Football team looks to buck trend by winning after loss

Facing the No. 2-ranked team in the country certainly isn’t the easiest route for IU to start winning again.

But should they defy the odds and win, the Hoosiers will be bucking a major trend in their football program during the past 15 seasons.

Michigan, topped the Hoosiers on Saturday at Memorial Stadium in a 42-35 shootout.
It was the second year in a row Michigan had beaten the Hoosiers with a score in the final 2:30 of a game.

The result from last season’s Wolverine loss was a two-game losing streak for IU that included a home game loss against then-No. 9 Ohio State and a 47-7 drubbing on the road at the hands of Virginia.

The Hoosiers finally broke into the win column again — albeit for the final time of the 2009 campaign —  with a 27-14 home win against Illinois a week after the Virginia game.

Turning losses into losing streaks, in fact, has been the norm for the Hoosiers with Bill Lynch in Bloomington as the Hoosiers’ head coach.

Lynch’s teams in the past three seasons have compiled a 5-16 record in the game immediately following a loss, and the fifth-year seniors have suffered through a 7-20 game-after-loss record through the past four seasons.

To be fair, it’s certainly not a department where Lynch or the seniors are pioneering
new territory.

For the past 15 seasons of Hoosier football — a period that has included five head coaches — the Hoosiers are just 24-79 after a loss.

The span includes just two seasons, 1998 and 2001, where the Hoosiers were a .500 team after dropping a game.

Just once — the Insight Bowl season of 2007 with Lynch at the helm — the team had a winning record (3-2) after losing a game.

Certainly, it’s been a road of futility for IU after a loss and one from which the team would desperately like to find the off-ramp. To do so, IU will have to get over the Michigan hurdle mentally.

“I was talking with Tyler (Replogle),” senior safety Mitchell Evans said. “I was pretty bummed about the game. He was like ‘Look at it this way: We lost by a touchdown in the last minute of the game to a great team.’”

Evans credited Replogle, a senior linebacker, with exhibiting some characteristics that will benefit the team.

“I think people like that — that’s leadership,” Evans said. “That’s going to help bring us together and into games.”

The similarities in how IU lost to Michigan in the past two seasons certainly are easily apparent, but senior quarterback Ben Chappell said the team’s reaction was different this time from a year ago in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“I think initially everyone was a little bit more down than last year,” Chappell said. “I think last year we were, ‘Oh, yeah, we played with them great’ or whatever.”

Chappell had a chance to wallow in the loss, too, but he opted to take a higher road because he thinks his squad has more work to do.

“I think as leaders, the seniors and the older guys, we tried to pick everyone up because it is just one game for us as a football team,” Chappell said. “We have to move on to the next one.”

But after the Michigan loss, the odds of IU improving its track record in the “next one” after losing is arduous.

Up next for the Hoosiers is a trip to Columbus, Ohio for a game with No. 2 Ohio State.

The Hoosiers are 66-12-5 all-time against the Buckeyes with the last non-loss coming as a 27-27 tie in a 1990 home game. IU’s last win in the series came in 1988, a 41-7 drubbing of the Buckeyes.

Chappell said it’s a game in which their team can’t afford to be down.

“Obviously, it stinks to lose like that at the last second,” Chappell said of the Michigan game. “But it’s football, and it’s a game and you’ve got to be able to move on to the next one or we won’t be prepared.”