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Maybe he will have to do that. Still too early in my opinion to say one way or the other his recruiting approach his a success or failure. For me it’s more likely that fans will need to change their approach on following recruiting. In the old days it was relationships, relationships, relationships. Coaches put in crazy amount of time and effort with kids as they entered high school just to give the staff the best chance to land kids they want. Staffs would recruit a kid for 4 plus years to get a kid in their program that would be seen as a building piece for the future. Coaches knew it would be more likely a kid would stay with their program instead of sitting out a year to transfer elsewhere if it didn’t work out. Nowadays coaches have a lot more options when it comes to building their program. Recruiting misses are less impactful now than they were back then. Do I miss the old way? Yep. I miss following a kid as a sophomore in high school and knowing if IU lands him he will be a big part of the program down the road and not worrying if he will transfer after 1 year. That route is still available but it’s more likely nowadays you spend 3 + years recruiting a kid and him bailing after 1 year in. Personally I’ve adjusted my way of following recruiting. I don’t invest much of my time following out of state high school kids anymore. Someone will eventually have to say yes to IUs NIL and staff whether it’s other top rated high school kids or transfers. That money just won’t sit unused. My guess is a domino effect will happen with high school recruiting. IU will offer more money for kids holding out until the spring and will land some good kids

I think we can safely say IU has robbed Peter (the basketball program) to pay Paul (the football program) at the moment. This is probably a very good decision for the university overall and no one should complain given which sport drives revenue. However, it means DeVries will have to learn make do with less resources than any past coach. I will not be surprised if he achieves this, but it probably means NIL for top tier recruits is out of reach right now as many in media have hinted at. DeVries will have to make do with secondary recruits and portal that fit his system which is fine. IU simply doesn't have the money or resources to support both programs at top notch right now it appears and almost all the NIL and Rev Share money is going to football. This puts Thompson and other top recruits price out of reach right now for most part. Its the reality in new world of college sports. Until IU has 80-100K football seat stadiums filled each week, only OSU and Michigan have the deep NIL money to outbid for both. Indiana simply does not with so much support behind football and winning more than one or two of these recruiting battles for blue chippers is not viable until football delivers even more money to athletic budget.

Dang Coach, that's a rough prediction. I hope your predication is as good as your record at Georgia.

Dude clearly was intimidated by knowing he'd always be the second-best Anthony Thompson to ever play ball at IU!

EVICT PURDOOOOOOOO!! Yessss Trade them to the MAC for Kent State.

I just basically got told to piss off and wait for my email. Lol sick.

I don't necessarily want to be the team that is always throwing out the most money and that be the deciding factor. Woodson era proved that isn't going to get desirable results. If we miss on this 2026 class which is considered a weak one, I would rather have money for the transfer portal. And if we have a good year that will only help things with the portal and 2027 recruits

I don’t really care. No reason to give a huge payday to a kid who has yet proven he can play at the college level. Rather spend our money on Transfers

And I think that those that see Thompson as only looking for a payday have a little tunnel vision. Sure, money is going to be a part of it. When a player who is a good student pops for IU instead of Harvard, where coach Amaker is a proven, excellent coach? That's in some part a money play too. So if Thompson is getting a few hundred thousand extra for what he perceives to be his one year in college, that's significant. That could be all the money a player gets before a significant injury. Also significant? Diebler can take credit for developing Sensebaugh, EJ Liddell, and Jamison Battle into NBA forwards. Devries does not have that. And, along with more money and more NBA players to cite, Diebler also has the incontrovertible fact that OSU is the home school that friends and family can get to; his home town is a two hour drive from Columbus. It's five and a half hours from Bloomington. In summary? It's not who you 'don't get', it's who you get that matters.

Small tidbit.

Do we think some OSU donors got confused and maybe thought they were dropping a bag for a football player with All-American/Maxwell Award/Walter Camp Award/Heisman runner-up genes?

OT Fuchs decommitted from Penn St this evening, 10/20. Really interesting prospect, dad is an Ast. OL Coach for the Titans and took his original OV's over the summer to Penn St., Kentucky, and IU. I would love to see Coach Bostad work with him. https://247sports.com/Player/jack-fuchs-46146519/

https://x.com/allasley/status/1980428711162966121 Ok, I would not have bet that this visit actually took place since there was no evidence at all. But here we have it, Vaughn Karvala visit pics. Got to be one of the odder top 50 recruitments I can think of. Still no concrete evidence of an offer, but there’s got to be.

Saw Cig's press conference today. He's no nonsense about this game. Views it as playing the "new" undefeated UCLA. Don't think there will be a letdown.

Re. Wyatt. It didn’t sound like Cig completely shut the door for a return this season. Big Ten championship game is 7 weeks away. He walked off on his own power. I wouldn’t completely rule out a return for PU, BT champ game if we make it there. Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery.

Here's a nugget for the group. When Foster was fired, UCLA brought in a guy named Noel Mazzone as an offensive analyst. Mazzone is a long time assistant coach at all levels and a highly respected offensive mind that is also described as one of Jerry Neuheisel's mentors. If you listen to UCLA folks, they give Mazzone a TON of credit for this stretch of wins and the complete turnaround of their offense, while babyface (and suuuuper personable) Neuheisel gets all the media for it. Guess who was the NC State offensive coordinator in 2003 when Curt Cignetti was the QB coach and also likes to (rightfully) take credit for Philip Rivers' march to the NFL? Noel Mazzone.

Judewellin earned his stripes. Looks like the GK job is his to lose for the remainder of the season.

You're not wrong. Coaching matters!!! I will say this though, before Coach Cig took the job he was promised a budget and resources the administration had never done, ever. So while the type of success we are seeing currently might not have happened we would most likely be looking at a much improved IUFB program from top to bottom. A school like Kansas or UK more than likely. Dolson had a proper checklist for his coaching search. That type of checklist was the first time in the history of the program. You can find me talking about it ad nauseum in this thread. This is why I say, the IUFB program essentially started during the November 2023 coaching search.

Great posts everyone. Enjoyable reading, thanks. I think Aaron makes some good points about our fans, even if they’re tough truths. I’ve kinda noticed it over the years. As for football support, I suspect some of that can also be attributed to the program generally getting limited attention/interest/resources from IU and the AD. I don’t know. But, we are in a new strata with football. Big university support and a great coach. Every traditional power had a stretch of years where they became a “football school” or at least one with a big fan base. These moments were many decades or even a century ago. Perhaps for IU our moment came later… starting in 2024. We’ll see how well our fans embrace what’s happening. So far it’s been good, but it has a ways to go. If we make the B1G champ game it will be interesting if we can get close to 50/50 with the OSU fans. Peyton transformed the Colts fan base in about five years and we still see the impact of that today. It can happen.

Another thing IU fans/Alumni can do is to try to get your companies to become corporate sponsors. I am sure the sponsor level has gone up but from 2016-2022 the company I worked for supported IU this way. We paid ~ $250k/yr and got 4 tix to all football and 8 basketball games plus some extra events. I had trouble taking people to football games back then and basketball was not much better so I am sure the pricing has gone up. But we got really good PR, in game program, on screens, I got to do the game ball thing, did a quick interview each year with someone from the radio team for a quick commercial promo. It was well worth the $250k. If anyone has an interest let me know and I can connect you with the guy who runs this.

^^This is further proof of the mindset of an extraordinary winner.^^ Sure, Cig wants a fat paycheck and sure he wants his life and his family situation to be good where he is. But he could get those things in lots of places. "But Bloomington is special!" Yes, Bloomington is a really good place, and to IU students, alumni, and fans Bloomington and IU are special. Guess what? Places like Gainesville and State College are similarly special and good places. To Cig Bloomington and IU are simply really good. So what is "special" to Cig? That the leadership that he works alongside be worthy of his trust and respect. And if those highly appreciated leaders in his life aren't there? He is sending an open signal that he will look somewhere that has leadership that he respects. What an incredible endorsement of the University President and AD!

ALSO: • Cignetti is also entitled to a good-faith market review for his deal, as follows:

Over the last three conference games these are UCLA's numbers that Coach Cig talked about in his presser. Rushing for 233 yards a game. AVG TOP: 36:30 minutes Starting fast much like 2024 IUFB. Outscored opponents in the 1st half 58-17 Completely ignore their win loss record, up to the Northwestern loss. They are a different team and 3-0 in the conference since then. Let's hope the 3 game sample size is large enough on film for our beloved Hoosiers to shut down their offense. Everything is new with this team.

Lenee Beaumont says that 20 wins is not a goal for this season; it’s the bare minimum standard for IUWBB; they are foreseeing much higher outcomes. She added that she has seen IU media-projected as low as 13th in the B1G, and (without using these words) it pisses her off.

Save up the money for football transfers, imo. We have a national title level football coach. To sustain it he needs all the money he can get. No reason to pay money toward a basketball program that has stunk for the great part of the last quarter century. If Devries exceeds expectations then we can talk about allocating some to basketball, but football needs everything right now imo.

If DeVries is the coach we think he is, he will work around these constraints just fine with players who fit his system such as Sisley who are not blue chippers and win big with that. The best coaches such as Painter have done this just fine. IU has decent money, just not an infinite amount that schools with 80-100k football stadiums do. Teri Moren has had to deal with similar up and down through her career and with some adjustments appears to be on her way. The best way for our basketball programs to thrive is for fans to show up and cause the football stadium to need 75k seats or more seats. This goes for 8 win teams also. I have said many times us Hoosier fans are our own worst enemy and have a terrible habit of not showing up unless a team is the elite of the elite. The situation with women's basketball is a problem every Hoosier fan needs to note. IU won 20 games last year and went to tournament, but because they were not ranked, they lost several thousand season ticket holders and now season ticket base stretches to entryway instead of nearly all main level. Iowa on other hand had similar season last year to IU and has once again sold out the whole arena. If us as fans want to see every sport continue to thrive and money to be there across board, it means showing up in big numbers when you have a solid postseason team and not just an elite team. While all fan bases have this fairweatherness, my experience is we as Hoosier fans are particularly front running compared to pier schools for whatever reason and have the knowledge to say this with relative certainty. Loyalty will need to run deeper for this to work and it means not going down to 35-40k fans a game in football if IU wins 8 games a yr as happened towards end of Mallory era. Until Hoosier fans change their behavior to support good and not great teams as other schools do, the administration is rightfully going to be leery to add many more seats to the football stadium. Its time for all IU sports fans to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they can support a yearly postseason squad that is not highly ranked? Until the answer is an unequivocal yes from more casual followers, the school will lag behind many in the Big Ten money wise with peaks and valleys in performance as we see now across many programs at IU. I am not talking to diehards on this board, but this is the bottom line. Until casual IU fans change their behavior to match similar schools when it comes to support and attendance, the money is going to be behind others in conference.

This is where all the evidence has been leading. Genuinely makes you wonder how DDV feels about it. He came to Indiana to get access to those players you can’t get at WV. So far, we aren’t proving that to be very effective. Dolson is doing great at his job, and I’m sure he’s in discussion with DDV about what the expectations are. Resources have jumped at many schools and ours is steady. Our advantage is lessened. This is what I’ve been saying for a while now. A curious situation IUBB finds itself in.

As you said, the key is winning. That fixes a lot of issues. Cignetti has proved that on the football side. Now he's getting serious interest from quality kids. Our basketball side is mired in the dregs of NOT winning. Crean won some but he was manic. Archie was a doorknob, both personality- and coaching-wise. Woodson was a total s#!t show - he had top-10 talent and was lucky to be middle of the pack in conference. The kids today don't remember Indiana basketball as a winning or even quality program. Hopefully DeVries fixes that. The signs that I've seen so far show that it's a distinct possibility. His "money ball" approach seems workable at this point, but we have to see how it plays out. Winning will fix it, and the first step is not being a joke of a program. If you build it, the money (and kids) will come. Cignetti has shown us the way.

Coaches put in a lot of work on the HS route this summer, more so than many other teams based on feedback from some of the reports. I am not sure that the amount of work put in matches the results (so far) but another way to look at it is that we had to overwork just to get the 2 we got. We may not have them if we had put in the same amount of work as others. Hopefully this is indicative of the staff's willingness to grind. Going to have to have on court success and competitive NIL to keep up. I am hopeful but also had hoped to land some big HS names in '26 based on the work we put in vs other schools. The interview someone had with Brian Snow also makes me wonder how this one went down. He indicated that the $ is decided pretty early on and is not usually a factor to sway a kid late. He referenced Jalen Haralson and that in the end he was more comfortable with ND than with our $. Not sure that applies to Thompson but assuming Snow's info is still somewhat accurate. I am also hoping that when Snow said IU was a beast to recruit against (even when we had woody) is also true and if we have on court success, we become dominant recruiting the Midwest. But apparently, we are not there yet.

Sounds like the home team is going to win out according to the Trilly discord this morning

Pick your Vaughn Karvala doppleganger!

I thought one of them was supposed to be really good. Haven’t heard a….Paep out of either one of them*. *I hate myself

Wow. Matthew Graves -- Indiana State coach -- needs triple bypass surgery. Taking a leave. Prayers to him. https://gosycamores.com/news/2025/10/20/statement-from-indiana-state-mens-basketball.aspx

I'm literally quoting Coach Cig's angst.

Before tonight's game gets started we've got a couple of weekly award winners. Darn good outing for Judewellin and well-deserved recognition. Waiting for the lineups to be announced to see if he'll remain in goal for tonight's match. For the 3rd time this season. And still more recognition for Ault.

I think we'll see a team that gets better and better through the season (barring injuries, please). We make the tourney.

I was going to say...The MD game was hardly impressive for either team. With that said, 4 weeks ago, we could've slept walked into this game and won. That's not the case anymore. The boys will need to be ready.

Back then I thought those days would never end. Boy was I wrong.

Anyone, like me, that went to school in the 80's just had it too good. NCAA champions and even with the season on the brink we were always relevant. Soccer was great. Football had the best Mallory years and then AT followed by Dunbar and usually a bowl game. I think the girls were prettier too!

Those stats while impressive are trending down. 42-38-20 Total Points 27-24-7 First half points 269-239-193 Rushing 39-36-33 TOP

Great leadership is what took so long. Whitten + Dolson = Cignetti Dolson + Cignetti = Haines, Shanahan, Bostad, Owens, etc. Cignetti + Haines, Shanahan, etc = winningwinningwinning.

UCLA will need to play significantly better this Saturday than they did last week for that to happen.

Game 7 in the books. IUFB 38 MSU 13 Spittoon stays put. The Nandolorian probably looked his best I've seen all year. Definitely will be playing on Sundays. Next game: The 3 game turnaround UCLA Bruins

Absolutely. I'm very pleased, if nothing else, this is evidence that roster construction is going to be super intentional with this staff whereas Woodson's was always a matter of convenience and being the highest bidder. I mean, a top 10 recruit's mother had to text him asking to recruit her son! Lol. I'll never get over that... This staff clearly evaluates kids, puts a price point on them, and sticks to it. For better or worse remains to be seen, but I respect it. We have at least 6 spots to fill for next year. On the high end, maybe 9 depending how much "Crean-ing" DDV and staff believe in. We have 1 HS player committed currently. Maybe add Karvala. So most likely IMO looking to add 4-6 guys in the portal. We should have enough dry powder to land the targets we prioritize during that cycle. Bottom line... win games and it'll work itself out

I agree with all this. We are coming at this with own biases on how an 18 year old kid should make a major life decision. Let's be honest there were some recruiting cycles we won under Woodson where other schools would have said we only got that player because of money. We just got to move forward. I am confident if DeVries shows a team this year we can get behind, runs a fun system and punches above its weight, we will start to win more of these battles. All the other handicaps like money will also likely work themselves out.

Meh, from an IU fans perspective. If he was looking for a straight to NBA factory he wouldn’t probably pick Indiana or Ohio State. Plenty of other coaches have a good track record of that. Money and hometown where family can be involved is tough to beat. DeVries will need to alter his approach after this offseason. Either target realistic kids or up the budget.

Sounds like OSU wallet had a little more money in it than ours did. Or maybe a lot more money

In Cig's presser today, he said his new contract came together in less than 48 hours. Scott walked in his office Tuesday and said we want to do this with your contract, can we talk with your rep? Cig basically said sounds good. That was it. It's pretty clear the alignment and groundwork needed was already in place such that both sides were comfortable -- no big list of demands or a drawn out negotiation. Excellent work from Scott and IU in my opinion.

The kid shot 45% on almost 8 attempts a game last year. You might want to give it a minute.

AP poll