Indiana football has had a couple of good runs on the grid iron, ever. Success happens sporadically and mostly very many years between good runs, even decades apart.
For example, way back around 1945 I have read that the football Hoosiers had a great run and won the Big Ten. I don't know if they were playing the best teams of the best generation of yesteryear, like Army and Notre Dame and Oklahoma, or probably Harvard and Yale back then, but they did well. They did not go to the Rose Bowl, probably, because of a little thing called World War II. Details.
I am not trying to be to glib or cynical, but Indiana's football luck is affected by stuff like world wars. And not in good ways, usually. Stuff external to Indiana University and the play on the field can negatively affect the program. Some people call it snake-bit: when you have observed the Indiana football teams as much as I have, you call it life. And life can be very perplexing and vexing, or if you hang some hopes on the football Hoosiers, anyway.
Sometimes Indiana football is another term for "losing". We hate that, when it comes down to a crucial winning or losing play, or season defining game, and we predictably or inevitably come up short. There have been campaigns where on the final game of the year, the phrase "that dropped pass in the end zone to IU's most reliable and prolific receiver, falling from his hands after properly finding him in the chest, perfectly targeted from the much maligned journeyman quarterback, has cost Indiana another bowl season." And it usually has been over a decade since they last went to any bowl.
The first football season that my parents moved to Bloomington, in 1967, the "Cardiac Kid" Hoosiers won the Big Ten and traveled to the Rose Bowl, losing to superstar O.J. Simpson and the USC Trojans in the Coliseum. They didn't lose by too much, but they lost.
This is Indiana. Never been back since. Indiana doesn't really play well enough for the Rose Bowl.
Over a decade later future ESPN College Football commentator Lee Corso lead the upstart Hoosiers to the Holiday Bowl in 1979 and miraculously won. One hit wonder against an undefeated smaller school but up-and-coming Brigham Young University, a school I would later to grow to love myself.
And BYU would do things like go on to win for decades. A lot.
But this story is about IU, so back to the losing traditions...
However, it was not all losing. A coach named Bill Mallory brought a period of sustained hope, when the Hoosiers went to six bowl games in a span of eight years, from 1986 to 1994. I was young and impressionable, and I really thought that Indiana had found its presence as a winner in college football. We beat Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State... We even beat South Carolina and Baylor in bowl victories. But not for long.
Mallory had a weak stretch thereafter, was dismissed, and then came a string of coaches that could not do it. Well, the third coach was finally doing it, Terry Hoeppner, but along the lines of IU football luck, he was stricken with a brain cancer that initially removed him from some games and then removed him from the game of life. His successor, based on Hoeppner's recruits and his widow's hopes and inspiration, Bill Lynch, led them to one bowl, the first in 14 years, where they were blown out and would not return with him. Because the real revamp coach was taken by an act of God, an infliction known as cancer.
We IU fans get that. We even know a lot about losing in basketball, a sport that IU has dominated in. But football is different. We know about losing on and off the fields of life. We lose consistently. We have been beaten every way possible. Multiple times. In a single year. And then there's next year!
Lynch tried hard. And then we got an assistant coach from Oklahoma 6 years ago. He was dedicated and he knew it would take a while to win. It took more years than I thought, but we got a winner now.
Many games were lost in typical fashion, dropped passes, blown plays, poor defense every year.
We lost a close bowl game last December (2015); this year we gave one up to Wake Forest before upsetting Michigan State. Despite succumbing to Ohio State, as expected, there are 7 games left and some fun to be had. Expect the Hoosiers to play in another bowl this December.
I think the corner has been turned.
But alas, life is so often cruel and harsh! That Coach Hoeppner who died while resurrecting their last bowl season while painfully absent in his grave in 2007, his heroic widow graciously taking the playing field with his players as they qualified by a game-winning field goal on the last night of the regular season? Their daughter, 9 years later, in her 40s, died suddenly in a car crash on the main highway outside of Bloomington a few short weeks ago. We mourn for Mrs. Hoeppner and her family. We are sorry that life has been so hard for someone whose family toiled and sweat for Indiana University and left us early.
The current coach, the new hope of Indiana football Wilson, knew Terry Hoeppner, coached with him at Miami of Ohio decades ago. Somehow I think that Wilson knows what he is doing. He is bring a battered fan base to life.
There is hope. There is life beyond death, joy beyond despair, winning after decades of losing.
And past the real life losses of our heroes in the greater world, like Ernie Pyle in World War II, the guns at Memorial Stadium in southern Indiana can hail our grid iron athletes and its school--
and victory.
For example, way back around 1945 I have read that the football Hoosiers had a great run and won the Big Ten. I don't know if they were playing the best teams of the best generation of yesteryear, like Army and Notre Dame and Oklahoma, or probably Harvard and Yale back then, but they did well. They did not go to the Rose Bowl, probably, because of a little thing called World War II. Details.
I am not trying to be to glib or cynical, but Indiana's football luck is affected by stuff like world wars. And not in good ways, usually. Stuff external to Indiana University and the play on the field can negatively affect the program. Some people call it snake-bit: when you have observed the Indiana football teams as much as I have, you call it life. And life can be very perplexing and vexing, or if you hang some hopes on the football Hoosiers, anyway.
Sometimes Indiana football is another term for "losing". We hate that, when it comes down to a crucial winning or losing play, or season defining game, and we predictably or inevitably come up short. There have been campaigns where on the final game of the year, the phrase "that dropped pass in the end zone to IU's most reliable and prolific receiver, falling from his hands after properly finding him in the chest, perfectly targeted from the much maligned journeyman quarterback, has cost Indiana another bowl season." And it usually has been over a decade since they last went to any bowl.
The first football season that my parents moved to Bloomington, in 1967, the "Cardiac Kid" Hoosiers won the Big Ten and traveled to the Rose Bowl, losing to superstar O.J. Simpson and the USC Trojans in the Coliseum. They didn't lose by too much, but they lost.
This is Indiana. Never been back since. Indiana doesn't really play well enough for the Rose Bowl.
Over a decade later future ESPN College Football commentator Lee Corso lead the upstart Hoosiers to the Holiday Bowl in 1979 and miraculously won. One hit wonder against an undefeated smaller school but up-and-coming Brigham Young University, a school I would later to grow to love myself.
And BYU would do things like go on to win for decades. A lot.
But this story is about IU, so back to the losing traditions...
However, it was not all losing. A coach named Bill Mallory brought a period of sustained hope, when the Hoosiers went to six bowl games in a span of eight years, from 1986 to 1994. I was young and impressionable, and I really thought that Indiana had found its presence as a winner in college football. We beat Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State... We even beat South Carolina and Baylor in bowl victories. But not for long.
Mallory had a weak stretch thereafter, was dismissed, and then came a string of coaches that could not do it. Well, the third coach was finally doing it, Terry Hoeppner, but along the lines of IU football luck, he was stricken with a brain cancer that initially removed him from some games and then removed him from the game of life. His successor, based on Hoeppner's recruits and his widow's hopes and inspiration, Bill Lynch, led them to one bowl, the first in 14 years, where they were blown out and would not return with him. Because the real revamp coach was taken by an act of God, an infliction known as cancer.
We IU fans get that. We even know a lot about losing in basketball, a sport that IU has dominated in. But football is different. We know about losing on and off the fields of life. We lose consistently. We have been beaten every way possible. Multiple times. In a single year. And then there's next year!
Lynch tried hard. And then we got an assistant coach from Oklahoma 6 years ago. He was dedicated and he knew it would take a while to win. It took more years than I thought, but we got a winner now.
Many games were lost in typical fashion, dropped passes, blown plays, poor defense every year.
We lost a close bowl game last December (2015); this year we gave one up to Wake Forest before upsetting Michigan State. Despite succumbing to Ohio State, as expected, there are 7 games left and some fun to be had. Expect the Hoosiers to play in another bowl this December.
I think the corner has been turned.
But alas, life is so often cruel and harsh! That Coach Hoeppner who died while resurrecting their last bowl season while painfully absent in his grave in 2007, his heroic widow graciously taking the playing field with his players as they qualified by a game-winning field goal on the last night of the regular season? Their daughter, 9 years later, in her 40s, died suddenly in a car crash on the main highway outside of Bloomington a few short weeks ago. We mourn for Mrs. Hoeppner and her family. We are sorry that life has been so hard for someone whose family toiled and sweat for Indiana University and left us early.
The current coach, the new hope of Indiana football Wilson, knew Terry Hoeppner, coached with him at Miami of Ohio decades ago. Somehow I think that Wilson knows what he is doing. He is bring a battered fan base to life.
There is hope. There is life beyond death, joy beyond despair, winning after decades of losing.
And past the real life losses of our heroes in the greater world, like Ernie Pyle in World War II, the guns at Memorial Stadium in southern Indiana can hail our grid iron athletes and its school--
and victory.
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