level, I can't speak for the lower level, upper level, there
were four bathrooms because I walked around that entire thing
to find them. Each one had a line that was out
the door. All the food.
This is like middle of the second quarter.
Like there's lines for food. Like everything is just a line.
Like everyone's waiting in line all the time for everything.
A guy behind me waited like 45 minutes, just take a just to go
to the bathroom. It was wild.
It was very unimpressed with that.
The second thing I will say, I thought was interesting, and
this is I, I think this relates to IU 2 is trying to build a
program. You know, I, I, I harken it to
Assembly Hall. You go to an IU basketball game
and you're kind of seeing a nice mix of, you know, the band plays
and they play some music and then like you have the seven
minute timeout. Like there's things that like,
oh, this has been organically grown.
We're playing the fight song here.
Fans know what to do. I was really surprised I was
going into Notre Dame. Like they have an iconic fight
song. They have, you know, the, the,
the mascot, they have all the stuff.
There wasn't as much of that as I was expecting.
Like it was a weird like between the 3rd and the fourth quarter,
which is kind of like your iconic time as a football
program to have your thing. They did the DEO song from
Freddie Mercury with like a Groundhog on the Jumbotron with
a, with an Irish hat. And it's like, OK, well, that
wasn't around when New Rockne was here.
Like, do you guys not have any traditions?
Like I didn't hear the Notre Dame fight song very much.
The band maybe from where we're at, we couldn't hear it as much.
It just it, it felt like they've gone overboard with like crazy
hip hop songs, stuff like that, which I get.
I was just for a place that is feels like a cathedral
basketball, There's sorry, football, there's nothing on the
field. It it felt very kind of nouveau
nouveau rich to me. I don't know.
It was it was an odd thing. I was expecting more tradition
out of the Notre Dame football game day experience.
Although I will say their their entrance to the field was was
dynamite. They turn the lights out.
They have like green neon lights.
They have file. It was it was a cool entrance.
And I had heard that Indiana we we saved like 50 grand by not
getting the LED lights you can turn on and off from the
stadium. I think we're redoing that
because when they start turning the lights off on a night game
it is, it is pretty damn cool. I'll just say, I mean, look, I
wasn't, I've been to Notre Dame Stadium before.
It was a long time ago. It was like 12 years ago and
wasn't really that attuned to the atmosphere.
I I just think that across the board side, like societally, you
have to essentially treat most crowds the same.
There are very few places that don't have anything modern in
their presentation, and that's fine.
Ohio Stadium was a mix of things and it feels maybe a little more
authentic or whatever because of the band, but that was about it.
This was also a the College Football Playoff rules about
what you could do were a little bit different.
I don't, I, I can't, I can't compare what they do to a normal
home game. So all I'll say is I think
ultimately what you're seeing is more the reality of how you deal
with crowds today. Because at the end of it, all
generations are generations and they're going to react for, you
know, the, the bright lights and the shiny things and the stuff
that you see happening across the country.
Everybody has to copy each other now because that's what works
so. The one thing we can't copy that
my wife absolutely hated was they had a animatronic race
through the campus of all of their national championship
coaches. It's like Newt Rockney Racing,
Lou Holtz and a bunch of Dan Devine and my wife.
Just like I hate this place, you know I don't.
Know why that that put her over the edge?
They've got their they've got their own things.
What can you do? But no, overall I will say it
was, it was, it was a great atmosphere just in general.
And it was agreed, it was one of those where you did feel a lot
of the history, just the way the stadium looks.
It was interesting hearing people talking afterwards about
how vivid the sounds were. And there's this theory that NBC
kind of mutes the sound from Notre Dame games that they
normally broadcast, whereas ABC was broadcasting the game.
So they have their sound engineers and everybody's like,
wow, we've never heard the stadium sound this electric
before. It, it was one of those games
where I, I, again, I don't have a lot to compare to in terms of
regular games at home there, but it was a very cool atmosphere
once you got in there. It felt like a playoff game is
supposed to feel like. So anyway, let's, let's broaden
the, the lens a little bit and talk a little bit about goodbye
South Bend, Goodbye South Bend. Well, not quite, not entirely
because immediately after the game and actually apparently
during the game, during the broadcast, immediately the
narrative start, Indiana didn't deserve to be here in the 1st
place. Indiana was, you know, hadn't
earned their way in that kind of garbage, which we should have
settled 2 weeks ago. But of course, shockingly on
ESPN/ABC, the company that is entirely in bed with the SEC,
the narratives start immediately for what ended up being a 10
point loss on the road. Which is something I want to
yell at. These are your partners.
Like like this is like you're you're trying to promote this
product, not talk about how crappy everything like talk
about the Cinderella story. Talk about the fact like, hey,
this team kicked everyone's ass all year.
They got to 11 and one like this was an amazing story.
It's too bad it ends here. But Notre Dame is a great
program. Like that's the you can push
that narrative. You have.
To push. We, we F this up.
Man, I really wish South Carolina was here.
And, and then of course, that continued on into the next day
and we're still seeing it. ESPN just tweeted something else
out about Kirk Herb St. on Sports Center last night, taking
the time to talk about how Indiana didn't belong in the
College Football Playoff. And then we heard, well, SMU
didn't belong because they lost. And then, and then Clemson lost.
And then of course, Tennessee gets boat raced by by Ohio
State. I, I haven't heard a lot of,
well, Tennessee didn't belong. I think what we've seen out of
all of this is some realities, which the, the realities are
really interesting to think about.
A lot of it you just can't trust what a lot of the college
football media landscape decides to talk about because it is so
driven by a very confused agenda.
And, you know, I thought a lot about this over the course of
not just the last couple of days, but really the last couple
of months as we've watched the way that people have talked
about IU and the playoff devolve into this weird sort of dialogue
regarding deserve and, you know, who who really should be there
and what do we want to see. And it really highlighted how
broken college football discourse is.
And it's a product of years and years of the distinguishing
aspects of college football being polls and people voting on
things and people claiming that this team is better than that
team rather than actually playing out on the field.
You know, it's it's a it's an interesting thing to me because
most other sports don't have this broken level of discourse
in the United States because they're set up in a way that's
either more democratic and how it's decided at the end or more
democratic and how it's set up at the beginning.
You look at college football and you should be saying to
yourself, wow, Indiana making the College Football Playoff
coming from three and nine being the losing his program in
college sports or in college football history.
Like that's a great story. The fact that Indiana was able
to win that many games and put themselves in a position to get
in like that should be the story.
SMU coming back from a death penalty and coming back from
just a couple of years ago, being in an irrelevant
conference and essentially being a nobody in college football,
being able to turn that around and be in a College Football
Playoff. That's that's an amazing story.
The idea that, you know, somehow going on the road in college
football and losing indicates that you don't belong when it
might just indicate that you're on the road, which is a very
difficult thing to do. I mean, I saw some kind of a,
there was a stat earlier where it's like, you know, most of the
time when top 25 teams play each other, the team that's playing
at home wins the game. It's it, it's not necessarily
who the higher ranked team is, but playing at home is a huge
difference, especially in college football that doesn't
get paid attention to in any of the discourse.
You know, so we as Indiana fans are an interesting spot because
we have to some degree become the target of all of the things
that these people who talk about college football claim are
important. But when you really step back
and look at what they're arguing is important, it's like that.
That's a that's a crappy way to think about your own sport when
all you're carrying about is the perpetuation of the same brands.
And when the primary conveyor of the College Football Playoff,
ESPN, has such a naked and uncompromisingly direct
relationship with one of the parties within this larger mix.
And they don't even bother to express that when it's left to
other people to highlight, hey, your opinions here are clearly
compromised. You're clearly filtering this
through one particular frame. Like that's a real problem.
I don't know how that gets fixed.
And I've seen some people who have been covering college
football talking about this openly, like where it's like
people don't really like college football.
They like branding and they like all these people arguing, well,
we shouldn't have had a 12 team playoff because you had these
four teams lose in the first round.
Well, I mean, I'd point to the NFL.
We've had expanded playoffs in the NFL all the time.
Guess what? First round matchups often times
result in the team hosting winning the game.
This is nothing new. This is how this stuff works.
It doesn't mean that you don't let those teams in.
This is Year 1 of a much larger stretch of time with a new
format. And oh, I'm shocked that that
there's three to five teams that might be better than the other
seven or eight that make the playoff.
But that's, that doesn't mean you don't expand the playoff.
It, this has been the fascinating thing to me.
It's like, well, we shouldn't have let those teams in in the
1st place. It's like, why not?
Like what, what did we lose in that exchange at this point?
There's going to be more of this as we move forward.
They're not going back. You're not going to cut the
number of teams. And I do think that the rules
changes that we're seeing in college football starting to
take hold, the transfer portal and NIL, the movement of
players, the the gap that people perceive right now between the
the top five teams, for instance, and the rest of
college football, that's going to start to reduce as you start
to see talent spreading itself out a little bit.
And I honestly think that's the core of a lot of these comments
and concerns about teams like Indiana being in the mix.
They don't want Indiana looking like a viable option for talent
to land and having a shot at playing in the College Football
Playoff any more than they want SMU, any more than they want
Arizona State being in the mix. But this seems like the common
thread through a lot of this. And that to me is exciting
because guess what? You're not going to change the
process. You're not going to change the
approach. You could add some playoff
games, certainly, But this is actually what makes the sport
better and this is what makes the sport more important to even
more people. And at the end of it, that might
be the thing that's bothering SEC fans in ESPN so much is
like, they've had this nice little self-contained thing
we've forgotten. And we're finally being reminded
that, hey, the Big 10 is the most dominant college Football
Conference in the history of college football.
It's not the SEC. It's really where the sport like
thrived for so many years. The SEC, yes, has had higher
levels of talent, but this system that we have right now,
you have to give everybody at least some kind of a shot to get
in. And yeah, Indiana lost their
game. SMU lost their game.
That may not happen next time because I think there's going to
be a lot of recruits looking at Indiana and looking at SMU and
say, man, I go there, I got a chance of playing for a national
title. I go to some second tier S or
SEC school. I might be 8 and four and
sitting at home or going to the Cheez It Bowl.
I'm just letting you cook like that's, I think everyone who's
listening, you owe IU at least $35.00 because that's part of
Galen's age, 30, you know, 141 class.
So you just got a 10 minute lecture.
That's great. I agreed all of that.
I also think what's at play is unlike college basketball, like
like you said, has a system, a defined bracket at the end where
everybody kind of gets in. You know, college football is
also at a crossroads where you have two conferences that are
fighting for power, the Big 10 and the SEC.
There's been talks that's not off the radar of will the Big
10, the SEC just break away from college football.
They have that much power. And what you're seeing, I think
is Indiana being caught in the crosshairs here where the SEC is
pissed. They got three teams in the Big
10 got 4. These are two T these are two
conferences that under and that have TV networks backing them
up, kind of proxy fighting with the conferences.
And everyone understands here that there is a real power
vacuum. And if if the big 10 of the SEC
take over college football, there is no such thing as a 5050
partnership. My parents owned a company.
They're a 5050 part didn't work. They got divorced.
Like you need to have 5149. Somebody's got to be 50 when
when there's like, hey, we need to make a decision and we
disagree. Who's got the outstanding vote.
And I think that's what you're seeing now is the SEC is getting
pissed because they don't want the Big 10 to be the 51 percent
partner. And unfortunately, you can't go
talk about Ohio State sucking or Penn State sucking or Oregon
sucking. You can talk, I mean, like Ohio
State will come back at you. You can talk about Indiana
because we just don't have the history.
You know, we have some holes in the resume.
So I, I think that Indiana's caught in this proxy fight
between the Big 10, the SEC and largely between Fox and ESPN.
And I think it's because everyone sees that one of us
could rule college football, like we could just take college
football and own it. And the SEC wants to do that
then. And but I, I agree with all of
that. It's insane to be like, we
should go back to four teams, go back to they're going to expand
this quickly. They're going to change all
this. But the thing that I think is
interesting is a point that you hit on that I was thinking about
driving back. You know, the NCAA tournament is
all neutral sites and you know you're trying to find it.
You've heard this all the time. We're trying to find the
champion from the SC. We got to see who the best teams
are. Well, it's also like we want to
have a fun weekend. You know, there's such an
advantage for playing at home. If I'm if I'm Oregon, I'm like,
man, F this. I won a home game.
Like we're the number. Why are we going to play in
whatever ball like I want to play at home.
You almost should flip it. We're like the first round games
are at the Bulls, second round is at home.
Or just play the whole thing in neutral sites.
We're playing the whole thing at home.
Like it. It does feel like you've given
such an advantage to the the first round, the 567 seeds with
these home games. And I do wonder if next year if
you have another round of first round, mostly uncompetitive
games, someone will look and say, hey, at some point we are
trying to make a fun product here, like let's have some
competitiveness because again, the years.
The the NCAA tournament, what people love is they love the
upsets they did that first weekend.
It's not like, Oh my God, did you see Kansas win by 42 against
Winthrop? That was awesome.
Like, no, you're, you're looking for those games, those moments.
That's what makes the NCAA tournament special.
Football is not quite that way. But I do wonder if the the home
game is almost too much of an advantage.
And it is weird that the top four teams don't get that
advantage. Well, so I think there's a lot
of interesting points to take out out of this.
I'll say first of all, the system we've got right now is an
unfortunate shotgun marriage of a bunch of old things and a new
system. So you think about it.
It's not just the the dichotomy between the, the, the home games
in the first round and the neutral sight games in the
second round, because the, well, that's the part because it's
like you, you know, in order to do this, you had to get the
bowls involved. And so you had to have neutral
sight games. And look, the way that we run
college football overall is very different from every other
sport. It if you try to find an analog
to the way that college football specifically gets managed in the
United States, you you can't point to the NFLNFLS run much
differently. You can't point to college
basketball. College basketball has a very
big tournament, which lets a lot of people in.
It's also just fundamentally basketball is a different sport.
It's a lot more random than football is.
It's not like Major League Baseball, but it's a little bit
closer. The sport that is the biggest
analog to college football is European soccer.
And you have to think about like there's a, there's a lot of
parallels there. I know not everybody in our in
our audience is familiar with European soccer, but I think
it's important to understand, like if you think about college
football in the United States, of all of the sports, college
and professional, it is the most fundamentally unfair and uneven
in terms of talent distribution structure.
So think about the NFL. Everybody has to go through the
draft process in the NFL, and the draft process is geared
specifically towards giving weaker teams an opportunity at
better talent so that they can even themselves out.
It's also about having a salary cap that keeps everybody more or
less on the same plane. That becomes how well can you
use resources in that midst. Baseball, which has a lot of
fundamental unfairness in it because there's not really a
salary cap, still has an entry draft.
It still has a whole bunch of systems in place where you can
control your players contractually through the most,
you know, profitable and most, you know, high level years that
they will have in terms of production.
You know, the NBA is very much about having a bunch of teams in
a very small band from a a salary perspective and it's
about making the right choices around the margins while also
not giving people stupid salaries.
College football has none of that.
College football has allowed for years it's best programs to
hoard talent and not let them move.
It's allowed their best programs to pay players under the table
and not punish them. It's allowed conferences to
control matchups, to control narrative in terms of who gets
to play who in bowl games. You know, all of this program,
because the punishing SMU is like, we got punished, right?
No, but, and that's, and that's also the point.
And you can even, you can even go back to 2020 when the Big 10
created a rule and then arbitrarily changed the rule
because they didn't like the outcome of the rule, which was
going to be Indiana playing in the Big 10 title game.
And then further screwed Indiana by having the committee chair
for the College Football Playoff figure out a way to keep Indiana
out of the New Year's 6 Bowl. We've seen this happen over and
over again. So you also have
organizationally in college football conferences running
things. And these conferences, as we
heard complaints about throughout the course of this
last couple of weeks, they set up schedules where Indiana
doesn't get to play Oregon, Indiana doesn't get to play Penn
State, SMU doesn't play Clemson, SMU doesn't play Miami, Miami
doesn't play Clemson or SMU, but you know, Alabama doesn't play
Texas there. There's all of these games that
should have happened that didn't, but you can't because
the conferences are not arranged for competitive purposes.
They're arranged to make the most money as possible.
Now time out, let's look at European soccer, the Champions
League in particular. the Champions League represents the
best team in Europe, the best club team.
Well, how do you determine that? When you've got the Premier
League in England, you've got Serie A in Italy, you've got La
Liga, you've got the Bundesliga, you you've got a bunch of teams
that don't play each other. How do you put something
together where you can actually figure out who the best team is?
So they do this year long tournament that ends up
culminating in a neutral site game.
But leading up to that, it's it's home and away games and
it's two legged games that you couldn't do in college football
because again, soccer is different than football in terms
of physicality. But ultimately you you have to
go about it in a way where you give teams a chance to play each
other. What I've found fascinating
about this whole College Football Playoff experience and
where I look at the Champions League is a great example.
Most of the time in the Champions League, it's the very
best teams that are able to win and rise to the top.
It's why Real Madrid has won so many games because they have the
most talent. It's, you know, it's or how many
Champions Leagues. It's it's why, you know,
Liverpool was able to win one. It's why Manchester City's been
able to win. It's why you don't see a whole
lot of upsets consistently. But they can still happen.
And we've had underdog stories make it all the way to the the
Champions League title game. So the system this year didn't
produce a lot of initial upsets. And that's not that surprising
because we're transitioning out of an era that allowed teams to
do very different things, right? There's just no good way.
There's no scientifically, like 100% way in a sport that has
this uneven talent distribution, this uneven scheduling, to say
for sure who deserves or doesn't deserve to be in, Which is why
you have to have a committee of people looking at it or a group
of computers looking at it to figure that out.
So look, we're going to continue to have these arguments and
debates, but this is what college football is.
And until it coalesces around a set of rules that everybody can
agree on, which frankly seems unlikely given the the forces
involved, not just the schools, but the media that are in there
as well, you're going to continue to have people claiming
that whatever's happening is bad.
You don't have to listen to them, though, because all
they're doing is arguing things that they think are in their
best interests. And that ultimately allows you
to disregard what they're saying in your brain.
And you should. Yeah, I I agree.
And what even yesterday when I was talking about, you know,
like if you moved everything to neutral sites and did it like
the NCAA tournament where, you know, like if if Oregon gets the
the best neutral site game next to them, it's like, all right,
well, that would theoretically maybe be the the Rose Bowl.
But like you have to think the Rose Bowl is like men.
No, F that. Like we're not doing a first
round silent. We're the Rose Bowl.
We're a semi. Like you have so many different
competing interests. And that's, that's I think the
problem here is all the other sports you talked about outside
of college basketball, like they have a commissioner or a leader
of this that can do it. College football doesn't have
that. And I think what you're seeing
is continuing like there's a lot, there's a, there's a power
vacuum and everyone's fighting for that leadership and no one's
thinking of this as a whole. And, and the, the unbalanced
conference schedules, it's going to continue to happen.
Like, you don't know because, you know, this year we're
supposed to play, you know, the national champion, the national
runner up. It didn't turn out to be what we
expected. But next year there will be some
SEC team or Big 10 team that plays a schedule similar to
Indiana that just kind of skates.
I won't say skates, dude, but just doesn't play a lot of the
top teams and has a record that it's hard to do apples to
apples. It's going to keep happening and
they've got to figure it out. But again, nobody wants to do
it. You know, curb Free did make one
point I thought was interesting of, you know, if if everybody
got together and looked at scheduling from a holistic
approach at a top level, you could solve some of this
scheduling stuff. If the Big 10 and Indiana and
the SEC and Alabama like opened up their books and talked about
scheduling all together. But they don't and it's not
going to happen. And so you're going to continue
to have this. And the, the, The thing is,
there will be another Indiana next year.
It's just that Indiana was unfortunately in this position
where they were, like I said, the proxy fight between some big
players. And unfortunately, Indiana
doesn't have the name recognition.
So if it was, you know, next year, if it's old Miss or LSU,
they're going to be handled differently than Indiana because
Indiana's kind of like, well, who cares about like us?
But like the higher level powers and all the proxies and all the
reporters, they don't care about Indiana.
Like they just because like that's not a brand, that's not a
college. Like, we can just slam that with
all of our thoughts because it's not like it's LSU or Ohio State
or something. Yeah.
I mean, and you're always going to struggle with that until you
don't. You're you're always going to
struggle with the recognition until you just do things.
I mean, think about, I always point to Clemson.
You know, yes, Clemson won a a title in the early 80s, but
then, you know, Clemsoning became a verb to illustrate like
blowing games that you shouldn't.
And the only thing that changed that narrative was that they
just continued to accrue talent and continued to win.
Georgia was the same way, you know, so you, you the only thing
that changes the narratives in college sports are two things.
One is success, but the whole, the other thing is you have to
be able to have your message out there.
And for those who were like, well, don't engage with the
trolls or don't engage with the discourse because it's so awful.
It's like, no, the the opposite is actually the case.
This is not a case where, hey, we're just going to let our
results talk for us because that's rarely enough when it
comes to the actual talk. And going back to something that
Andy said about a media war, I think one of the things I was
actually kind of disappointed in was how mute the pro Big 10
forces were at the national level.
You just didn't see a lot of commentary and, and all of this
SEC propaganda really let people think like some people really
thought that there should have been 5 or 6 SEC teams in the
playoffs and just didn't question it.
Like, well, of course they've got the best talent and that's
not how it's worked. And we talked about this with
Nicole Auerbach. The entire history of college
football, when we've talked about the polls and whatever,
the only thing that's mattered has been wins and losses.
Did you lose games or not? And suddenly this year that
didn't matter. What mattered is, well, who did
you play? Well, no, that's not actually
how we do things in this sport. Who?
Didn't even who'd you play? It's which SCC teams did you
play? So did you play that?
So look, look, this is different.
This is different air for Indiana to be in and and this is
a new sport for a lot of people in this fan base.
And you're not going to get welcomed with open arms at this
level. You you're going to get you're
going to get beaten down. You're going to get made fun of.
I mean, look, take a program as successful as Wisconsin.
Wisconsin's the butt of jokes all over the place for a variety
of reasons. Why?
Well, because that's how that stuff works in this business.
And so a lot of this really does come back to Indiana deserves a
seat at the table. And and look, if you're in the
Big 10, you deserve a seat at the table if you're taking
football seriously. And Indiana's finally taking
football seriously. And a lot of it at this point is
going to be all you can do is go out and play the schedule that
you've got in front of you. I think it's going to be
hilarious next year when Indiana gets off to a good start and
people are, well, they haven't played anybody when all of this
year, all we heard in this last week or so was SECADS and
coaches whining about we're not going to pay anybody.
Well, it's like, all right, great.
Let's just all agree to that. That would be fine.
The other narrative that I heard that.
Cracked me up is I I heard this a couple different places and
somebody tell me he's like man, you know with, you know, let me
get it all out. But like, you know man, with the
showing you guys had against Notre Dame like it's next year
it's going to be tough for you guys to get back in the College
Football Playoff. I'm like sure, like if we're in
the competition again for the College Football Playoff, like I
will take it. Like if, if that's our biggest
problem is that we're going to have a hard time with our case
for the College Football Playoff.
Like do you realize where we came from?
Like 12 months ago, you and I were just like, can we get to
Detroit Bowl? Like we get to six wins?
Like yes, if, if our biggest problem is back-to-back years,
we're having a hard time making a case for the CFP in year 2
because we made it in year 1. Like I want to take that right.
Like it's just like you, you realize you're talking to
Indiana fans like we don't have winning season.
Like it's that that narrative I think is insane 'cause it's
like, yeah, if we're ten and two and we don't get in the CFP
because we have a good enough showing, it's like that's the
best two year run of my lifetime.
Like I will buy that right now. Well, that's a good spot for us
to kind of pivot and talk a little bit about the season as a
whole. And, and this has been a hard 1
to get your head wrapped around in terms of, yeah, just the
enormity and the, the impact that the season has had on, on
so on this podcast on the way that so many fans think about
IU, it's really, it's really amazing.
And you know, the I, I still think about what we were doing
roughly this time last year and how none of this was
foreseeable. You could be excited about the
Signetti hire and, and I think Signetti did a great job of
getting people excited early who were paying attention, But it
was so easy to ignore IU football prior to this season.
And it wasn't just easy, it was often times safe.
It was the safe choice because you, you really did feel, you
know, at the end of it all, like you were, you were helping
yourself to a large degree by not putting yourself in a
position where you could get hurt emotionally if you tried to
care. And that's for this particular
season to have gone the way that it did and for the season to
have unfolded the way that it did.
I, I really do think it's, it's, it's why it's so hard to put
into words. I was trying to explain this to
somebody the other day, you know, when we got through the
UCLA game and you know, there was that great experience.
You win that game, you got all these IU fans out there in the
Rose Bowl. A lot of psychological baggage
gets shed there. You're like, hey, this team
could be pretty good. We didn't know how bad UCLA was
going to be, but you, you were like, wow, this was really, this
was cool. They beaten Northwestern after
beating Maryland and suddenly it's like, wow, this season has
the potential to be something special.
Like we could win 8 games and go to a bowl and then October goes
the way that it does and Indiana racks up not just wins with huge
wins in those games. They win a road game against
Michigan State, they win the the game day game, they win the Big
Noon kickoff game, they beat Michigan going into November.
It's just like a wave that didn't Crest.
And yeah, it crested a bit in the Ohio State game and
obviously essentially washes itself up on the shoreline here
in the College Football Playoff. But you know, Scott, you and I
have been doing this for a long time, podcasting.
We've been going to games and being fans a lot longer.
I mean, have you been able to figure out a way to put into
words how this has felt and what your overall like experience was
like throughout the course of this season?
Not really. But I will just say this, thank
you. I mean, like thank you to the
coaches, thank you to the players.
I mean, thank you to everybody who made this happen.
It's been, it's been awesome. It's been wild to really think
that we were part of a historical season.
You know, I might. My hope is, and I really do
believe this, this is the first step in turning IU into
something different. What that is, I don't know.
But it does really feel like we are turning into something
different. If we're right, that's awesome.
But even if we're wrong and it just becomes the Rose Bowl
season of 68, we lived it. I mean, we were there.
We we like we we got to be on this ride for the season.
I went to a majority of the games.
You went to all of the games. We talked about it the whole way
it, it was so awesome. And like we've been saying, you
only get to go up the mountain once, You know, now expectations
are slightly different. Not like I'm expecting the CFP
year after year, But you know, I don't think any coaches or
players are listening. But if they are just like, thank
you. Like it's, it's been so nice to
have to have this and to kind of, you know, I have something
special. Like it's those moments at
Memorial Stadium that I'm going that I'm going to remember, you
know, bringing my my wife wasn't able to go to the Washington
game, but being there with my son and just seeing all of the
flags and like just everybody there in the stadium full and
then getting ready for the Michigan game and telling my
wife, you're going to not believe this.
We've been going to games for like 15 years together.
Like this place is going to be full.
It's going to be fired up. And then it was, and then people
stayed and you know, I, I think back to some of those early
games, like the Maryland game where we were all in the rain
and you kind of looked around. It's like, dude, there's,
there's a real core sticking around for the fourth quarter.
It wasn't full, but it was like 38,000 people there.
And it's like, I don't remember seeing a, a stadium this full in
the rain in a game that's kind of wrapped up in the fourth
quarter. That something is, if you were
watching, you could feel it happening throughout the year.
And that's what was so cool. And then it kind of blew up and
hit and and then, you know, then it went to like the entire next
level. I remember walking around in
Iowa. I'm sorry, not sorry.
I mess on my joke Walker in Notre Dame and just like I saw
coach Tonsandi and I'm like, my joke was always like, is this
heaven from like, like feel the dreams?
Like are we in heaven? Like, Oh my God, like, what are
we doing here? But really that's that's my
thing is just thank you. And you know, you're probably
the one to have the better analog to this.
But the positive view that I have is, you know, you look at
North, you look at Wisconsin, a team that you mentioned now,
Barry Alvarez was there for a long time, but for years, up
until the 93 season, Wisconsin was just kind of like whatever
the five win team, six win team, whatever.
And then like boom and hit 1993, they're 10 and one.
They go to the Rose Bowl and they they won.
But they go to the Rose Bowl and they win.
Now it wasn't just a straight line up.
The next year, they're seven and four, they go to the Hall of
Fame Bowl. The year after they're four and
five, they don't make a bowl. But then it's like Boom, Copper
Bowl, Outback Bowl, Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl, Sun Bowl, no bowl.
But then, you know, you're just you're off to the races and
suddenly they're Wisconsin. And for so many years you look
and like Kansas State had a run like that, You know, George,
Virginia Tech had a run like that where it's like one season
just changes things and then it's like we are off for the
races and we are a different program.
Wisconsin's case. They're just like, we're just
going to go ahead and stay here. Like we're just going to stay in
this level. It it's really unbelievable that
we caught lightning in a bottle and we had that season and that
we now are on the trajectory where we could take that step
and become a different program. Iowa's the same way.
They were just kind of a normal program and they boom took a
step and they got there. Even Northwestern to a degree
got that Rose Bowl in 95 with Fitzgerald and they took a step
up and became a different program.
It's so unbelievable to leave. We just lived through that year.
We had that lightning in a bottle season and now we could
take that step up where I don't think we're going to be suddenly
like, you know, 123 in the big 10.
But look what Wisconsin did. They just hey, we're ahead of
Michigan State, we're ahead of Illinois.
We're just we're ahead of all these other schools and we're
just going to try and get to that next epsilon it to me,
that's the part that I have a hard time wrapping my mind
around is we just lived through that season and we could look
back in 20 years and be like that.
That was the changing point. And I will wrap by just saying
this like it is so cool to think back on the journey because it
was really like little steps if you were paying attention.
Like like you said, at this point in this year, it's like,
all right, Signetti seems like a cool hire.
Like we probably like, but it like you said, it's kind of
like, wow, Michigan State probably got the best guy.
Like that was kind of the it's kind of interesting hire.
Michigan State probably won this cycle.
And then it's like, I mean, honestly, it's that moment,
Assembly Hall, the Purdue sucks moment.
And it's like, ha, this guy's different.
And then you start hearing spring practice like, ha,
stuff's happening and then it just kind of it.
It's so cool how it layered and stacked on each other as it went
along. So there's they don't have any
answer no. And that's the thing.
And maybe this is something that we have to really marinate on
more. I'll say this like there's
there's like a a bunch of different levels of why this
season's been so impactful. And it's not just the wins and
the losses and it's not just the experiences, just in general,
it's, it's everything. And, and I guess here's here's
how I would look at it in terms of like from the standpoint of
the way the team played, they were such a joy to watch.
There was such a connection that formed relatively quickly
between the, the, the players, the coaching staff and the fans.
And that was one of the big things that was missing for a
long time. I mean, it just the, the results
weren't there, the play level wasn't there.
And it's obviously people are going to get more behind A-Team
that's playing really well. But it was palpable when you
were in the stadium, that connection that was there,
especially at the end of games. And that was really cool to see.
The number of people who suddenly felt like this was
worth devoting time and effort and energy and emotion to was
really interesting to to pay, you know, to see as we went
through the season. And again, the success played a
big role in that. And the the the success will
have to continue. I think one of the big
misconceptions in general that we've talked about for years on
this show is this idea that the fans need to be there first and
then the team will perform well. It's always been the opposite.
It's always been you have to have a foundation of winning and
that will get people into the stands.
And look, it, it doesn't mean you have to go to the College
Football Playoff every year, although that would be nice.
But it's unrealistic just because of all the things we've
talked about with scheduling. Doesn't you know, it has to, it
has so much to do with who you play and, and being in the SEC
and well or well or the Big 10. I mean, you have to be in a
position where you can put yourself in a position to be
successful. And there's going to be years
where Indiana's schedule is more favorable than other years.
And there's going to be years where another team has a more
favorable schedule. Like, you know, is Illinois in
the College Football Playoff if IU plays their schedule and vice
versa? Yeah, maybe it's it's entirely
possible. But you could also take the a
different approach on that. And the Illinois lost a couple
games they shouldn't have and Indiana was more dominant
throughout. So there's all these little
eddies and currents. And I don't know if that ever
gets fixed because of how spread out college football really is.
But to watch IU fans, many of them for the first time, I think
fully invest emotionally in IU football.
And you have talked to so many people up in South Bend and out
in Columbus and all the other places that I went to this
season, including the Memorial Stadium parking lot.
To hear the the the joy and the excitement of so many people who
had either. You know, they won a love
Indiana football, but it wasn't something that they felt like
they could do consistently because of how bad the teams
have been. And we heard Mitchell Page, who
played on the team, talk about how he and his his teammates
kind of, you know, it's it's been a real struggle because it
always seemed to default back to a level where Indiana wasn't
very good and Indiana wasn't taking the sport seriously.
And I think that's the other element of this season that's
been so special to me is to watch the institution finally
really embrace football and say we have to be good at this and
we have to put resources behind it.
Not doing that up to this point has been a choice.
And you know, if you look at Wisconsin, Wisconsin made a
choice in the early 1990s that they were going to commit to
football, that that was going to be their thing.
And they had been real bad before.
Now you think Wisconsin, you think football, you know,
Indiana's always had this available to them, but there's
never been the political will or the cultural will to actually
make it part of what Indiana's identity is.
And my hope and, and I think that this is true, you know, so
it's more than a hope as far as I'm concerned.
But it feels like Indiana University finally embraced
football as part of its identity and that we don't have to be a
basketball school and have that be the identity.
First of all, that hasn't worked out very well the last 25 years.
But second of all, there's so many people who want to be
football fans at Indiana. There's so many people who want
to have that be an important part of of what they think of
when they think about the institution of the whole as a
whole. And so to watch Indiana make a
great hire to watch Indiana then support that hire, give him a
contract that's commensurate with the accomplishments this
year. Keep the assistance that are
that we're here who did such a great job for most of the season
and say to the college football world and to their own fans,
we're not going anywhere. This wasn't a fluke.
This wasn't just something some magical season that then
disappears into the ether. This is going to be part of what
we're doing moving forward. That's such an important step.
Does it mean that next year's going to be as good?
No, it doesn't. Could it be sure like for the
first time in ever, I think Indiana plays neither Michigan
nor Ohio State next year. Now they got to go to Oregon.
That's that's tough. They got to go to Penn State.
That's tough. They got to go to Iowa.
But you know they they don't have to fuck after we play.
Don't forget the Indiana rule. They somehow it will be like
those games don't count now they don't have to play the toughest
teams historically that they've had to go up against in the big
10. This is the new reality.
It's a different world than it used to be and there's no reason
why Indiana can't be a big part of that world.
It's not all going to be a straight line upward.
It never is. But the fact that Indiana has
said we're going upward and we care about going upward and our
actions now demonstrate that. To me, that's one of the biggest
things I'll take away. Like as someone who's been an IU
football fan since the mid 80s, as someone who's been podcasting
about IU football since the late 2000s, as someone who sat
through a lot of bad seasons, done a lot of podcasts where I'm
like, why are we even bothering with this?
Shouldn't I go play with the kids or like assemble a model
airplane or something else? So like, you know, to, to, to
have this level of satisfaction delivered all at once.
I think it's been the hardest thing for me to get my head
wrapped around. And for a lot of the die hard IU
football fans I know, it's almost like we got everything we
asked for and we got it in a about a 2 1/2 month span.
And like, what do you do when that happens?
Like most lottery winners fundamentally don't understand
how all of the sudden they became financially secure, like
generationally speaking, overnight.
That's kind of how it felt with IU.
Unlike being a lottery winner, we can't just put, you know, 75%
of it in a, a, a, an S&P fund and, you know, not work the rest
of our lives. This is going to be incremental.
But what I hope we see out of this is the passion that we've
shown for IU football that many of the fans who are sitting here
watching and listening have shown Ferrari football over the
years. A there was a reward finally for
it. There was finally a reward on
the biggest stage, and it sets the table to maintain and
increase that passion and bring more people into the tent as
hopefully Indiana continues to establish its place among the
teams that matter in college football.
I think that's the thing that I'm going to take out of this
season the most is like the baseline's there.
Finally. We don't have to wish for a time
when that platform exists. The platform's there now.
Let's see what we can do with it.
I love the idea of IU winning the lottery.
Like what? What's like the, what's the
version of buying like the yellow Bugatti?
Like if we just like wrap the stadium in like a red and white,
like just some crazy like $10 million purchase of like, hey,
we bought the biggest, I don't know, like pregame tailgate 10
in the country. We'll get Jeremy Gray on that.
I'm sure he's got some ideas. You know the.
Biggest pal ever. No, but I think the other thing
that you said that is key is for for so many years and something
we talked about this podcast we hated talking about.
There was almost an adversarial approach between the team and
the fans. It was like the fans were pissed
the team for not winning. Then then you you would always
hear little bit barbs during some seasons of the team was
pissed the fans weren't showing up.
And it's like this, you know, do the fans have to do more?
Like why do IU football fans suck?
And the team like it, it always devolved into something very a
lot of animosity and it was never fun and I hated it.
And that was also something and and you know, winning is really
the core of all these things, but there was such a connection
with the fans and this team this year and it it's due to winning.
But it was also that the team of running over the student
section, the student section having like fun chance, the
student section moving this year, you know, the towels that
was born this year. There's so many the connection
points between fans and this team that I hope continue.
But but I think that's also what I loved so much.
Is it kind of washed away all of those anger, resentment,
feelings that it felt like for so many years you had between
fans and team that now it's like, all right, let's let's
we're all in this together and let's build this together.
And the other thing too, I, I do think it's, I'm going to kind of
go against what I'm going to say, but also like, I think it's
good that Indiana widened its view as opposed to just like,
hey, we got to win the bucket game.
Like what have you done to win the bucket?
Like let's, let's widen our view.
That said, in 1947, Indiana won the bucket game.
They didn't win it again until 1962.
Purdue went on just a run of kicking the snot out of Indiana.
There's one tie in there. We just beats Purdue 66 to
nothing. They fired their coach.
It does feel like let's go on one of those runs like the
Indiana's not all about just winning the bucket, but it sure
is nice to keep that bucket in Bloomington.
That's another kind of nice thing here is for so many years,
Indiana, it's just always been they're good we're bad vice
versa. They are one of our rivals.
We're going to play them every year.
Let's go on a nine year run. We're just kicking the shit out
of Purdue and just keep the bucket here for 9 or 10 years in
a row. Again, it's not it's not the
only thing we have to do. I I like that we've widened our
scope and we should, but I also would love to see us just let's
pound on them while they're having a hard time too.
I'm sure. I mean, of course I, I mean, I
just, I think that's such a, it's, it's like a tertiary thing
in the bigger narrative. It's, it's it's it's a nice
thing. I mean, look, ultimately it's
part of college football. You know, you want to be
superior to your rival. You're not going to beat your
rival every year. And look, 1948 was very
different from this era for a variety of reasons, not the
least of which was, you know, Indiana.
Indiana has had a a tradition to some degree of having its
greatest seasons in abnormal years or periods.
You look at how good Indiana was in the 40s, it was largely
because of the disruption of World War 2.
You look at Indiana winning the the winning the title in 1967
and going to the Rose Bowl, the Big 10 title, that was a very
weird year in the Big 10. Like you had a down Ohio State
that year, you had a down Michigan that year down Michigan
State who had won the title I think the previous year or the
year before, like the national title.
You know, Indiana, they had the 2020 season, which it was one of
the top three or four best seasons.
That was obviously disrupted by COVID.
This was also a disrupted year to some degree.
New conferences, mega conferences, 12 team playoff.
But I think the difference between all of those years and
this year and as we think about moving forward is the
investments that Indiana's making behind the scenes.
And, you know, we've got somebody who's, you know,
decided that they have to be the turd in the punch bowl in the
comments section being like, Oh yeah, you know, India just did
this because of a bad schedule. And you get a bunch of guys from
one school transit, you know, transfer in.
Look, you could certainly have that be the framing.
Keep in mind, Indiana did all of this with nowhere near the
levels of investment that they are now demonstrating.
And the idea that you haven't built a culture based upon the
culture that was somewhat imported, like the, the idea
that somehow is disappearing as opposed to, well, now that's
just been absorbed by IU. And now you can add to it with
more athletic pieces or faster pieces is very it's, it's the
kind of thinking that is I think illustrative of, oh, if Indiana,
like they used to in the old times was like, oh, hey, we had
a great season, but we're gonna keep doing things exactly the
same way that we've done them in the past.
Sure, I might give some credence to that argument, but there's
so, so many other things now structurally that Indiana's
building up in terms of staff support, in terms of coach
support, in terms of NIL money. Indiana's got we we saw that
that listing the other day, like Indiana for NIL and football is
like top 15, top 20 in the country.
I mean, that's that's. Our NIL numbers are so high and,
but when you talk about, you know, sleeping giants, no one
ever talks about Indiana. But it's like, sure.
Well, well, we're. Paying our coaches in the top
15, we have top ten NIL money. It's a fertile recruiting
ground. And you've got look and look,
you've got to you've got to raise the baseline level of the
roster and that's going to take some time.
And that's been kind of the interesting thing about this
season is watching what Indiana did, all these people that I've
seen, and this is this has been a common narrative throughout a
bunch of what I've been looking at in comments on Twitter and
even in some of our show comments.
Everyone's like, Indiana's not going to be as good next year
because they're going to lose XY and Z.
And it's like, I mean, who thought Indiana was going to be
this good this year? Like, you know, they, they took
all of these pieces, cobbled them together.
And it wasn't just the JMU guys. It was also these random
transfers from elsewhere. It was also guys on the roster
that that had come out of the Allen era.
Not a whole lot of people honestly thought that that group
as a core was going to be a part of anything other than maybe a
six or seven win season. To watch all of that assemble
and to watch them execute as well as they did.
And you know, whatever you want to say about the the supposed
quality of the schedule, all of the computer numbers that
demonstrate who the top teams are in the country in terms of
how well they play against teams and how well they beat teams and
how dominant they are. Had Indiana as a top ten team in
the country, every single one of them.
So even the. Weinbaum, who has the SEC filter
just turned on like only SEC. So, so look, that's what gives
me optimism about the future is you have a smart coaching staff
who clearly knows how to build and sustain pain.
And again, it's like you can go back and look at look at what
Signetti did at Elon and look at what he did at JMU.
It wasn't like they had success immediately and then faded.
They had success and then moved into an echelon where they
became for, for their station in football, relatively dominant.
And so that is where I'm really looking forward to seeing what
they do. They've made some good moves in
the portal already. Clearly have to get a
quarterback. You know, we saw the news that
Tavin Jackson's in the portal, which I think indicates they've
probably zeroed in on somebody. We'll have to see who it is, but
they've made some good moves already to not just stabilize
the roster but to upgrade in certain areas and I'm really
looking forward to seeing what they do now.
We had a question from earlier on from Andy.
How far has the bar been realistically raised?
Six and six in a bowl here and there was the previous bar.
I would argue that wasn't the previous bar, like the previous
bar was like 5:00 and 7:00 and it was like, well, we were, hey,
if we win the bucket game, we're gonna we could potentially go to
a bowl. There was a, an, an implicit
agreement there. I think that, well, six and six
was actually a successful season.
It wasn't even the bar. It was that was that was over
like getting over the bar. It was getting to six and six.
So look, I think right now, if you look at the way that the Big
10 schedules layout and you look at the way that Indiana's
scheduling as they continue to build their roster up, you know,
I think the, you know, bowl eligibility now becomes the bar.
Anything below that is is going to be looked upon poorly.
But I think look, you look at the schedule next year and you
look at what Indiana's going to have coming back, a lot of it's
going to be dependent on who's the new quarterback.
But I think 789 wins somewhere in that range.
Yes. And we predicted that this year
as well. That's where we thought Indiana
was going to go. But I think for for Indiana, at
this point, it really becomes, I think that, you know, the bar is
not so much the record, but like, who did you beat in the
games that you were playing in the given year?
And I think the idea that you you got to turn Memorial Stadium
into a fortress, you've got to when you're playing teams that
are equivalent to you, you need to be able to beat those teams.
And when you're playing whoever the big dogs are within the
conference at a given point in the year, you know, that's
that's going to be an interesting circumstance to
watch for Indiana as they they start to shed.
And I think this kind of goes back to the Signetti comments.
You have to start thinking of yourself.
If you're Indiana as a team that belongs there.
And that's a that's a player thing, that's a coach thing.
You know, for as much as you want to criticize Signetti about
about comments and not you all, but some people do, you have to
have that expectation in your brain.
That's how this stuff works. And so I think the overall
baseline expectation now is like, we're not in for
participation trophies. We're not in to just beat
Purdue. Going back to what you were
saying earlier, it's about that's that's stuff that
programs that aren't focused on being amongst the best teams in
the conference or the best teams in the country, which are
basically synonymous at this point.
That's the stuff that they focus on now.
The focus has got to be at a higher level.
That's where I think the focus probably is, and that's where
the bar is at now. So to answer the question for
for me, and I was telling some of this the other day, you know,
for me, the bar I think still is six wins in a bowl.
And and I think it's going to be that for A and I've got to hold
myself for this too. Let's stack a couple of those
years on top of each other. You know, like you said, it's
not a straight line. I came back, all right, we won,
we won 11 games a year. We got to go for 12 next year.
You know, eight wins next year would still be amazing.
Like this is still a program. It's it's a one year sample
size. And so it let we've got to start
stacking competitive good years on top of each other.
So to me, it's like, I think this year, next year, maybe even
the year after six wins in the bowl, like let's just get and
stay competitive. I think what you said is
perfectly 100% right. Let's let's make Memorial
Stadium a place you can win. You look at the, the schedule
for next year, you know, Old Dominion, Kennesaw State,
Indiana State, yes, Illinois, Michigan State, UCLA and
Wisconsin, you could win that slate, win all your home games.
And and then I do think it's not like it has to happen next year,
But I think you're also right. And I know I made the the bucket
comment. I agree with like, we've got to
take a step up in our our view. You know, you're playing at
Iowa, you're playing at Oregon, you're playing at Penn State.
Let's get one of those. Like let's see if we can get one
of those because that if you lose all of those and then then
it becomes all right, can can we get to the top level and start
competing with those other teams, you know, at home away
like, but we're not there yet. And to me it's still like what,
you know, those are things I think are aspirational and goals
we need to look at. But to me, I think for
everybody, it can't be that we're, you know, getting pissed
in an 8 win season. We're not there yet.
We we've just had our first winning season.
When was the last time we had back-to-back winning seasons or
three straight seasons? We went to a bowl.
It's been a while. Well, let's.
Do that. Let's stack and stack and stack.
But I will say, you know, another point that you made that
I think is very valid and true is that the the administration
has shown a an ability to support this team that they
haven't in the past in that you have, you know, you have
Signetti making what, $8 million?
Like he's in the top 12 of 12 or 15 of coaches in the country.
Now, obviously other people are going to get raises, but what
that tells me is that that's where you're at now.
Like now, now you're in that echelon.
You're just we're going to play in that space and we're going to
stay there. And like if something happens,
the next coach is going to make more.
Very rarely do they go back down.
You've raised the assistant pool, which I think Signetti has
a big piece in doing. That was always the biggest
thing we had. It's like your assistants are
making less than sometimes head coaches in in programs like they
have to make more. They're now making that.
That'll continue. So you're you're playing in the
spaces you need to play in, which which hasn't been the case
in the past, which means you're going to get the talent at both
the coaching and the player level that you haven't gotten in
the past either. But for me, let's stack a couple
of six win bowl seasons back-to-back to back, and then
we can look at raising that bar again.
Well, the one I don't, I don't know if I totally agree with
that. I mean, the one thing is
historically, and it's what's made this season so weird in in
a good way, six and six. I mean, it will and I and I I
think that's that's aiming too low because of the reality of
how rosters get assembled now. And you know, you when you point
back to Alvarez at Wisconsin or when you point to, you know,
Ference coming in at Iowa, that wasn't as big of a disaster.
But it it you know, or Tiller, you know, Tiller coming into
Purdue was kind of a unique circumstance.
But you know, the idea of like, how do you raise the bar of your
roster? You can do it a lot faster now,
but you have to do it every year.
And and this is where the recruiting is going to be
important. What happens in terms of
recruiting? In in terms of like, you know,
this cycle, yes, Indiana's rating, I think in recruiting
they ended like 38th or 39th. Well, that's because most
recruiting lags a year behind results.
But it's also OK, who can you get in the portal and how do you
use your resources? And there's going to be some
interesting theories floated in college football and Indiana's
going to be right there along with them.
Where do you allocate your resources for NIL?
How do you spread those out amongst the different aspects of
your roster? Indiana's in an interesting spot
where they can't afford to spend an insane amount of money on one
player or two players because they need to be able to spend a
lot of money on a lot of players to try to raise their floor.
And I think Indiana really took advantage of a lot of
efficiencies amongst available players in the transfer portal
this last year. They took advantage of being
able to spread their NIL mountie out quite a bit.
They've clearly got quite a bit of NIL money.
What they do and and how they approach these next few years in
terms of how they assemble the roster, who they put in what
spots, that's going to be the fascinating thing for me.
And it's what makes what you just said, while it makes sense,
I think traditionally and historically it's a different
calculus now in terms of what your program looks like then
what it then what you would think about even five years ago
because of all these different rules.
So I'm really fascinated to see how it all turns out.
It's going to be really curious to see how Indiana approaches
this. I think they've got a coaching
staff that really knows how to put a roster together and
assemble talent. You know, trying to keep all
that talent happy as a as a problem, trying to make sure
that you're raising the bar so that you're not so outclassed
athletically against bigger competition is important.
But that's going to be part of what's going to make IU
football. I think so fun to watch over the
next five years is we're going to watch them try to navigate
this in a way that gives them advantages that they don't have
inherently, given the lack of historical success in the
program. Yeah.
I mean, the the thing for next year specifically, that's going
to be interesting. And I think back to all the
podcasts we've done over the years, you talk about all like
we're bringing a lot of the pieces back from this team, but
we're not bringing our quarterback back.
And for so many years, we would you and I would talk about all
these pieces on the left and the right.
And it's like, I remember, I always get to November and it's
like, it's the quarterback, like our quarterback, you know, stuff
that went down, we're done. Like that's just that is it so
much this is, is going to be who is our quarterback next year?
And can they run the system that Signetti wants to run?
And we don't know that answer. And that answer could be great.
It could not, but we just don't know that answer yet.
And I think that's that's the real only not negative, but
just, you know, it's like that would have been awesome if if
Rourke had one more year of eligible.
Can we, if we see if he can got a COVID year, like everyone's
got nine year, like can can Hunter Dickinson give up one of
his years? He seems just having reserve and
just give it to Rourke. That'd be nice that that's the
only thing. It's like, man, that would have
been a nice piece to keep one more year.
And then we really have some continuity there.
But we don't I I, I have faith that Signetti and his staff will
get the right person there. But I think that's, that's the
biggest question mark for next year.
And it will be nice to have, you know, if you can get a two year,
2, two or three-year run with a quarterback, that would be
awesome. Because in the end, that really
is that's really the answer for, for, for for us if if we could
do that. But that's that's all for next
year. We'll see what happens.
I mean, obviously, I think the being in the College Football
Playoff has pushed the portal stuff back a little bit.
Curtis Rook had already committed to IU by this time
last year. He committed on the 14th.
And so I'm expecting Indiana will will figure out what
they're going to do with the quarterback position here pretty
soon. And it's going to look
different. I think it's going to the
offense is going to look different the way Indiana plays
going to look different, just like it looked different this
year based upon what they've done the previous year given the
circumstances. So a lot to look forward to.
And I think it's, you know, what we'll do is we've, we've gone on
almost an hour and 45 here. We're going to go ahead and kind
of turn things down and, and let this podcast episode expire.
We got a lot more to talk about though, as we move forward over
the course of of the next weeks and months.
And we'll be keeping track of what's going on with IU football
and, and bringing you folks into the mix as well as this is a
football program you're going to pay attention to.
It's going to be a lot of fun as we move ahead watching this
Indiana team figure out how to compete with the elites and how
to continue to to keep the fans excited.
I think they made a lot of strides this year and I can't
wait to see how this plays out as we move forward.
I have a final question for you. Yeah, if you walk around the IU
stadium, they have a section on the South end zone, like on the
on the outer ring. It shows like all of the bowl
games we've made. And that's on the outside of the
stadium. You could definitely put, you
know, College Football Playoff there.
I, I'm curious, where do you, you know, where, where do you
put the recognition of this team making the College Football
Playoff in Memorial Stadium? Do you have a, a flag, a, a
thing? I'm just, I'm just just for fun,
kind of a marketing exercise like you, you, this is something
you recognize that you made the College Football Playoff.
Where, where do you put that in the stadium?
Do you have it inside where fans can see it?
Do you have it outside in that spot where all the bowl games
are listed? I, I think when you renovate the
inside of the stadium and hopefully add some luxury boxes
and maybe maybe refresh the press box that you put it inside
the stadium. You have, you know, 2024 College
Football Playoff appearance right next to the, the three
bowl games Indiana's won. And look, you've, you've got a
Indiana. They did so much work in
upgrading the support, in upgrading the coaching staff.
They've got to start working now on having some laurels that you
can view within the stadium and making it, you know, something
when an opponent walks in. No, I'm saying, I'm saying find
a way to put it in the stadium now and then make it something
more permanent as you move forward.
I want every opponent who walks into the stadium having to look
up and, you know, for the next 50 years, 75 years and say
Indiana was in the College Football Playoff that season.
I mean that that's part of the process.
And again, it goes back to what I said earlier, You don't be
Midwest nice and polite about this stuff.
You got to shove it in people's faces every single time because
that's what makes people want to come here and play.
It's what makes people want to come here and coach.
It's what makes people want to donate money.
Wear it loud and proud and and put it as prominently as you can
in the new stadium. I'm going to really be
fascinated to see how Indiana goes about doing this.
But I think they've got the right people in charge of the
marketing now to actually go that direction with stuff.
Jeremy Gray, first game of the season.
Our flags are just College Football Playoff participant.
Just everyone's got a flag that says it.
That's how you, that's how you get the fans involved and you
let them let them know. Anyway, my thanks to all you
folks for sticking with us throughout the course of the
show and for the entire season that you've all been a
delightful audience. We really appreciate not just
you listening or watching, but how kind you all have been.
Not just in the chats and in the comments on Twitter, but the the
number of people who have expressed thanks just for us
doing the show all these years has really meant a lot.
And it's meant a lot to us to be a part of the process.
And we look forward to having you in the audience as we move
forward. We've been doing this thing
pretty much the same way for the last 15 years.
Not planning on changing anytime soon other than just doing more
things. And we're looking forward to
doing those things with you as an audience.
Look, can't, can't wait. I'm so sad that the season's
over. I just.
Googled it. We are 251 days away from our
next game, August 30th, 2025. We've never done that in our
final final football podcast. Never have I tried to figure out
how many days until we play our next game.
But I'm 251 days and if you're listening to this, you are two
hours closer to. The game that's right than you
were when you started. That's right.
And I mean, from a couple of years ago when we had a
legitimate conversation about whether we should continue to do
the football part of the podcast to now, yeah, what a what a turn
around and couldn't be happier to be here.
So thanks to all of you folks for being along for the ride.
And my thanks to everybody that was on the show throughout the
course of the year. You know, our thanks to Taylor
Layman from Bite Sized Bison, who if you're not subscribing to
Bite Sized Bison on Substack, you're you're, you have not
achieved full Indiana fandom in football.
Taylor's been just a great addition to things and has done
such a great job of treating IU football seriously, giving us
the statistical analysis we need, you know, so we'll
continue to have him on as long as he chooses to associate with
people like us. And I hope that you're reading
his stuff consistently. You know, our thanks to Rhett
Lewis, who was on the show a bunch the course of the season.
Thanks to all the guests we had throughout the course of the
year that Mitchell Page came on a couple of times.
Always enjoyed having him on. Onion came on.
Come on. He called me at the airport.
I'll do some live. Like he he tried to come on.
Yeah. You know, and, and just all the
folks that that took the time to, to be a part of what we did.
You know, my thanks to, to Joe Cronin and Emily Fox, my, my Co
host and producer on Bison chat. We launched that program at the
beginning of the year thinking, you know, IU football might
actually be good and, and fun and, and worth following along
with and thought Joe and Emily did an amazing job.
And my thanks to all the other guests that we had throughout
the course of the season and all the folks like you that
listened, that commented, that wrote us notes that subscribed
on Substack. It's just been a thrill.
And, and again, I guess finally, my thanks to the whole IU
football community, the players, the coaches, the parents, the
staff members, the creative team who did such an amazing job with
all the content that they pumped out this year.
Thanks to Hoosiers Connect and the whole NIL collective.
Alex Paul, the folks over there, it's been great working with you
all and I am just, I'm really excited about the future, really
excited to see where Indiana football goes and, and really
excited that there's this level of commitment now to football in
this level of excitement is what we always wanted, Scott.
We always wanted to be here and and be in a thriving community
that cared about this sport here at Indiana University and in the
Indian University alumni group. And it's here, so let's see what
we're able to do with it. I, I can't wait to see what the
next chapter looks like. Yeah, I, I agree, I echo all
that. And thanks to you, man.
It's been fun doing this for the years we've done it.
And I'm excited to continue to do it.
I, I saw in the chat like, thank God we, it's a good thing we
didn't stop doing it, but we were, we were close, I think
closer than people would realize.
But it's, it's, it's awesome and it's invigorated a lot of
things. And I'm, I'm very excited and
excited. Literally 251 days.
For our presenting sponsor home Field Apparel and for Upland
Brewing who sponsored us for a large portion of of this season.
And for Scott, I'm Galen saying thanks for joining us here on
Crimson Cast for one final official time during the
football season as we'll be back with more.
As we continue to cover the portal, continue to cover the
NIL space and see what Indiana is able to do in this offseason,
we will catch you folks. On the flip side, Bring Back the
Bison, Stay, Never daunted, so on everybody.