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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

sports football

IU forced to handle success going into Happy Valley

The team gets pumped up by coach Mark Hill before the game against Ohio State on Saturday at Memorial Stadium. The Hoosiers lost to the number one ranked Buckeyes, 27-34.

IU Coach Kevin Wilson said he remembers one thing from Miss Blackburn’s English class — nothing great was ever achieved without 
enthusiasm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it first, but now Wilson uses the saying when referring to the IU football team.

He said he likes the energy and enthusiasm of the team, but that enthusiasm needs to be channeled to be productive, like on the first play of last week’s game against No. 1 Ohio State.

The Hoosier defense blew up the line of scrimmage and swallowed the Buckeyes’ Braxton Miller for a 9-yard loss. Players rallied around each other and jumped up and down in celebration.

Wilson said he didn’t like that one bit.

Or when a senior said Ohio State was a bigger week for the team. Wilson said he didn’t like that either.

He said he wasn’t frustrated the team lost. He said he was mad someone implied the upcoming week isn’t 
always the biggest.

“He doesn’t get the gist of this program if that’s what he thought,” Wilson said.

For Wilson and his team, it’s about the next play and the next week.

Focusing on the next opponent and handling success was a point of emphasis for Wilson this week because he coaches a 4-1 team that is going into the second largest stadium in the country, as IU travels to take on Penn State at Noon Saturday.

“They’ve won four in a row,” he said. “It’s their homecoming. It’s going to be a tough environment.”

The Hoosiers started the season 4-0 for the first time in 25 years and nearly snapped the Buckeyes’ then 17-game win streak last week. There has been an unfamiliar amount of success for the Hoosiers this season.

In recent years, there have been impressive wins against teams like Penn State and Missouri, but those wins were quickly negated by sub-par follow-up performances.

“We’ve shown as a program we can be good,” Wilson said. “We’ve shown we don’t consistently move on.”

But Wilson said he sees growth, and he isn’t the only one. He said he recently received a text from a former player, who told him all the things Wilson used to preach are coming true. Wilson used to talk to the player about turnover ratios and the play-the-next-play motto, and the player told Wilson he is seeing those principles come to 
fruition.

And while his sayings earned some love from a former player, Wilson said he was a fan of another coach’s comments last weekend.

After Clemson defeated Notre Dame on Saturday, Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney went off on a speech to a reporter about how the program can give players plenty of material things, but it cannot give them guts. He called it “BYOG” — Bring Your Own Guts.

It goes hand-in-hand with IU’s internal way of setting the bar this season. Instead of having Wilson and coaches tell players where they should be, the players set the goals. Wilson just holds them accountable to those goals.

But now this IU team takes on a Big Ten opponent in Penn State with a big home-field advantage. The Hoosiers face this challenge with the additional adversity of the uncertain health statuses of senior quarterback Nate Sudfeld and junior running back Jordan Howard.

“Playing at their place will be very, very challenging with crowd noise and all the great things they do there,” Wilson said.

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