Editor’s note: The contents of this column are intended for satirical and entertainment purposes and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the IDS or its staffers. The scenarios mentioned are fictional.
Amid the sanest March in living memory, Curt Cignetti is not smiling. Sources familiar with the football coach’s facial expressions told the Indiana Daily Stupid he has even furled his brow.
This is because one year after Indiana men’s basketball missed the NCAA Tournament, the team saw its season end again with no tournament to look forward to…
…in 2025.
Now it’s 2026. The Hoosiers just missed March Madness for the third time in a row. After witnessing Cignetti smile in the aftermath of the College Football National Championship, the Daily Stupid could not bear to see the hair above his right eye twitch at this lack of athletic triumph.
To uncover what went wrong this year, a group of Daily Stupid reporters forewent spring break to comb through over four months of men’s basketball practice and game film. The footage reporters obtained revealed head coach Darian DeVries’ more offbeat tactics some attribute the disappointing season to.
Players spent three hours a day practicing bench warming drills. Then team managers then wheeled out carts piled with butter sticks. Players greased their hands with the dairy substance before DeVries lobbed balls at the backboard for them to catch. Most slipped through the players’ buttered-up palms, clobbering their faces.
Later, DeVries was seen returning to his office, where he spun in his swivel chair, screaming, “I’m a basketball!”
Unfortunately, several journalists who braved watching these painful scenes were hospitalized.
Editors rushed one teary-eyed freshman to the IU Student Health Center after she watched Indiana’s four straight losses to Illinois, Purdue, Northwestern and Michigan State in one sitting. Doctors diagnosed her with calamitas mentis turmalis, a bad mood induced by a disappointing season, but said they were unprepared to treat the affliction. They directed her to Purdue’s CMT Center for Football Fans, a national hub for languishing fans of downright bad teams.
“Why couldn’t they practice rebounding without the butter,” the reporter wailed on the way to Purdue.
The Daily Stupid staff’s sleepless nights attending to film and the sustained disappointment they endured means a complete report remains underway. But they made one interesting find:
Just past the back door students must use to enter Assembly Hall is a lesser-known, way-back door alumni are required to use. At around midnight before the season’s last home game against Northwestern, security cameras caught a hooded figure, estimated to stand at 6-foot-5, enter this door.
Key card records later revealed the mysterious figure was former basketball head coach Mike Woodson.
Woodson navigated to his old office, where he leered at the new name plaque on the door — “DeVries” — for an hour. Around the 34-minute mark of the tape, Woodson slightly clenched his fist.
“I’m a basketball,” he whispered, slowly spinning around, before he exited.
The super-duper-way-back door used by Martha the Mop Lady, Assembly Hall’s longtime cleaning lady and thr Indiana Hoosiers' biggest fan known for singing the fight song before games, is located a mile past the way-back door. Typically, Martha arrives at this entrance bright and early, but Lawrence Bird, the staff member who checks Martha into the building, said she was a bit later this day.
“I would have never known anything was off, though,” Bird said. “She did seem kind of taller.”
Police reports indicated the current Martha — whose identity is a tight-lipped university secret but resembles IU President Pamela Whitten — was out of town the night before the game, however.
Bird said he initially laughed off the height change.
“‘Ya wearin’ heels today?’ I asked,” Bird said, slapping his knee for comedic emphasis.
Upon entering the building, the figure thought to be Martha navigated to DeVries’ office, where she loomed over the door for an hour before the coach arrived.
“‘Oh, just mopping the floor, Dearie!’ she told me,” DeVries said. “Her voice was a little deep."
After DeVries stepped inside the office, security footage showed Martha dumping buckets of soapy water on the floor just outside. She promptly fled the scene — without posting a “Wet Floor Sign.”
“I nearly slipped,” DeVries told the Daily Stupid. “I could have been out for the game. Then what would we have done, call up Mike Woodson? I began to wonder, ‘Is this really Martha?’”
Daily Stupid reporters forwarded through the next four hours of the purported mop lady spinning around in a janitors’ closet. Upon game time, Martha initially stood along the sidelines opposite DeVries, frowning as Northwestern made a fool of the team he — I mean she — loved.
Then, it happened.
DeVries slipped on a rogue stick of butter.
Team managers had failed to clean it up after practice. He flung his clipboard into the air. It gracefully parachuted into Martha’s hands while Assembly Hall medical staff carried DeVries to the locker room.
Suddenly, Martha ripped her hair off. The entire time, Martha’s hair had been a wig? Wait! This was not Martha. Nay, this was the hero we needed in a Martha costume!
“Mike Woodson!” the student section collectively gasped.
Northwestern’s coach dropped to the floor and prayed that the basketball gods grant him pardon.
Woodson turned to his former children who filled the student section to its brims.
“Indeed, it is I,” Woodson boomed. “Mike Woodson, destroyer of Indiana’s foes.”
He faced the Indiana Hoosiers team and called one play after another that answered Northwestern’s barrage of first-half baskets. High up in the stands, Cignetti’s lips curled micrometers upward. All was as it should be.
But DeVries returned to the court before the end of the second half. Woodson knew he could not be caught by his successor. He fled.
“What was all that about?” DeVries asked a player on the bench while Northwestern shot from halfcourt.
Northwestern’s ball swooshed in the net. DeVries gestured at the player warming the bench. “By the way, good form.”
Cignetti scowled, again.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a sophomore studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
