Ep 1182 - Indiana's Magical Ride Ends at Notre Dame

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.