Senior quarterback Nate Sudfeld said when IU Athletics Director Fred Glass showed up to practice Sunday, he was wearing a heavy coat. IU Coach Kevin Wilson halted his usual post-practice message to the team to allow the director to speak.
Glass pulled two red New York Yankees hats out of his coat and put one on.
“‘I just talked to a partner,’” Glass said, according to Sudfeld. “’We’re going to New York.’”
The team jumped up, clapped their hands and cheered for the director, for the team and for the program that hasn’t reached a bowl game since the 2007 season, when the Hoosiers lost to the Oklahoma State Cowboys, 49-33.
The Hoosiers were going to the New Era Pinstripe Bowl in New York City to play the Duke Blue Devils the day after Christmas.
The senior class — the 2012 class and others — had achieved what it had come to IU to prove: they could turn around the IU football program that had seen its fair share of dismal years — a program that had only been to 10 bowl games in its existence.
“When I came here, that was the goal for most of us,” senior offensive lineman Jason Spriggs said. “We wanted to turn the program around. We wanted to go to a bowl. We saw ourselves getting to that bowl game, and it’s great to finally accomplish that.”
The 2012 class came into the program with players like Spriggs, Sudfeld, defensive end Nick Mangieri, offensive lineman Dan Feeney and former Hoosier running back Tevin Coleman.
It was the class that lit a fire in the hearts of the IU football fan base, and the players felt it from what Wilson told them during the recruiting process, Spriggs said.
“Coach Wilson really sold me on that this is a family, the family I belong to,” Spriggs said. “That’s why I ended up coming here because I felt like this was a home. Coach Wilson only ever promised that we would have good guys in the locker room, we were gonna play hard and we were gonna win.”
Spriggs said it was the leadership of Wilson that helped him and the others in the class mature into the players that they are now. He said that Wilson instilled ideas and morals within the lineman that Spriggs didn’t even understand until later in his career, and now Spriggs is teaching those same things to the younger players.
Now that senior class is the anchor that is taking IU football to New York City and the seniors’ only bowl game of their careers.
“I think there’s still a lot of work to be done,” senior defensive end Nick Mangieri said about rebuilding the program. “I think winning a bowl game would be the next step. It’s gonna be up to the guys in the classes below us to take what we’ve done and run with it.”
Mangieri said while the anticipation of the bowl game will continue to build throughout the month of December, he’s trying to prepare the same way he’s always prepared this season.
“I’m definitely planning on having one of the best games of my career,” Mangieri said.
These performances are what allowed the most heralded class of Wilson’s tenure at IU is taking him to his first bowl game of his coaching career.
“You have no idea. We are proud, very proud,” Spriggs said.
With the team traveling 760 miles to New York City during the holidays, Wilson said he asked the players to raise their hands if they had been to New York.
Around 20 players raised their hands.
But the big city isn’t intimidating anyone, Mangieri and Shaw both said. In fact, Sudfeld said he’s excited to play in the same venue as former Yankees star shortstop Derek Jeter. And Shaw said that he is ready to get to the city to see what it has to offer.
“I heard it’s a really nice place to be around Christmas,” Shaw said. “So I’m really excited to be in New York.”
