“Hoosiers” – the story of a small high school that wins the state basketball tournament – is the greatest underdog story ever told from Indiana.
But even though little Hickory High was an unlikely champion, it wasn’t entirely unlikely. After all, lovable shooter Jimmy Chitwood was the equivalent of a five-star talent. He happened to grow up on a nearby farm. Even mighty South Bend Central had no answer for him.
The current Indiana Hoosiers football team — the one that is 10-0 and ranked fifth in the country heading into a mega-clash that no one saw coming Saturday at No. 2 Ohio State — has no one heralded quite like Chitwood.
IU is a team full of coaches and players who almost didn’t want a big program; a group that, instead of accepting being passed over by big-school recruiters, worked and worked and worked to prove them wrong — and still attracted limited interest in potential transfers last year.
One person did believe in it, 63-year-old Curt Cignetti, himself an ignored asset. Cignetti worked as an assistant for 27 years before he could even land a head coaching job in Division II. He won and won – “Google me” – but didn’t make the Power 4 until this year, when IU tapped him.
Together, the underrated coach and his underrated players clawed their way to the Big Ten, albeit in Indiana, where the 712 losses are the most in FBS football history. Coming primarily from the Sun Belt and Mid-American Conference, they were a low-expectation group (picked to finish 17th in the 18-team Big Ten) with chips on their shoulders and a sense of purpose in their play.
Given the chance, they would show everyone they were wrong. Ten games played, mission accomplished.
Hollywood endings are hard to come by in real life – so who knows what happens in Columbus, let alone beyond. The Buckeyes are almost two-touchdown favorites for good reason.
The fact that IU is even here, playing a huge top-five matchup in late November with the Big Ten title and College Football Playoff stakes on the line, is a testament to everything that is great about sports.
Recruiting rankings and preseason perception don’t change the scoreboard. Struggle and work and self-determination can still win.
Army is literally America’s team, as the 9-0 Cadets play a similar game against Notre Dame on Saturday.
Indiana is something else.
America itself, or at least the promise of what America should be.
And yet…
“There needs to be a different mentality in coaching because you’re not building a team, you’re actually buying a team,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college head coach, told AL.com on Monday. “And that was kind of forbidden when I was coaching, but now it’s legal.
“Look at Indiana,” Tuberville continued. “They went out and bought them a football team and look where they are.”
Tuberville lambasted the state of college football with its transfer portal that allows player movement and its name, image and likeness agreements, which he said should carry significant punishment if broken. He wants to pass laws to address this.
How the Hoosiers caught a drifter here is telling and absurd. In what is sure to be another first for the program, a Washington politician is promising to act on concern about how Indiana football got so good.
There is plenty to say about Tuberville, but calling out his hypocrisy as a job-jumping coach or noting that any NIL contract could already contain provisions if broken misses the bigger issue.
Someone with Tuberville’s power doesn’t see Indiana’s winning games as a dream-sized, value-driven Disney movie in the making, but rather as a pressing problem in need of immediate federal regulation.
It’s part of the way the whole issue of transfer and NIL deals has been framed in such a backwards way that Senators, even former coaches who are Senators, don’t see the benefits.
They still seem hung up on wishing the way things used to be, or amplifying current coaches’ complaints about how challenging their multimillion-dollar jobs have become. (It’s certainly not easy being a head coach these days, but every industry changes, and rarely with the sky-high salaries of college football).
Or perhaps they haven’t moved on yet with demonstrably untrue fear-mongering predictions about how NIL would only ensure that “the rich get richer” or, even more ridiculous, that fans would stop watching.
The fact that Curt Cignetti was able to bring in a boatload of new players (to replace the boatload that was transferred) is not a bad thing for the sport of college football. It’s a wonderful thing. Overnight, he built a program that had run forever under the old rules, favoring established brands with greater recruiting benefits.
IU’s quarterback, top four rushers, four of the top five receivers, starting tight end and top four tackles are all transfers. Considering the low-major programs they came from, it’s laughable to say the Hoosiers “bought” them – unless it was from a dollar store in Indianapolis? Any major program in the country could have done the same. Or they could have hired Cignetti.
Only Indiana did that.
The beauty of these football-playing Hoosiers is the beauty of “Hoosiers” – it makes you dream the improbable. In the past, the only way to get into the top five was for a school to invest decades, even generations, in the program to build elite recruiting classes. Even then, you had to be in a fertile recruiting ground.
Tuberville understands that part.
Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia and so on handled everything. The Indianas of the world hoped to win six games and reach the Fosters Farm Bowl. The sport was completely top-heavy. Over the past 55 years, either Ohio State or Michigan has won at least a share of the 42 Big Ten titles.
There was almost nothing anyone could do about it.
Now apparently there is. Wonderfully so.
The new system offers a bright light of possibilities. The reality is that almost no one can make Ohio State or Alabama. Anyone can be Indiana. Or Colorado. Or maybe even Ole Miss.
The battle here isn’t just the coaches’ desire for control versus player freedom. It’s also about competitive balance and spreading the excitement beyond a narrow axis of power. The 12-team college football playoffs contribute to this.
The three biggest games this weekend are Army, Indiana, BYU and Arizona State. No one is a traditional winner.
IU, a team of discount coaches and outcast players, takes on the mighty Buckeyes. The new Hoosiers never stopped believing they were good enough, never stopped working to prove it and, thanks to rule changes, have the opportunity to deliver their best punch.
Maybe it will land. Maybe not. But they got there.
It’s a glorious story – one that only happens in sports – that should be held up as an ideal, not for senators to mock and try to “fix.” The establishment doesn’t need more protection.
After all, the field at Ohio Stadium is 100 yards long.
They’ll find the exact same measurement in Bloomington.
