Weak Become Heroes
Maybe, just maybe, the magic can be yours this time
PROGRAMMING NOTE: This is the season-opening essay. Here are 2022-23 and 2023-24. Yes, this is a blatant ripoff of other, better concepts. What can you do. The watchlist for Week One will be out tomorrow, as it ended up being a bit long to pair with this. -WW
I started noticing the tweets sometime in August. Maybe July? My search function claims July, but I feel like it was August. I don’t totally remember. It was as if, overnight, my feed had been infiltrated by people really, really excited about Indiana football. And they all kept using this same hashtag. These are all screengrabs because you can’t embed tweets, or Xeets, or X Æ A-12s, whatever.
They just kept coming, and coming, and coming. Over the years I have accumulated a pretty loose inner circle of people I interact with on Twitter, and until August I had no idea that I followed so many Indiana fans. The For You function on the website is so broken that I saw the same White Boy Rick (apparently not the Detroit FBI informant) tweets every time I reloaded the site one day. I have seen photoshops of Kurtis Rourke re-named Kurtis Pourke, or backup QB Tayven Jackson now blessed with the new name of Baycon.
I started seeing it in mid-August, before the college football season began. Real excitement. Real hope. All of that for an Indiana football program that has never won more than nine games in a season. All for a program that’s finished ranked one time in 36 years. Bill Connelly’s projections would come out, and their initial take was that Indiana would go around 5-7. In the context of Indiana Football, one of the worst programs in world history, this would actually be an average season for them.
All of this excitement for what I figured would be some sort of mild story until reality set in. They had powerhouses (Ohio State, Michigan) to play, and they had the usual frisky beings (Maryland, Nebraska, Michigan State) of B1Gdom. Then there’s the new teams you gotta play, because every conference has more teams than it ever has before. I admired the dreams. I admired it when I first saw it in 2019, the goal of 9Windiana that ultimately came up short in a meaningless (to Tennessee) bowl game at the hands of Tennessee.
There has been a serious lack of magic in college football for most of the last 15 years. The 2007 season was so singular, so shocking, that it still gets written about as the greatest season in modern football history. But what that season belied was a more depressing trend as LSU won the championship, their second in four years. From 2003 through 2022, 10 schools split a total of 20 championships. The most notable upstarts were Clemson and Georgia, two teams who’d won championships before.
Even in 2023, when Michigan won the title, it wasn’t their first of any kind. It was the closing out of a three-year dream that never seemed to end, one beyond any fan’s wildest hopes, but it was a traditional power being victorious. The last truly surprising champion, history-wise, is probably 2010 Auburn. That’s 14 years ago. Everyone else who’s won it in the last 20+ years of the sport is a historic top-15 program at worst. It gets very samey.
Most of the fun distractions get knocked down by the end of the year, anyway. That hallowed 2007 season resulted in a championship game between LSU and Ohio State; an expanded four-team playoff would have only added Oklahoma and Georgia. Something genuinely new so rarely happens; if it does it gets stamped out pretty quick. Boise State never made the national title game. TCU finally did in 2022, only to lose by 58 points. Cincinnati was disposed of quietly in 2010 and 2021. The magic runs out.
Even in this season, we had genuinely exciting things happening for a couple of months. Vanderbilt defeated Alabama in one of the most shocking upsets of my lifetime. Northern Illinois beat Notre Dame. UL-Monroe started out 5-1. For a brief moment, UNLV was on top of the world. Illinois started out 6-1. Navy was undefeated into the final weekend of October.
All of these things have been stamped out by the unending rule of college football. The teams with the most resources, most money, most talent, and somehow the most coaches always eventually win out. The five teams with the best shot at a championship are Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and Oregon. Only the final one of those represents a genuine departure from all of college football’s history, and it’s the program with the largest budget for NIL in the entire nation.
Everything new is stamped out at the time of writing, save for two things: a true longshot bid by 8-0 Army that stands to likely end at the hands of Notre Dame, and a longshot bid by 9-0 Indiana that feels less of a longshot every time you watch them play. Maybe. Maybe.
Yesterday, Indiana defeated Michigan State 47-10. They’re now 9-0, with just one game on the schedule that they won’t be favored in: Ohio State. Barring a massive collapse, Indiana is going to make the first-ever 12-team playoff. Indiana. INDIANA.
Somehow that doesn’t feel like enough. Literally Indiana, a program whose record number of wins in any season in history in nine. This is the same program that spent the post-COVID years going 2-10, 4-8, and 3-9. My buddy Ben has kept a tier list of Indiana football losses over the years and the one that ranks worst is a 2019 Gator Bowl loss to Tennessee in a game that ended up having zero effect in either direction for Tennessee football. I find it beautiful that he hasn’t had to touch this list once all season.
Meanwhile, in the same town, Indiana basketball continues onward. A dominant program for most of the 1970s and 1980s, still quite strong through the 1990s, it feels like they’ve been searching for their own Curt Cignetti for most of my lifetime. A brief spell in 2013 where they looked like a plausible national champion was ended by an inability to break down a simple 2-3 zone. A wonderful run to the title game in 2002 ended in a double-digit loss that almost no one remembers. If you’re my age - 31 on Thursday - you can remember two, maybe three seasons where Indiana felt relevant.
This year, they anticipate competing for the Big Ten behind a super-talented (if potentially ill-fitting) roster and an acknowledgement that success needs to come. At the same time I do not know a single Indiana athletics fan that seems to realize basketball season is here. Football has become such a dreamlike figure, a trance, that it has taken a beleaguered fanbase to highs they presumably never imagined where possible.
This is a long way to say that through Indiana football I feel like I’ve rediscovered the magic and power of college sports this year. I’ve been disillusioned with a lot of this project - endless realignment, constant reminders that the average fan doesn’t matter to the bottom line, and a never-ending chase for the monetary golden goose. If we just change the pawns on the chess board for this exact formation in this exact time in history, we will definitely not re-arrange said pawns within five years. Trust us.
I don’t know, man. I tuned in for the last four or five Indiana games and watched each one all the way through and felt something I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s not because I need a new team to bandwagon - my family and I had a pretty good 2023, football-wise - but because I needed that reminder that the weak can become heroes.
In the final throes of attempting to put this together, I was scrolling through Twitter before falling asleep last night. I saw this and felt a smile break out involuntarily.
Kyle Robbins wrote that original post five years ago. After bearing the brunt of…all the Indiana stuff, he more or less stopped writing about Indiana altogether after 9Windiana failed at the hands of an onside kick in Jacksonville. I’d be pretty broken, too, if I thought my one remaining stab at magic had come up dry. But maybe this sport, and college sports as a whole, can still surprise us. It has all along if we’ve been looking.
I spent the first three or so weeks of the season feeling a mild jealousy at how cool it must have felt for lifelong IU sufferers before realizing I was the problem. Ever since that time I’ve had a wonderful three hours each Saturday seeing what this supernova does next. My only regret is that I wish I’d done the same all of the other times this has happened in college sports instead of worrying and whimpering about how it might have a 2% effect on the team, or teams, I wrote about. No matter who you root for, it’s simply very cool when the magic emerges from hibernation and selects someone you never, ever would’ve expected it to select.
I’ve been dismissive of a lot in life; it’s probably time to celebrate the great things this sport, and all of college sports, gives us. I can worry about the end of it at a later date. Living in the moment was always more fun, anyway.
I don’t know what this season has in store for college basketball, and truthfully it’s probably not ideal to have your Welcome Back College Basketball post spend the first 1,500+ words on football. But I promise this is the point: I believe in a college sports world where magic exists, even if I might doubt it for long stretches of time. It was there last year when an NC State team that had a 0.9% shot of even seeing the NCAA Tournament went from ACC Tuesday to the Final Four. Or when this happened and we all learned about an accountant in Michigan.
Or the year prior, when we had three first-time Final Four teams. When San Diego State found magic of their own to go to a title game, the way everyone alive never imagined they could.
Or Saint Peter’s. God bless Saint Peter’s.
Or this.
Or this.
Or, yeah, this.
Or VCU, or George Mason, or Loyola Chicago, or Oral Roberts, or FAU, or Wichita State, or FGCU, or Kent State. Anyone can do it here. Anything is possible here. The magic is here, because the magic never left. And that’s just the men’s side. Imagine how this felt after years, so many years, of accepting the Elite Eight was the best you could do.
Or spending a long, long amount of time simply praying to see the second weekend again, until the right coach at the right time walked through the door.
There is no direct comparison to a 2024 Indiana Football happening this season. If DePaul ends up a 3 seed or UCF wins the Big 12, then I’ll simply have to accept that there was more magic than I ever dreamed could be. No matter how hard those in power try to kill these dreams, they’ll always be here.
Everyone, even Indiana, can be the Indiana in college basketball. A Butler can make back-to-back national championships. Baylor can win one. Villanova can win two. In your lifetime, all of Texas Tech, San Diego State, Gonzaga, Wisconsin, Butler, Georgia Tech, Utah, UNLV…they can all play on a Monday night in April, just 40 minutes from endless fame.
Tomorrow, more than any other night of the season, all 364 teams playing for one title can say the same thing.
We all dance. We all sing.