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I generally agree with your walk before you run position, but for me it’s going a little too far to suggest ducking UK at Lucas Oil of all places. If we want to do that, what’s the point of even having a team. We’ve got to have some ambition and guts and pride when we spend $10-12.5M on players and spend a ton on coaches.

Another award and another great stat.

@BA47591 has a lot of interesting posts I was way too dismissive of. I think he was the first to point out the issue on how long it took to get a staff in place. I hope he’s right because at least that is fixed this year.

Fan Duel released win totals for 2026. We’re at 10.5. Love it. Here is the rest of the B1G and SEC: Big Ten 10.5: Oregon, Indiana 9.5: Ohio State, Penn State 8.5: USC, Michigan 7.5: Illinois, Washington, Iowa 6.5: Wisconsin, UCLA 5.5: Nebraska, Minnesota, Northwestern 4.5: Rutgers, Maryland 3.5: Michigan State, Purdue SEC 9.5: Georgia, Texas 8.5: Alabama, Texas A&M, LSU 7.5: Oklahoma, Ole Miss 6.5: Florida, Tennessee, Missouri, Auburn, Vanderbilt 5.5: South Carolina, Kentucky 4.5: Arkansas, Mississippi State And other schools: Link to Odds

And therefore on top of college athletics. CFB is king.

It's probably the beginning of the end for the Clearinghouse. Some Nebraska NIL deals were denied and now they're going through the process to challenge the rulings. Not too surprising. It's very hard to stop players from getting paid what people are willing to pay them.

Rumor is Louisville is involved, and he's from there. Could be a kid staying local/close to home story, on top of money of course.

He’ll always be part of the IU family.

On the body language topic, I'd add that his press conferences are less than convincing. We definitely need CDD to be a fast learner/adapter. Fingers crossed.

IMO, the bold/underline is a fair counter-point the late to the portal narrative. It worries me a bit. As for a Carr-like person to bridge the gap last year, that would have been good, however that seems like it would have been a tricky hire. You want the head coach as part of that hiring decision, but the head coach hasn't been hired yet. And the Carr-like person would want to know who the head coach was before joining. Plus Woody was a combative @$$ that made IU unappealing until he left. I don't know -- just thinking out loud. Maybe I'm wrong. On the topic of Carr, I am kinda worried CDD struggled with his scouting and we're really pinning our hopes on Carr. Not sure we're gonna make it if CDD struggles with player selection, though to be clear it's still TBD if it's an issue. With IUFB, the staff does a lot recruiting work, but Cig is very involved with player selection and at the end of the day he more or less handpicks the whole roster. Anyways, a clusterhump (good term) indeed.

Ugh. What the heck sort of quote is this?

Quinn was one of Scott’s bosses. Quinn was gonna do whatever he wanted and he unfortunately did for a while.

Yea. ~$16M buyout after season two. That's a lot to fork out, but with offsets and such it's probably doable. Though I'm not sure what IU would do. He is gonna get at least one more crack at it though. Maybe he somehow figures it out, slim as those chances may be.

Not looking good for Scott on CDD. I'm still surprised how different from Cig the CDD hire was. Next hire probably needs a small committee with Cig on it. Every candidate has to interview with Cig and pass the Cig test -- thumbs up or thumbs down. Aside from that I'm out of ideas.

This is the problem. He's not even coaching that well. So even if we excuse the roster construction, which is hard to entirely do with the sheer number of evaluation misses, we've got this coaching concern. And a player dev concern too -- there was very little of that this year, which I hate. I'm just not seeing it. There is so much to fix and so little progress made in a year. On the bright side football practice starts in two weeks.

Lose this game or get smashed by Purdue… either way it’s going to end poorly.

Ha, I just try to give him credit when the athletic dept does something well., because I spent a lot of years complaining when they didn’t. I doubt my read is any better than yours. I only read a summary of what he said. I thought it was directed at the fans who are generally underwhelmed with this season and want to hear what the AD thinks of the state of IUBB. I suppose he did sort of knock the current team in the process of explaining why we are where we are, but then again the team can't be too offended given their mid record and fairly slim chance to make the dance. I don't think they'll take much offense and I don't care if they do -- if you don't like it prove 'em wrong then. I think the key donor discussions are mostly one on one and our roster budget is set for next season. I don't know what the budget is. I hope it's the rumored $12.5M. That seems possible -- football has generated so many AD donations, some of which are general and not football specific, it's quite possible some of that was pushed over to IUBB. Just a guess. I think Scott is on our side, which I like. He's connected to IUBB as much as anyone, we all know he was a manager and has been a mega fan all his life. He went through hell to fire Woody midseason, and I'm pretty sure he would have canned him earlier after season three if he was in control. I'd also wager he didn't find this season to be very good. But obviously he is going to publicly support CDD at this stage. Of course, the big question is if he hired the right guy. Like many here, season one created more concerns than anything. The excuse that he inherited a tire fire from Woody and had to assemble a program in six weeks seems like a legitimate one, and we have to pray it is. The other issue of course is even if you excuse the roster construction, there are other concerns which we've discussed. There is way more to explain away than I'd like. I'm pretty worried, but I could be wrong and perhaps CDD figures it out.

It would be a great sign to do this -- as it would show we successfully did the recruiting legwork early. In a perfect world our targets enter the portal with a "do not contact" designation and just go to IU, but I'll be happy if we hit on our initial targets however it goes. If we miss on our early targets that would suck for obvious reasons, as it could start the downward spiral we're so accustomed to at this point.

This post is really responding to Athlon, not you. Something is getting misinterpreted by Athlon, and/or they have a bad source(s). I just don't follow what they're saying at all. I'm positive IUFB was not top-10 in roster spend in 2025. And there is no way we outspent Michigan, or PSU, or USC in the conference. I say this just from chatting with folks, but also Cig even said it himself: "There's five or six (programs) out there that have unlimited NIL resources. It's kind of scary for everybody else. Our little pot of gold (at Indiana) is pretty nice, but we're not at $40 million. Or $30 million. Or even $25 million." I think $21M was about right for our 2025 roster, but other schools were spending $30-35M+, some maybe $40M. I'd guess we were around #20-25 in the country last year. I'm just posting all this because IUFB in no way "bought" a title. Our 2025 roster spend is often exaggerated. And Athlon is annoying me with their claims. Now for 2026, IUFB is close to or in the top-10 for roster spend. It's amazing, I didn't think it was possible. Just so folks know for 2024 (pre-rev share) and our roster was around $4.5M when big programs were $12-20M. As for how this relates to IUBB, we can see how IUFB ramped up. IUBB was already around #15 in roster spend this season. That's pretty good. Regardless of what we think is the best path forward, I think it's going to be hard to get much more NIL without showing some better results on the court. If that $12.5M number is true for 2025-26, that's some amazing support for IUBB in my opinion. But, I'm not sure what the roster 2025-26 budget is at this point.

So true. The only alternative outcome is we crap the bed in our first game. The BTT stinks in my book. - IU almost always plays bad. Pretty annoying after a quarter century of struggles. - The atmosphere for all the games is generally mediocre since each team only had a small number of fans there - No one really cares about winning this thing - By the time the final rolls around, everyone is already fixated on Selection Sunday I'd be happy to see it go. Heck, expand the tournament to 128 -- that gets rid of the BTT and IU could actually make the big dance. Maybe that's what we need. (just kidding)

Damn that race was good.

IU +4.5 seems like a small line for this game. Maybe IU will surprise me (probably not).

Another positive recent tweet.

If you're wrong you gotta change your profile pic to this! just kidding and btw -- I hope you're right.

I dunno if this is particularly good or bad. Will probably need insiders to opine. Good players continuing to stack offers is pretty common. It’s very easy for a school to throw out an offer, and they’ll do that regardless of how committed a player is. Like all commits, we’ll have to recruit them all the way to signing day. Flips happen for and against us. @AZ Hoosier He announced his commitment, but he can’t sign until early December. Until he signs he’s fair game in the world of CFB.