“Hoosiers” — the tale of a tiny high school winning the state basketball tournament — is the greatest underdog story ever told out of Indiana.
Yet as much as little Hickory High was an unlikely champion, it wasn’t completely improbable. The sweet shooting Jimmy Chitwood, after all, was the equivalent of a 5-Star talent. He just happened to grow up on a nearby farm. Not even mighty South Bend Central had an answer for him.
The current Indiana Hoosier football team — the one that sits 10-0 and is ranked fifth in the country heading into a mega clash no one saw coming at No. 2 Ohio State on Saturday — has no one as heralded as Chitwood.
IU is a team full of coaches and players that almost no major program wanted; a group who rather than accept being passed over by big-school recruiters, worked and worked and worked to prove them wrong — and then still drew limited interest as possible transfers last year.
One person did believe in them, 63-year-old Curt Cignetti, himself an ignored asset. Cignetti spent 27 years as an assistant before he could even land a Division II head coaching job. He won and won — “Google me” — but didn’t get to the Power 4 until this year, when IU tapped him.
Together, the undervalued coach and his undervalued players clawed their way to the Big Ten, albeit at Indiana, whose 712 losses is the most in the history of FBS football. They arrived from mostly the Sun Belt and Mid-American Conference to form a low-expectation group (picked to finish 17th in the 18-team Big Ten) with chips on their shoulders and purpose in their play.
Given the chance, they would show everyone they were wrong. Ten games in, mission accomplished.
Hollywood endings are hard to find in real life — so who knows what happens in Columbus, let alone beyond. The Buckeyes are nearly two touchdown favorites for a reason.
The fact IU is even here, barreling into a massive late November, top five game with Big Ten title and College Football Playoff stakes on the line is a testament to all that is great about sports.
Recruiting rankings and preseason perception don’t move the scoreboard. Fight and work and self-determination can still win out.
Army is America’s team — literally — as the 9-0 Cadets head into a similar type game Saturday against Notre Dame.
Indiana is something different.
America itself, or at least the promise of what America is supposed to be.
And yet …
“It takes a different mentality coaching because you don’t build a team, you pretty much buy a team,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, formerly a longtime college head coach, told AL.com Monday. “And that was a little bit forbidden when I was in coaching, but now it’s legal.
“Look at Indiana,” Tuberville continued. “They went out and bought them a football team and look where they’re at.”
Tuberville was decrying the state of college football with its transfer portal that allows player movement and its name, image and likeness deals, which he believes need to carry a significant punishment if broken. He wants to pass laws to address it.
How the Hoosiers caught a stray here is both telling and absurd. In what is undoubtedly another first for the program, a Washington politician is vowing to act out of concern about how Indiana football got so good.
There is plenty to dunk on Tuberville, but calling out his hypocrisy as a job jumping coach or noting that every NIL contract could already contain provisions if broken, misses the bigger problem.
Someone with Tuberville’s power doesn’t see Indiana winning games as a dream big, value-driven Disney movie in the making, but rather a dire problem in need of immediate federal regulation.
It is part of how the entire issue of transfer and NIL deals has been framed so backwards that senators, even former coaches who are senators, don’t see all of what is happening.
They appear still hung up on wishing for how things used to be, or amplifying the complaints from current coaches about how challenging their multimillion-dollar jobs have become. (It certainly isn’t easy to be a head coach these days, but every industry changes, and rarely with the soaring salaries of college football).
Or maybe they haven’t moved on from demonstrably untrue fear mongering predictions about how NIL would just cause “the rich to get richer” or, even more ridiculous, fans would stop watching.
The fact that Curt Cignetti could bring in a boat load of new players (to replace the boat load that transferred out) isn’t a bad thing for the sport of college football. It’s a great thing. Overnight he built a program that had been spinning its wheels forever under the old rules that favored established brands with greater recruiting advantages.
IU’s quarterback, top four rushers, four of its top five receivers, starting tight end and top four tackles are all transfers. Considering the low major programs they arrived from it is laughable to say the Hoosiers bought them — unless it was from an Indianapolis dollar store? Any major program in the country could have done the same. Or they could have hired Cignetti.
Only Indiana did.
The beauty of these football playing Hoosiers is the beauty of “Hoosiers” — it allows the unlikely to dream. In the past, about the only way into the top five was to be at a school that had spent decades, generations even, investing in the program so it could stockpile elite recruiting classes. Even then you needed to be located in a fertile recruiting area.
Tuberville understands that part.
Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia and so on ran everything. The Indianas of the world hoped to win six games and reach the Fosters Farm Bowl. The sport was completely top heavy. In the last 55 years, either Ohio State or Michigan won at least a share of 42 Big Ten titles.
There was almost nothing anyone could do about it.
Now there apparently is. Wonderfully so.
The new system offers a bright light of possibilities. The reality is that almost no one can become 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 vs. player freedom. It’s also about competitive balance and spreading the excitement beyond a small axis of power. The 12-team college football playoff adds to it.
The three biggest games this weekend include Army, Indiana, BYU and Arizona State. None are traditional winners.
IU, a team of discount coaches and outcast players, will get their crack at 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 throw their best punch.
Maybe it lands. Maybe it doesn’t. But they got there.
It’s a glorious story — an only-in-sports story — that should be held up as an ideal, not for senators to snipe at and try to “fix.” The establishment doesn’t need more protections.
After all, the field inside Ohio Stadium is 100 yards long.
They’ll find this exact same measurement back in Bloomington.
