Pagoda

Give him one more game suspended for this haircut.

Man, it sure was. They were kind of ahead of their time with the 3 pt shooting and versatile bigs. Plus we had so much toughness with Cov who was bulldog, Dane who was a junkyard dawg, and of course AJ. That was a blast even though we came up just short.

I like how the official CFP account doesn't stop tweeting [about us].

Bill Self knows his stuff. Newton’s Law if you know you know. Send it in!

Awesome deep dive on Baldwin’s story, from his recruitment to now: https://247sports.com/college/indiana/longformarticle/indiana-iu-football-safety-byron-baldwin-jr-hoosiers-2026-season-273929592/

Just thinking out loud here for fun: my only concern with this is if it devalues the regular season. I’m not sure playing for seeding is valuable enough to make regular season games matter as much as I want them too. I like the exclusivity of 12 making the playoff — the best team is usually in that group anyways. Though I would really prefer the quarterfinals to be on campus, campus games rule and there is too much travel to boring NFL stadium neutral sites. I’d also like campus games to have slightly larger away fan section allocations than usual (like the FA Cup — 1.5-2x the usual seats for visitors). Maybe I’m wrong. I know you like this 24 team format and if it happens so be it I won’t be too upset. For thread reference, below is what the bracket would have been this year.

After the 2024 season, Penn State and OSU (and probably others we don't know about) made huge runs to hire Bryant away from IU. We held them off, likely mostly because of Cig's relationship with him, though two big raises must have helped too. What a key moment that was for IUFB, and Bryant. One year later: National Champion and Broyles Award winner. Plus after another raise he's more or less the highest paid DC in CFB. Incredible. Cig's program is insane.

Here is Bryant talking about the Broyles Award (for best assistant in CFB). The winner is announced tonight.

Damn, those stories are disappointing to hear. It's odd, I was at most of those games and didn't notice a thing, in fact I thought KU and IU fans got along great. I'm not doubting your experiences, just sharing my data points. The only US games I've seen get really nasty between fans are big football rivalries like UM-OSU, Tenn-Florida, etc. One thing we've both noticed is our student section is too vulgar and crass. It does suck. Not sure how that can be fixed -- probably some proactive efforts from the AD or something like that.

T-Cal is predicting a blistering 40 time.

Hmm. IMO at home our student section is notably vulgar and not nice. And given the size of the student section the overall AH vibe is not exactly nice to the visiting team. The rest of the AH fans are generally Midwest nice. Visiting fans are treated okay. Neutral and road games I’ve never noticed much of an issue with us. It’s hard to rank niceness.

Haha. Conor Enright x JLab Collab.

Spot on imo. It's an extreme example, but Keaton Wagler as a #200+ ranked HS kid isn't getting paid much this season, he's got to be 3% to 4% of their roster cost, but he's delivering huge production. And retained players cost something like 10-20% less than their portal replacements. What makes Cig's player retention so damn great is it saves IUFB something like $3-5M/yr, which he can turnaround and spend on very productive and impactful guys. Good scouting and player dev is still as vital as it ever was. And lastly, Kenny and Rod need to earn need to earn their $ in the portal this year. Our staff budget is top-10 and needs to produce.

There is some logic to next year looking better given the job is not has hard as it was a year ago: March 18, 2025: We effectively had no staff and no team. Basically had six weeks to assemble a whole program. Pain in the @$$ until the last moment Woody had not moved out of his office yet and CDD had a makeshift office in the lounge. March 18, 2026: We will have a whole staff in place and, while still thin, a small core of a team. That's a big difference. We should be more prepared for the portal. We don't need as many players. We should be able to do more advanced scouting in terms of who's available (via agents) and their fit. And we should be more prepared to sell them on IU. And IU looks reasonably appealing right now with our style of play. Will this matter? Logically I think it will, but who knows, I can only guess and there are so many variables. I don't know what our roster budget will be next year (I'd think at least similar to '25). We could have repeat errors like Reed and miss on top targets. We also need our returning guys and freshman to work out. We'll just have to wait and see...

I think it is the greatest accomplishment. At worst when this conversation comes up we're always going to get mentioned. I think some people will conflate coaching careers vs. a specific accomplishment, but they're wrong and it is what it is. There just aren't many sports leagues where this sort of rags to riches story could happen. The NFL and NBA have too much parity via the league rules, notably the salary cap. MLB has more variance, but it's still not CFB, and no one talks about the '03 Marlins or '15 Royals for a reason. The only instance I think is close is Leicester winning the Premier League in 2016. They're a small club (~1/4 salary spend of the big teams) that usually yo-yo'd between the Prem and the Championship, yet somehow over the course of a long 38 game season won the league. It was literally unbelievable. But, I'm putting them #2 to '25 IUFB because we did it with so much domination (16-0 and +479 point diff)... and I'm an IU fan.

Lamar is moving up the record books in terms of 3's made. Also, it's crazy how many Steve made in the first year of the 3 pt line. And yea I know the line as closer back then, but shooting the three was a totally different thing in '86-87 and Steve did shoot 53% from deep. Amazing how RMK and Steve figured it out so quickly.

I really like that thinking with this statue. This should help get everyone back to remembering RMK as a great coach, who also did a lot of good. As we know, after 2000, at IU the discourse with him was mostly about the rift with the university and his flaws (he was human). That doesn't need to be dwelled upon anymore. His return to IU really helped and this should keep helping. For me, I think he was the greatest college basketball coach of all time. Importantly, he played by the rules, which eliminates several other coaches from taking that honor. He won consistently and he won big. His players loved him. He was often unselfish and would help people. He was genuinely funny. May as well remember all the positives, there are plenty.

RMK statue is coming. Pretty cool imo, it had to be done.

A satisfying read from the judge:

In that interview, Cig talked about how he turns down a lot of speaking and appearance requests since it takes away from doing his job. He did say he was more open to stuff in Indiana. He'd be a great ‘26 Indy 500 Pace Car driver or Green Flag waver. Whatever he prefers. Fernando would be a good fit for these honors too. IUFB has cross-promo’d with IndyCar and we took the time to wrap our prop car in IUFB colors and logos. So, there is a connection and maybe this happens…

30 min Cig interview with Yonkman. Good stuff as usual.

Another ‘27 4* we’re involved with. 5* hair.

They had one day in between games and their players were out? Good. I wouldn’t be happy to hear that as an Oregon fan, especially with their nine game losing streak.

FWIW, I think that's the very start of the game. NW won the tip and it looks like a live game on the court/jumbotron. In fairness, it may have filled in some after the tip, that's pretty common. I'm a little surprised. I thought Carver-Hawkeye fills in pretty good when they have a decent team.