You couldn’t have scripted it any better.
For IU, a perennial basketball school, in Indiana, a perennial basketball state, football season serves as an opening act.
And right on cue, IU football seemed to close the curtain this past Saturday in an ignominious 55-52 loss to Rutgers, setting the stage perfectly for IU men’s basketball, which makes its season “debut” this Saturday with Hoosier Hysteria.
This poeticizes the state of IU athletics throughout the past 50-plus years, in which one of the “big two” college sports has clear, lasting hegemony over the other.
This tradition is a pretext for dismissing the failures of IU football — but make no mistake. To follow it is to condone the apathy surrounding the program’s history of mediocrity.
Saturday might have felt like the end of IU football, but it isn’t. The show is far from over — and the Hoosiers need to be held accountable by a captive audience.
The old adage goes it’s not how you fall, but how you pick yourself up that counts.
So let’s see how IU football picks itself up against Michigan State.
The Spartans have been touched this season with the kind of destiny the Hoosiers have been unable to manifest for decades, emblematic in the waning seconds of the teams’ most recent matchups.
At the same time Rutgers was driving into IU territory in a tie game — setting up the game-winning field goal and a miraculous loss for the Hoosiers — Michigan fumbled what would have been the game-winning punt. The Spartans recovered the fumble and ran it in for a touchdown as the clock expired, a miraculous victory.
IU (4-3, 0-3) will have to flip this script in East Lansing if it hopes to take down undefeated MSU (7-0, 3-0).
The Spartans have certainly left the door open for upset this season, with close games against Oregon, Rutgers and Purdue that give many the impression they are not as formidable as their record suggests.
IU Coach Kevin Wilson, too, said he believes the Hoosiers are better than the sum of their wins and losses.
He was quick to emphasize the first three quarters against the Scarlet Knights, which comprise the best football IU has played all season in spite of the fourth quarter sacrilege that ultimately determined the game’s outcome.
If the former team shows up at Spartan Stadium, one would think IU has as good a shot as any to hand Michigan State its first loss in 11 games, dating back to last season.
But in order to claim the Old Brass Spittoon, the Hoosiers will have to demonstrate levels of discipline and focus that hit an all-time low against the Scarlet Knights and have been inconsistent in arguably every game this season.
There’s a reason the Spartans are currently in possession of the longest win streak in the Mark Dantonio era — they execute those skills with tremendous poise, even in the face of adversity.
Now with three straight losses, snapping a streak of the Hoosiers’ own will mean not only remedying the origin of the their 28-point skid on homecoming Saturday, but beating Sparty at its own game, against the winningest quarterback in school history in fifth-year senior Connor Cook.
I’m just not sure a week is enough to rectify and pull off that performance.
But I dare the Hoosiers to prove me wrong.
vziege@indiana.edu
