Hoosiers prepare for last home game

With one-third of their regular season left, a few IU football players were taken aback by one question this week.

What’s it like to be playing in your final career home game this weekend?

“It’s like ‘Is this really my final home game? Is this my final game here?’” IU senior cornerback Richard Council said.

The Hoosiers (4-4, 0-4) face Iowa (6-2, 3-1) for their final home turf tilt of the year at noon Saturday in Memorial Stadium.

Courtesy of an athletics department decision to move the Nov. 20 Penn State game to the Washington, D.C. area — a move predicated by a $3 million guarantee to the program’s coffers — IU won’t open the home turnstiles again in 2010.

Players or fans didn’t suffer through an unusually short home stand, however. Arkansas State — who IU beat 36-34 on Oct. 16 — filled the open home slot.

After Saturday’s game, there are three straight trips on the road. The Hoosiers play at Wisconsin next week, then Penn State at FedEx Field in Landover, Md., before the season finale at Purdue.

The first two trips of IU’s traveling road show are the longest the Hoosiers will endure this season.

But prior to that are the Hawkeyes and Saturday’s Senior Day festivities, where the graduating players will be accompanied by their parents during an on-field ceremony.

“I’ll have my parents down on the field and some other family here to watch me,” senior wide receiver Terrance Turner said. “It’s still a game, but it’s going to kind of sink in that it’s the last one.”

For the player leading the IU offense, the thought of one final try in Memorial Stadium had yet to really sink in.

“No, it hasn’t really,” IU senior quarterback Ben Chappell said. “It’s been a long five years, but it has gone by fast. It’s crazy.”

IU will lose 16 total players at the close of this season — 13 of whom redshirted one season.

The fifth-year seniors have compiled a 23-34 overall record as Hoosiers, going 8-28 in the Big Ten.

Three players — safety Mitchell Evans, linebacker Tyler Replogle and defensive end Terrance Thomas — leave the program in the regular four-year track. Together, they’ve been a part of a program that has gone 18-27 overall since their freshman year in 2007.

All of the seniors, though, were a part of two significant events for IU football.

First, former IU coach Terry Hoeppner — the man in charge of the program when they were recruited — passed away after a battle with brain cancer in June 2007.

Later that season, IU played its first bowl game since 1993.

Those events were part of a maturation process, Council said.

“I’ve changed a lot. I was a boy in a big world when I got here,” said Council. “My sophomore year I really got serious trying to improve as a football player. Every year since, I’ve just tried to do that.”

Turner agreed that there’s been a radical change since his first game as a Hoosier.

“Oh my gosh, I was watching my first game here on film a couple of days ago,” Turner said. “I looked different, I played totally different. I think I’ve made a lot of strides, a lot of improvement.”

Despite thinking about playing in his last game at “The Rock,” the thought and feeling of the experience — one final time at home — still wasn’t fully processing, he said.

“It probably won’t hit me until I walk on to the field and think ‘Wow, this is the last time I’m going to play in this stadium,’” Council said. “That’s when I’ll feel it.”