You're listening to the Back Home Network presented by Home
Field Apparel. Welcome back to Crimson Casket
and Clavio joining you here. Little solo action on this
Friday afternoon we finally. Finally have power back in
certain parts of Bloomington, including at at the Crimson Cast
studios down here in town. And my thoughts very much are
with the folks that still don't have power in Bloomington.
Several friends of mine still waiting to get power back.
It has been a pretty rough time over the course of the last few
days. For those who haven't been
paying attention or aren't aware, Bloomington got hit hard
on Tuesday by not a tornado, but something that sure acted like
one. There was a measured wind gust
out at the Monroe County Airport of close to 80 miles an hour,
which is hurricane strength wind, and it knocked power out
to over 42,000 people in Bloomington itself.
And it's interesting, you know, the Bloomington, for those who
don't know, kind of has a a little bit of a sketchy power
grid in places where I live. We actually haven't lost power
hardly at all over the course of the time that I've lived here.
But there are other parts of the city that lose power pretty
regularly. And so this was an unwelcome
surprise, I think, for a lot of people who were hoping there'd
be a quick restoration of power. But I will say it seems like the
crews have been working as hard as they possibly can.
This was just a really, really powerful storm.
And even with the grid occasionally being a little bit
unpredictable down here, this was one of those events that was
probably going to knock the power out regardless.
And so we hope that power gets restored to the rest of
Bloomington here soon. There's still some stop lights
out. There's still a few businesses
that don't have power. And fortunately, it doesn't
appear like there were, there were any huge like, you know,
widespread infrastructure damages.
There were some garages damaged, some houses down on trees,
things of that nature. So our thoughts with everybody
in town that still doesn't have power and hopefully you're able
to get back up and running again soon.
And thank you to Duke Energy and all the crews that came from
across the United States literally to help get these
things cleared up. We had crews from Georgia and
Alabama and several other places coming in to fix things.
So we're going to talk. We got some questions and
comments from those of you out there in the audience.
So we're going to tackle some of those and try to send you on
your way into what should be a an interesting and fun weekend.
I think overall, just in terms of we got a lot of lot of soccer
going on across the country, IU athletics about to turn the
corner and head into July. Hard to believe we're already
done with June, but football getting closer and a few things
I guess to talk. About on the.
Basketball front as well, which we'll touch on briefly later on.
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All right, let's go ahead and dive into some questions and
some items that are worth talking about.
And I'm going to start with a couple of leftover questions
that we had from the last time we put a call out.
And then also we've got some new questions that we're going to
filter in as well. And maybe, you know, actually,
first and foremost, before we get to that, I did want to talk
a little bit about the NIL event that happened up at the
Hawthorne's yesterday in Fishers that benefited IU volleyball.
This was an event that was put on by both Hoosiers Connect and
the volleyball program. I was up there.
My whole idea was I was going to go up and try to publish some
things on social media. Cell phone signal.
Not very good on the golf course, but the golf course was
beautiful. If you haven't been up to the
Hawthorns and you're a fan of the game, I would highly
recommend checking it out. It was a really enjoyable event.
Got to meet a lot of of IU fans up there and it was a great
opportunity to interact with volleyball athletes and the
volleyball coaching staff. Coach Steve aired up there and,
and most of his staff out there interacting with fans.
Just a lot of fun, a beautiful day.
And, you know, it got me thinking throughout the course
of that event, you know, as we move forward into what are still
relatively uncharted waters as it relates to NIL, these are
going to be the kind of events that I think fans will enjoy and
that programs are going to need. You know, certainly there's
going to be a lot of emphasis necessarily placed on creating
and maintaining revenue streams for name, image and likeness for
football and men's basketball. But I think for a lot of the
other sports, including women's basketball, including
volleyball, a couple of other sports in that mix that that are
liable to be consistently front and center in the college
athletics environment, the you know, this is the kind of events
that you're going to need. They're not going to be
necessarily huge scale events, although they certainly could
grow into that I think with enough support behind particular
teams. But I think it's it's nice to be
able to go and interact with athletes and with coaches in
relatively open and low pressure environments.
And I think obviously not everybody plays golf, but I
think these sorts of events are things that can happen across
the board. And I think it's one of those
things where if you're a fan and you're interested in, you know,
a particular type of sport or team, I would, you know, maybe
start thinking a little bit about how NIL organizational
structure can help because where this is headed?
I mean, you know, we've talked a lot on this podcast about the,
you know, the organization of name, image and likeness
collectives and the fact that with this settlement, which we
assume is going to go through that we're, you know, and there
are actually are still some questions about whether this the
house settlement, the NCAA settlement is going to actually
be approved by the judge on the case.
There is still a chance that it isn't approved, but as these
things continue to develop, I, you know, to some degree, I
think a lot of people look at this $22 million figure and say,
oh, well, that solves it. That's going to be the amount of
money that's distributed through NIL and, and they'll find a way
to pay everybody through that. And that's, that's really not, I
don't think how it's going to work.
I think a lot of schools, lot of programs within schools, and a
lot of the fan bases that surround particular sports are
going to have to start thinking about how do we build our own
NIL resources around what we're doing.
Because ultimately, I don't think there's going to be enough
money for everybody to get everything that they need.
And you're always going to have situations where there are
certain centers of individual sports where money is much
easier to come by because there's an existing base of
people who are willing to donate.
So then the question becomes, you know, and this is not just a
question that's limited to say an Indiana volleyball or or
whatever, but you know, for these sports that don't have the
huge voluntary donor base to some degree, like say men's
basketball has, how do you generate and maintain and build
upon the numbers that you're generating?
And can you make it so that it's a diffused across a lot of
different people so that nobody's necessarily feeling
like they're having to donate for things that they don't want
to? But also, you know, how do you
make it so that you can expand the interest and maybe the
connectivity with athletes and coaching Staffs and then the
people that are supporting them? This is it's a really
interesting situation when you think about how the NCAA has
tried to treat athletes over the course of time.
Because if you really think about the NCAA rule book from a
philosophical perspective, you know, obviously you know, the
the rules are often written down in this very confusing legalese
mumbo jumbo. But if you really think about it
more from a conceptual basis, a lot of the NCAA's premise and
the way that they've approached rules has been centered on this
idea that athletes are not supposed to be utilizing
themselves to market their sport or themselves unless it is
something that it's being done on their behalf by an athletic
department or by the NCAA. So you know, you've you've all
seen those ads for, you know, the NCAA, you know, basically
self aggrandizing and like the one with Kyle Hornsby, you know,
where he's like a former basketball player now doctor and
that that kind of thing. The way that a lot of the sports
have been promoted, it's been about, oh, here's what they're
doing on the field or on the court and.
Rarely do we see, and, and this is by design mind you, rarely
have we seen athletes personalities really be utilized
effectively to market themselves, market their sports
and be used within the confines of a fundraising operation.
You'll see some of that internally with donors, they'll
be OK. You know, donor meet and greets
are certainly a thing. But now we're moving into an era
where sports, especially sports again, outside of the the big
revenue generating sports, are going to have to be more
entrepreneurial in the way that they think about these things.
They're going to have to be more aggressive in utilizing what
market value and brand equity they have and their athletes
have in getting people interested in donating money to
help bring in the next wave of athletes or pay the athletes
that are already there or attract athletes as transfers
from other institutions where they might not be able to get as
good of a deal That is, I think women's basketball may be the
sport where there's the kind of the biggest tipping point
potential right now on that front because we have obviously
seen this groundswell of interest in women's basketball.
Thanks to Caitlin Clark and thanks to, you know, many of the
other players that have come through college over the last
few years and have both performed well at that level and
have started to play at the WNBA level.
You've you've got this moment where people's attention is on
that game. And women's basketball to some
degree finds itself in the position as a sport overall
where it's like, how do we take the the personality aspects of
our players and get that in front of people to try to
generate more interest? Because that's where the money's
going to have to come from. Yes, there may be some entry
points for businesses, particularly people that want to
sponsor athletes, but a lot of that is probably going to be
tied more to individuals. As opposed to something that you
can then tie back into a larger program or group.
And that's, that's essentially what I'm talking about with all
of this. So, you know, I, I love the fact
that Hoosiers connect did that event.
It's one of the reasons why I wanted to go up there and, and
take part and, and do what I could to help out.
But I'm also very fascinated in these things from a, a
managerial perspective and a directional perspective with
college athletics. You're, you're, I, I it's really
along the lines of what you would see in, you know, some
aspects of, of professional sport, but smaller professional
sports where you're not. The NFL, you're not necessarily
going to be able to market the game.
And the the. Team names as the only thing
that's going to bring in money and interest you, you have to
utilize and leverage your athletes and your coaches and
they have to be able and willing to go out and help to produce
the the kind of atmosphere that leads to more donations.
And I know a lot of you out there are probably thinking why
are we having to fund all of this?
And at the end of the day, you know, I know fans, especially
donors, are probably going to think along those lines.
But I think it's also important to think about the the structure
of how donations have been thought about within the
confines of college sports. Like the NCAA went out of their
way in this process of trying to fight name, image and likeness
as as even something that athletes could make money off
of. And for many years, the NCAA's
base stance on all of these things was that athletes at the
college level don't actually have any market value.
Their market value is tied up and who they're playing for,
what teams they're playing for, which is why, you know, I mean,
that was a core argument that the NCAA made in its legal
arguments during the court cases.
And then when the NCAA essentially got slapped down
and. Had to face the reality that
they were going to have to rely or they're going to have to
allow NIL money to be made. It's why they forbade athletes
from. Being able to use Marks and
logos of the teams in anything that they did in IL wise, which
I think maybe you're aware of, But if you're not a a quick
refresher, if you're an IU athlete and you're going and
doing something that's NIL related, you're not allowed to
wear IU gear, IU apparel. If you want to go do an
autograph signing, you're supposed to not have anything
connected to IU as a part of that.
Then again, that goes back to the NCAA's wrong argument.
I think we can say now, given how successful a lot of athletes
have been in the NIL space over the last three years, it's it's
it just highlights that their argument was wrong, that
athletes at the college level do indeed have market value.
And so now it's like, well, the, you know, the NCAA and its
member schools went out of their way to say we are not going to
help any athlete in terms of their NIL.
We're not going to provide you accounting assistance for tax
purposes. We're not going to provide you
with any legal assistance. And yet now.
Three years later, a lot of these schools are looking around
and saying, well, we don't want to get rid of all of these
athletics programs we've got. But now we've got essentially a
system where the NCAA and, and us as members have said, well,
you guys got to do this on your own.
So it makes it very much a situation where if you're trying
to run and maintain any kind of a program where you don't
already have a tremendous amount of money flowing in the door, it
can make it very difficult to to coordinate those things
effectively. And ultimately, I think a lot of
these programs are are looking at the reality and I think the
NCAA kind of needs to face the music that this isn't a
realistic way of handling things moving forward.
It is it is one of those situations where these really
need to be more coordinated efforts.
And you're talking about in many cases, the survival of
individual sports and and the ability of athletes to play
those sports. And this is going to be a really
fascinating test case in terms of all the things that people
have said that they're they're really interested in college
athletics. This is where we're going to, I
guess, see if if that's actually the case moving forward.
So this is something that I've read about it at several other
areas. And in fact, what prompted me to
even think about talking about this today, there was an article
that focused on what's going on at Wisconsin right now, as
Wisconsin has a bunch of donors who are like, well, you know,
what do we do? Do we donate to like a new
football facility? Or do we donate to the athletic
department or do we donate to NIL?
Because there's been this back and forth.
I mean, a lot of the money that's been donated in the past
to athletics has gone towards paying for scholarships, which
is still going to be an expense. That's not like that goes away
with NIL. You're still going to have to
provide that scholarship money in addition to payments for
name, image and likeness, which is a separate thing, you know,
But we've seen several schools and coaches, including Maryland,
including a couple of others who have basically said, you know,
if you're going to donate to athletics, please donate to NIL
because that's where we need the money.
So what apparently is going to be happening at Wisconsin is
this was this was something that MIT Winter noted on Twitter.
Some donors will be able to. Give to athletics in general
coming up soon and then the. School will be able to decide
where the money is best used. This is a really interesting and
quirky and and often misunderstood aspect of when
people donate to anything college related.
It is you know, the sometimes donations for college and
universities end up being really hyper specific and the money
once it's donated can only be used on the specific thing that
is stated in the donor agreement.
It's not something that, you know, if I donated $100,000 to
to Indiana University, for instance, and I said, I really
want this to go towards scholarships for, you know,
underprivileged youth in Vermilion County, Indiana that
want to go to IU. But there was nobody that fit
that category for a couple of years.
It's not like the university could then say, well, we're
going to use that money on something else this time.
And there are there are tons of donations at colleges and
universities across the country that are just sitting in
accounts not being spent because.
The intent that the donor provided in their gift agreement
actually either doesn't exist anymore or can't effectively be
executed. And with athletics, a lot of
these donations get earmarked towards.
Certain things. And so the idea that you could
donate to a general athletic fund and let the athletic
department turn around and make a decision about where that
money could best be allocated is a pretty interesting step.
And I think that that's something that a lot of athletic
departments are going to end up doing as we move forward.
There's another interesting aspect, which Adrian Wojnarowski
just tweeted about, which is Syracuse basketball hired a
general manager. They ended up hiring a scout.
From the New York Knicks, who graduated from Syracuse about
eight years ago. And that person's job
specifically is going to be working with their head coach on
player personnel decisions and NIL.
And this is something I think we're going to see added.
And we've kind of seen it a little bit already.
Like this was the kind of role that I think everybody thought
that Mata was going to be playing when he was here.
You obviously need a situation where you have a coach who's
willing to listen to AGM, which I guess is not a whole lot
different from what you'll get at the professional rank
sometimes, but it is clear. Given how complex the nil space
is, how complex the transfer portal is?
And having to balance all of that while also recruiting and
also coaching and doing development, there's a lot that
has to be managed there, probably a lot more than a head
coach and a handful of assistants can currently handle.
So that's going to be, I think, an interesting thing to watch.
And I think most major programs, especially programs that
generate a lot of NIL revenue or have a lot of turnover because
they're bringing in, you know, new players every year or
they're having to compete on the transfer market for players.
This is going to have to be one of those absolutely required
positions that those programs are going to have to hire.
And I think Indiana fits right into that category.
So we'll see what happens as we move forward.
I I think, you know, there's, there's a lot of movement going
on in the NCAA right now. There was another story which
our friend Taylor Lehman at Bite sized Bison just put a note out
on on sub stack that the NCAA is moving forward.
I'm quoting Taylor's piece here. The NCAA is moving forward with
the removal of coaching staff limits and just recently added
an approval for all staffers to provide quote, technical and
tactical instruction in games and during practice.
And as Taylor points out, this is not good for Indiana.
It's not good for anybody outside of the the really
heavily resourced programs. But I on the flip side of that,
I will say that it's probably a necessary thing in both football
and men's basketball because of how complex the the landscape
is. You're going to need to expand
coaching Staffs to more to, to broader numbers.
I mean, you know, if you think about the, the way that we
handle player development, player coaching, whether it's
football or basketball, it a lot of the restrictions that have
existed up to this point and the, the, the lack of a number
of assistant coaches has really been put into place to try to
put restrictions on what high level programs can do compared
to what lower level programs can do.
But as these continue to pull apart as the upper tier from a a
financial perspective of college athletics gets further away from
the middle and lower tiers, I think you also have to start
looking at how are we, you know, spending money and how are we
effectively coaching or training the people that we've got.
Yes, it is an advantage to have more coaches on the field, just
like it's an advantage to have somebody specifically there to
work on your player personnel and IL items in the background.
This is just going to be a big change for everybody.
And I think ultimately, for as much as people talk about the
professionalization of college athletics, this is where you
could say, yes, it's becoming more professional, but you could
also make the argument that this is where the reality of how
complicated this circumstances is finally starting to register.
And these are some of the results that are coming out of
the adaptations to that. And you know, you can say, you
know, this is bad for IU in terms of like, now you've got
almost unlimited coaching. You don't have unlimited
recruiting in terms of the number of coaches that can go do
that, but you can have all these people coaching your players.
Yes, that that could be bad for Indiana.
But it is also a circumstance where the question is whether
it's, you know, is that a, is that a three or 4% advantage for
another program? Does Indiana find that they
actually can invest in this a bit more?
Is this where you can get more, you know, more graduate
assistants involved in things? Because a lot of different
facets to this that I think is going to be interesting to keep
an eye on. But I think the macro issue is
really as this trajectory continues forward with the with
NIL, with, with the financial realities of college sports
changing, I think you're going to see more of these things
because ultimately there is going to be a functional
separation between how the top programs conduct business and
how everybody else conducts business.
And you know, I, as much as people lament that occurring, I
think this was inevitable. And to some degree, the fact
that it's all happening at once indicates how much of this
reality has been repressed up to this point.
And is often times happens in these sorts of situations.
Whenever you have a repressed reality, it all starts to hit at
once. And then as a huge scramble to
try to figure out all right, like what are we doing in this
new reality? And.
Are all of these things actually needed?
So these are all things to keep an eye on if you're paying
attention to college sports and and they directly affect Indiana
in a bunch of different ways, but they affect everybody else
as well. And this is where you just hope
the people that are running. Things, you know, really have
their heads on straight in terms of how can we utilize this and
manage it to our advantage. Let's go ahead and hit a couple
of other lines of questioning that we had.
We had a question from the most recent batch.
Let's see Greg Lamont asked with this is a basketball question
with league expansion and schedule, do you expect Big 10
teams to schedule non conference in a similar way to Big 12 net
boosters from last year? I use playing a multi team
exempt tournament this year obviously in Atlantis.
So I don't expect a huge opponent home or away.
Illinois versus Duke backing right into March is also a
resume question mark. Yeah.
So it's, this is one of those really fascinating areas that,
you know, the, the NCAA constantly with the NCAA
tournament selection process. They're, they, they create
formulas that they think are going to fix a problem.
And often time they will fix a problem, but then they will
eliminate or they will, excuse me, they will create another
problem in their place. I remember this happening.
I want to say it was about 2005 or 2006 when the NCAA tweaked
the RPI for the first time. And the reason that they tweaked
the RPI in basketball was that they were finding that there
were certain teams and certain leagues that were tweaking their
scheduling to take advantage of the mathematics of the RPI.
And the RPI, for those who don't know or remember how that
worked, that it's still around. It's not like it went away, just
doesn't get used officially. But the RPI was in is still used
in a lot of sports for tournament selection.
And it's, it's essentially used as like a primary tool and say
soccer or or baseball. And what it is, is a very simple
kind of blunt force object of a formula where it measures your
record, your opponent's records and your opponent's opponents
records in terms of overall winning percentage.
What the NCAA did when they tweaked it because they found
that teams were scheduling teams that were winning a lot of games
but weren't very good. So, you know, teams that were
good in yet in lower conferences, you know, but
weren't necessarily high quality teams that game the RPI.
They also found that, you know, because it didn't matter whether
you're playing home or away, teams were just scheduling as
many games at home as possible. And it's one of the reasons why
Syracuse famously would schedule so many games at home and and
wouldn't wouldn't play outside the state of New York.
So the NC Double H tweaked the formula to make Rd. games count
more even if you lost one, and then home games count less.
What that ended up doing was then creating a whole new
scheduling problem where teams started scheduling bad teams on
the road and winning those games and those wins counted more than
the other games that they were playing.
When the net was created, it was supposed to solve that by
creating tiers of teams and then it became more about the quality
of the opponent that you played, except they also built margin of
victory into the net. And that meant that often times
you would get rewarded in your net rating more for blowing out
a bad team then you would be for beating a decent or good team
close. And So what we saw this past
year and what we're seeing increasingly as we see these non
conference schedules is teams opting to schedule a bunch of
terrible teams, winning those games by thirty 3540 points.
And that ends up having a really positive effect on your net.
And and so you end up with these wild variations between who's
good in the net versus who's good in something like Ken Palm,
which is more of a schedule or a a it's a metric that looks at
your offensive and defensive efficiency.
So that it's something a little bit different than that.
You know, if you if you look at the the teams that were in the
the, the non conference strength of schedule, like best and worst
categories, there were a lot of teams that scheduled really
badly but blew out their opponents.
And it's screwed up essentially how the computers looked at
them, both the net and to a lesser degree something like
Kenpalm. Like if you go back and look at
this past year, you know, the the biggest offenders were
probably Iowa State, who was a two seed, if you'll recall, went
29 and eight. They had the number one defense
in the country, but they had the 345th toughest non conference
strength of schedule. And if you look down the list of
teams that they played, I mean, they had, you know, Lindenwood,
Prairie View A&M, Florida A&M, Eastern Illinois, all of those
teams were below 300 and DePaul as well, below 300 in Kenpalm.
But they blew all of them out pretty much.
They only beat DePaul by 18, but they blew the rest of them out.
They, you know, they beat Prairie View A&M by 51.
They beat Eastern Illinois by 32.
They beat Florida A&M by what, 40 points?
So 38 points. So like, that's how a lot of
teams decided to approach this. And even though Iowa State, they
lost to Virginia Tech on a neutral floor, they lost to
Texas A&M on a neutral floor, they built up such statistical
cachet by blowing out those opponents that it made them look
better than they probably actually were.
And well, you know, they made it to the Sweet 16.
You know, they, they, they clearly weren't awful.
It did inflate their ranking in the computer systems, which had
a direct impact on their seating and how they were selected and
where they were put in the tournament.
And there's other teams like that.
South Carolina was like that last year, Northwestern was like
that last year, TCU was like that last year.
So I do think to go back to the question that was.
Asked by Greg, Yes, I do think you're going to see a situation
where Big 10 teams are going to adapt and look at what the Big
12 and others are doing and say, well, why would we bang our head
against the wall and and schedule too difficult when we
don't get the rewards for it? You know, yes, you can say,
well, we need to play tougher opponents to get ready for
March, but you know, there's so many good teams you're going to
play in your own conference. If you're in one of the major
conferences right now, I think it's much less of an issue.
And that is something, and I think you see it in football as
well to a lesser extent. We've yet to really figure out
how to handle that paradigm of we blew A-Team out, but they
weren't very good versus what we we played this team closer.
We lost to this team and it was really close and they're real.
They're really good team that we played.
The rewards don't seem to be for the for that.
They seem to be for the former where you're beating the bad
teams by a huge amount of points.
And so that is something I'm really fascinated to see.
I think it's going to make for some bad basketball games
though. And, and I do think that what
we're going to see to some degree within, you know, the
confines of, of how we approach the scheduling process here,
unless the NCAA really changes their, you know, their, their
system and really tries to take into account a bunch of
different scenarios. You know, why would you break a
sweat in the non conference if you actually get rewarded for
not breaking a sweat in the non conference?
So we had a similar question from another person on Twitter.
Does the need for should be easy wins in football early in the
season to get to a bowl outweigh the loss in competitive reps for
players and coaches by smacking low level opponents?
I would say yes, but I'm curious on your take.
So basically the question here from Beaufort Ball Smith is, are
the wins more important than the reps?
And for a school like Indiana, the winds are always the most
important thing. I think that's a really key
thing to keep in mind. It's also, frankly, the lesson
that IU has failed to learn historically when it's come to
its football program. We've talked about this on the
show many times before. If you go back and look at the
way IU scheduled football in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s,
even in the 2000s, you know, IU has always placed a premium, it
appears on scheduling harder than they should competition.
Some of that has been, you know, due to rivalry.
I mean, at a long standing series with Kentucky, they tried
to get a rivalry of sorts going by scheduling Missouri
regularly. But a lot of it has been almost
like what we we have a responsibility or maybe we're
trying to Jack up ticket sales by having better games.
And you know, that's why even in years when you you really needed
to pad your stats with a couple of wins to try to get close to
bowl eligibility, you're scheduling non conference games
against Navy, who's a notoriously difficult nut to
crack because they play such a a unique style or or played a
unique style under their coach. Or you'd see Indiana, you know,
schedule Oregon in the mid 2000s.
Yes, they won one of those games was like, what is Indiana in the
depths of the Jerry Dinardo era doing scheduling Oregon.
It doesn't make any sense. You know, why are they
scheduling if you can get on the list?
I mean, there's there's so many teams that Indiana has scheduled
in the non conference. We're just kind of scratching
your head like why are you not just using that time to cash
some wins? The chances are in, in most
historical seasons, Indiana's going to lose to the good teams
in the Big 10 anyway. And then the question is, are
you close enough that if you pull off wins against three
average to poor teams in the Big 10, you know what is that the
difference between getting to six wins or to four wins or
five? And IUA lot of times has had
seasons where they probably should have gone to Bulls or at
least been bowl eligible but they scheduled too hard in the
non conference and they went into the conference season at
one and two rather than going into the non.
Or. Coming out of the non conference
at three and O 2001 is a great example of that.
You know, Antoine Randall L that season, that was that failed
experiment where they moved into wide receiver and then had to
move him back to to quarterback. But I think what people forget
about that season is are you over scheduled severely in the
non conference? They they they they were at NC
State that year and at NC State team was good.
They, you know, they play a Utah team that's coached by Urban
Meyer that that was feisty and beat them.
And yeah, they beat Kentucky that year.
But if you're already playing Kentucky, like, why aren't you
loading up on on cream puffs to, you know, and because think
about Indiana went five and six that year and that robbed
Antoine Randall of a reasonable chance of the Heisman.
It led to Cam Cameron getting fired and it ended up
essentially ending the Cameron era.
You know, probably before it should have been ended in terms
of you look at what happened afterwards.
And that's a big sliding doors moment for IU.
Like if IU goes 6:00 and 5:00 or 7:00 and 4:00 and has a player
that, you know, potentially wins the Heisman Trophy that year.
I don't know if he actually. Would have, but I mean, it's, it
was a possibility at least if they had gotten into bowl
eligibility. May you, you avoid the Jerry
Dinardo era perhaps at that point.
And maybe the entire trajectory of the, of the 2000s and even
the 2000 tens is different. But IU is always over scheduled.
It's actually why when the news came down last year that the
Louisville series was getting bought out, a lot of people
scoffed. They, they laughed at IU for
buying their way out of what looked like a difficult series.
But it's like it, you know what it's about time.
Like, you know, if you look at what Minnesota's done and it's
not just under PJ Fleck, they did this under Jerry Kill as
well, and they did it under Glen Mason.
You know, they, they schedule about as weekly as you possibly
can in the non conference. They get to six or seven or
sometimes more than that eight wins.
And I think to go back to the question that was asked, to me,
reps are less important than confidence.
And you're going to be a lot more confident as a team if
you're 4 and O going into your first Big 10 game, then if
you're two and two, regardless of the reps you got against
better competition. And so that's that's where I
would land on that. Ultimately, I want to see IU put
themselves in the best possible position to take advantage of
wins that are going to put them in proximity to bowl berths.
And it appears that they've gotten the hint on that.
And I think, you know, Kurt Cignetti almost certainly
understands that that is an important thing.
It doesn't mean you'll never play a tough non conference
opponent. I do hope that it'd be, you
know, it'd be nice to have the Notre Dame series on the
schedule. I think there's other tangible
benefits there that would be helpful for IU.
But at the end of the day, especially as you're trying to
build a program up, you need wins.
You need wins more than reps. And so I'm I'm excited about how
bad this non conference schedule is for IU this year.
I just hope that they're able to take advantage of it, win all
three of those games, and now you've got essentially nine
chances to win three additional games to get yourself to a bowl.
Craig Spillman asked, has the SEC announced or decided on
anything the same or similar to what the Big 10 has for NIL?
So I think what Craig's referring to here, there was a
note about how the Big 10, at least a couple of schools in the
Big 10 seem to be pursuing the NIL payments in the $22 million
items, $22 million of payments based upon the idea that it
needs to be distributed evenly based upon Title 9 and the idea
that like half the money's going to go to female athletes and or
not half. But proportionally, female
athletes at IU for instance would get like 53% of the NIL
distro, whereas male athletes would get 47% because that's the
ratio of the university in terms of male and female.
I don't think the SEC really knows yet what they're going to
do, and I honestly don't think the Big 10 hot does either.
I think that a lot of what's being done is firing up some
signal flares with this stuff to see how the reactions come in
from the regulatory bodies that that govern these things.
It's interesting, you know, the increasingly the political
aspects of college sports and the legal aspects of college
sports tie into actual politics. There was, of course the
decision that happened today, which is is pretty controversial
from the Supreme Court in this Chevron overturning the Chevron
case, which essentially allowed government regulatory agencies
to set guidelines not explicitly spelled out by Congress.
It's a very complicated ruling in terms of like how to describe
it, but the the knock on effect is essentially that you're going
to see a lot of decisions now being made by judges as opposed
to being made by regulatory bodies.
I do wonder with with what we see with Title 9 and how that's
been enforced up to this point. I do wonder as we move forward
if a lot of the guidance around resource allocations related to
Title 9 maybe don't get enforced quite the same way because of
the the knock on effects of that kind of ruling.
And this general atmosphere in the United States right now
towards deregulation, which has been, you know, really a 3540
year arc. And we're seeing these things
happening more and more. Putting everything else about
that aside, this is going to be really fascinating because I
think most schools are trying to strike a balance where it's
like, well, we know that the money that's coming in, the
money that is being generated from television, the money
that's being generated by ad sales for the Big 10 Network or
or whatever network, the SEC Network, if you're in the SEC
like that, is largely being generated by the content that is
produced off of football and men's basketball.
You know it's. Not to say that women's
basketball or some of the other sports don't generate any
revenue, but they generate comparatively very little.
The ad spaces generate comparatively little.
Because those sports just are not as popular.
And and that doesn't mean that you know, they're, they're
worse. It just means they're not as
popular. And that matters when it comes
to ad sales and things of that nature.
So with this, I think a lot of these Big 10 schools have
decided they're going to March into these things, saying what
we're going to do when what we think Title 9 says.
Knowing that that's probably not what's going to happen.
And whether it's through lawsuits from football players
saying we're generating 90% of the money, why are we only
getting a proportion of 47% of the money as an example.
I think that will that will turn some things around.
And I also think ultimately that the courts and the settlements
will probably have some more explicit language about what and
how all of this stuff gets applied.
I think it's going to be really fascinating thing.
And I think you're probably going to see some contradictory
statements coming from schools and their own conferences as we
move forward. Because it doesn't cost you
anything to say you're going to do something and then find out
what the reaction is. It really only cost you if you
do something and then you get sued.
But even then, I think because of the lack of input or the lack
of guidance, schools right now and you and conferences would
rather air on the side of we're going to keep things business as
usual and then they will adapt as they move forward rather than
saying we're going to chart a brand new course on this.
We're going to do XY and Z. Chances are you're probably
going to get sued either way. It's a lot easier to be sued and
roll things back than it is to get sued and have to pay
restitution. So that's really where I'm going
to be fascinated to see how this all plays out.
But it's a really good question, Craig, and it's something we're
going to have to keep an eye on. As as we move forward.
I've been in a couple more questions.
We got a lot of good questions coming in today.
Evan Deal asked thoughts on Indiana football recruiting.
How does it differ from the previous regime and how do you
think it's going? And, and actually, we had a
connected question from Pitt Hoosier.
I looked at the 24/7 football team rankings and although IU is
ranked 12th in the Big 10, they're actually 11th now.
I believe in cumulative scores. When you look at the average
recruit score, we're dead last. Yet IU fans seem to be excited
about the 2025 class so far. What gives?
So to kind of answer both of those questions as best I can, I
think a lot of the the excitement over recruiting is
twofold. One, there some legitimately
intriguing prospects that are being pulled into this class and
they're from different places than we've seen Indiana
recruiting. And there is I also, frankly, I
think a different type of player, maybe a higher caliber
player that we're seeing get, you know, signing with IU, but
also just getting recruited by IU.
And a lot of it is this is buzz and I understand and and
certainly, you know, I myself have tried not to leap too fully
into getting overly excited about football recruiting
because at the end of the day, as we've talked about many times
on the show, what matters is how you play once you get here, not
what your ranking is before you get here.
But even going back to Pitt Hoosier's question about what
the rankings, the aggregate ranking seem higher than normal,
but the the individual numbers are lower.
One of the things about this staff that I think is really
exciting and yes, it's potential.
It's all potential right now. We don't know if it's actual
because we haven't actually seen the output.
But I do know from what this staff did at James Madison and
the way that they've approached things so far and the types of
recruits they're bringing in, you know, and also just the
success rates that they've had with the players that they
brought in who have not been highly regarded.
There's two things about the staff that I think are really
intriguing. A you know, Cignetti has said
multiple times he doesn't really care about recruiting rankings.
And we, we hear that from others.
I mean, Matt Painter famously talks about how he doesn't pay
attention to that. He he looks at fit.
And I think with Cignetti, a lot of it is he trusts his instincts
and his Staffs instincts about what types of players they want,
how well they think those players can develop and how well
they'll fit into the system that they want to play in.
And I think all of those things are are very important.
Like I, I think this coaching staff, based on what they did at
James Madison, deserves the benefit of the doubt in terms of
what they're trying to put together.
And the fact that it happens to be bringing in a lot of higher
profile recruits that Indiana was really able to sniff during
the Allen era or even the Wilson era to some degree, I think is
is promising and it's really exciting to think about.
And you know, we talked about this with a lot of Allen's
recruiting. The, you know, he had a what I
think the 26th or 27th ranked recruiting class, one of the
years. And very few of those players
even panned out in the first place.
The rankings aren't everything. So I'm not so much concerned
about the individual numbers or the individual levels of the
recruits based upon what we're seeing right now.
But I do like the fact that it does appear like Indiana's
swimming in a different set of pawns than they have up to this
point in terms of recruiting. And I do think that the the
talent evaluation and the development that this staff has
demonstrated thus far elsewhere is really exciting when you
think about what they might be able to do here.
So that's, I guess where I am excited.
But I'm also, yeah, we won't see this class.
This class won't even be on campus for another year.
And so I'm, I'm not overly worried about it as far as you
know right now is concerned, but I am, I'm really excited about
the trajectory as, as far as how things are going.
And I hope that that will continue because I think this is
much like I said earlier with you want wins more than you want
reps There's a, there's a, there's a cool vibe to this.
What's going on at IU right now. There's a there's a public
perception aspect to what IU is doing on the recruiting front,
and that is exciting. That is one of those situations
where you look at it and you say to yourself, OK, it feels like
IU is kind of the place to be. And maybe that doesn't apply to
the guys who are competing, you know, for spots at Ohio State or
whatever, but it means perhaps that a higher caliber of recruit
and a higher caliber of potential recruit maybe looks at
Indiana in a way that they wouldn't have before.
Now Indiana's got to back that up with action.
They got to back that up with wins.
They got to back that up with signings and retaining players.
And they got to go out and still do good work in the transfer
portal because a lot. That's still going to be an
incredibly important thing. But I do like the overall vibe.
I hate using that word with football given given the
background of things, but I do like the overall vibe that's
being put out through this recruiting process.
And I do really think it's fascinating that IU is
approaching things in a way that seems to be yielding a higher
level of results much with much as with Alan, we have to wait to
see if it actually pans out and hopefully it does this time.
Hopefully that answers your question.
Some good stuff there overall. OK, we had one more question on
the podcast and it regarded the situation.
I'll just read the question here from CSW Hoosier.
Curious your thoughts on the Reason Hoosier Hysterics
podcast. I know you have to be careful
with what you say, but also, yeesh.
James Turner asking how did your last meeting with Mike Woodson
go? Good, good set of questions
there, guys. Yeah, I, you know, I don't want
to dwell too much on this. I would actually recommend
everybody go listen to the podcast because now there's been
articles written about it. The Indy Star wrote an article
about it. The, you know, WDRV wrote an
article. It's popped up on, on college
sports media related items. It's interesting to me, you
know, that it's, it's a slow news cycle.
So I think that's to some degree why this got some attention.
But I, I also would like to note that it's it, it's unfortunate
that this ends up being the story that IU deals with and
that the program deals with in the, the latter stages of June.
You know, the, the podcast itself is, is interesting
because it is kind of a peek behind the curtain of how the
messy relationship is. It currently exists between
media and donors and nil collectives and all of this kind
of fit together. And you know, I think that the
positioning of this, the framing of this within the media space
is kind of an odd one that the whole thing to me.
It's kind of. Felt like a bit of a Rorschach
test. You kind of could get what you
wanted out of the podcast. The people that don't like the
Hoosier hysterics don't like what they do, don't like the,
the, the persona or the ACT that they put on on social and on the
podcast. You certainly got a lot of
reinforcement of those beliefs. The people who don't like Mike
Woodson and who feel like, you know, Woodson's out of touch or
Woodson is, is too self important in the job.
Well, you got a lot to work with as well.
Within the podcast. I'll say the following.
You know, I think ultimately it's regrettable that the
decision was made to. Air, all of that.
What is essentially a private business conversation, you know,
out in the public, Yes, there were public elements to it
including, you know, this, this, the fan fest and some of the
other items. But at the end of the day, this
whole conversation was essentially appears to be more
of a, of a business focused 1. I personally don't feel that's
the kind of thing you, you should be putting out there
publicly, You know, and I'm, I am kind of curious, like what
was the expected end game with this?
Was it to try to turn the tide against Mike Woodson?
I, I don't know that that's necessarily something that that
this was needed for because I think there's a lot of people
who are pretty ambivalent about Mike Woodson right now.
Just going off of what we saw fan reactions were in January,
February and March. There's a lot of people that
were very disappointed with the way the season went.
And, and you know, they are, they're appreciative of what
happened in the transfer portal, but they don't necessarily trust
what's going to happen moving forward.
So I don't know that necessarily if the idea was we're going to
put this out there and it's going to turn the, the tide of
public opinion against Mike Woodson.
If that was the goal, I don't think that that really happened
because the public sentiment has been pretty.
It's it's been kind of a well, you got what was coming to you
kind of thing. It appears, at least from
looking at Twitter and some of the other areas, you know, I do
think that there is some larger questions and this has been
brought up in several other spaces about, you know, this is
it actually Crimson Corey did a good job of of summarizing this
on the the day that the podcast came out.
This is why it's it's almost impossible to be all things to
to all people, at least in terms of being a an independent
podcast. You know, that we're fans react
emotionally, which I think is a paraphrasing of how it was
described on the episode itself. So you're that, but you're also,
you know, kind of a nostalgia focus podcast where you're doing
a lot of interviews that are largely, you know, supportive of
the overall brand, but you're also engaging with donors in an
NIL collective. You're you're organizing events.
There's just a lot of go a lot going on there.
And I know enough about media to know that especially in this era
where image is so important and the perception of image is so
important and where people in not just sports, but in pretty
much every walk of business are very sensitive to internal or
perceived internal partners and what they say and don't say.
The idea that you just get to say whatever you want because
you're bringing money into the athletic department.
I mean, that's that's that's silly.
That's not really a reasonable thing.
And I mean, this is not a hysterics thing alone.
I mean, there's a great example on a much bigger level with ESPN
and the NFL that happened about, what, 8 to 10 years ago where,
you know, ESPN and their investigative reporting division
is continually doing stories that are are truthful, are well
within the journalistic mission of ESPN where they are
uncovering negative things about the NFL or about NFL players and
the NFL. From their perspective and from
the perspective of, I think, you know, some people in media, the
idea is, well, they just they have to sit there and take that
because that's ESP NS job and ESPN and the NF LS perspective
was well, no, ESP NS a business partner like they we're we're
giving them inventory and they're giving us money.
Like why would they be? Going out and saying and doing
things and reporting on things that are then negative towards
their business partner, which is why.
ESPN Monday Night Football games frankly sucked for years because
the NFL kept giving them terrible games.
And it eventually led to when Jimmy Petaro took over as the
ESPN president. They basically had to go to the
NFL, go to Rodger Goodell and apologize and say, we really
want to have a great relationship with you.
What do we need to do to make it happen?
And once they did that and, you know, kind of reset the
relationship, suddenly ESPN starts getting better games and
things like that. And so to tie that back into
this situation with the podcast, a, you know, whatever the
contents of the conversation, to me, that's, that's just not
something that you should put out there.
What it, whether or not you're saying that you're being
supportive of, of the program and the team, ultimately what
you're, what you're doing is you're, you're harming all of
that publicly over what is essentially a business
relationship that has gone sour because of one aspect of the
business that you're running. And I don't think it's a
reasonable expectation. You may, you can argue that it
should be, but I don't think that it is a reasonable
expectation in an era where media messaging is increasingly
something that organizations are trying to control to just think,
OK, we're going to put whatever on here.
Even if it's been said in other venues.
If you're partnered with an institution or an organization,
there's probably going to be a different expectation there in
terms of of what the content sounds like and how you're going
to be evaluated within that. So my hope is that, you know,
this ends up blowing out of the news cycle relatively quickly.
I think it's unfortunate, but it's also just kind of it's not
the least bit surprising. And I think if you find it
surprising. It's helpful to kind of pull the
lens back and think about all of those different elements.
And that's pretty much all I have to say on that.
So anyway, we'll see what happens as we move forward here
into July and obviously, you know, football season,
basketball season, both coming up here relatively soon.
Should be interesting to see how all of the different irons in
the fire for IU athletics end up.
Going. So anyway, thanks to all you
folks for tuning in again. This is Crimson cast.
We will be back with more coming up early next week.
We'll have a couple of new episodes dropping. 4th of July
coming up here soon. I've seen your cooking tweets,
folks. I've seen your cooking
questions. We'll get to those relatively
soon, I promise. Anyway.
We'll catch you folks. On the flip side, bring back the
Bison. Solo everybody.