Pagoda

On January 27 (Tues) at 5:30PM ET on BTN the B1G conference will release the 2026 conference game dates. For anyone new to this, we know who we play, just not what dates we play them. The one exception is for promo purposes it was announced early that the OSU game is Oct. 17th.

Due to his role changing he wasn't in the spotlight as much this season. I was glad he made such a huge play in the championship game that got him some credit he deserved. Great player.

I'm sure many of your are familiar with the Wikipedia list of team seasons pages. Hard to argue sports and not reference Wiki all the time. I think I check Tom Crean's UGA record every few years for debate purposes. Anyways, cool to see our gold-shaded season... out of nowhere.

Who knows but it’s a positive tweet.

Hmm…

He’s asking NFL Draft.

Correct it was yesterday. I guess the question is if a player could have declared via paperwork and not announced it yet.

GIDDY UP!!!

Giddy up!

Commercial jersey patches coming. Won't look very good, but I'm not gonna bother caring. Get us some big $ Scott!

One more milestone -- Fernando is the highest rated player on CFB '26.

Speaking of Star Trek, one of my favorite goofy things about Bloomington is “Star Trek: Voyager” fans petitioned to add to the show’s lore that Captain Janeway was born in Bloomington. This is off the B-Line trail and it makes me laugh every time I see it.

30* or above I think Memorial is fine. If this was in warm and comfy AH they may have to turn some people away, but I think that's preferable what they're going to attempt. Our players will be so bundled up they won't have much fun and it'll be hard to talk on the mic. Maybe I'm wrong. Whatever, good luck IU athletic dept.

I hate to belly-ache, but IU needs to get off their @$$ and move this Saturday championship celebration into Assembly Hall. It's going to be 10* with a -5* windchill. Doing this outdoors is ridiculous. We need to assemble a lot of people to celebrate. We have a great big hall for that. Use it.

Our fans are fine. They're a net positive. They still support the program pretty well despite all the decades of struggles. The crowds are still decent and will cheer anything positive. They're usually desperate to cheer for something. And the fans still produce revenue via gameday sales and donations that fund the program and the staff/players enormous salaries. In the real world, our coaches and players are treated like royalty around Bloomington. I've seen it for years. Even in Woody's lowest moments he could walk down Kirkwood and no one would say a bad thing to him. Midwest nice. Nothing like UK or some of the nasty pro sports markets like Philly, Boston, and NY. And our media only asks softball questions. IUBB people have a great life here. Since our fans still care, they do notice things. We've had a lot of struggles, and frustrated players and staff will sometimes lash out when IUBB supporters notice they're struggling. I've just got no sympathy for that. It's a cop out, it's a lack of accountability/ownership, and it's a lack of gratitude towards the group of people who fund and support what you do. We absolutely have some overboard fans and that stinks. But IUBB has a fanbase of something like 2M people, and a group that big will have some bad apples. Some may not even be IU fans, just trolls. At the end of the day, if someone within IUBB can't appreciate the IU fanbase and/or handle what IUBBFan42069 and RMK768187 say online, they have basically zero chance of succeeding in CBB. Anyways, hopefully CDD can get this thing turned around over the next year.

Apparently you can just almost instantly become the best and win literally everything. Lol. I obviously didn’t know the season would play out like it did, but when we beat #9 Illinois 63-10 while pulling our starters in the 3rd quarter, I kept wondering what the reaction would be if a big name program did that. And if everyone was selling IU short. Turns out they were (me included).

This is a very cool watch of old Cig clips.

Final total viewership for the whole season (I just add up all the TV ratings): 2023: ~10M (pre-Cig) 2024: ~33M 2025: ~118M Pretty amazing. What was the exposure value ("earned media") for this past season? I wouldn't be surprised if estimates were $100M+. This is one component of the value of getting good at football.

One more huge viewership number for the season.

Honestly I’m struggling to see the resource issue. $10M for the roster is around #15 in the country and it was enough to entice CDD to come here. Our staff budget is huge. Plus IU paid $6.5M to buyout Woody and $6.2M for CDD’s WVU buyout. If CDD starts doing well the resources would increase even further too. AH crowds are down a bit this season, but it’s not a ghost town. The Nebraska game was a pretty good showing and atmosphere. While this thread exists, I doubt many IU fans want CDD fired. This seems like a staff issue. Roster construction has proven to be off as everyone has said. And quotes about player fatigue and not buying into the offense are alarming. I dunno. I get your point on our fans being finicky sometimes, but I’m just not seeing them as the main problem here. Maybe I’m wrong. Hopefully CDD figures it out. Tough start.

You’ve been posting this point since CDD was hired. I dismissed it, I thought it was normal for the staff to take a few weeks to hire. However, now I’m wondering if you were right. The staff wasn’t in place soon enough. And maybe we hired one or two of the wrong guys, we know who that would be… It’ll be interesting if we make any staff changes after this season.

Man I hope so. That would really put Miami in a pickle, which would be funny. I mean, they seemed to have screwed up their QB recruiting and now they want to buy their way out of this problem. Perhaps they cannot…

I think it probably will for the next six months, maybe longer.

Ha, probably. I can't believe what some people will pay for parking passes. On that note: If IU ever wanted to add a justifiably pricey tailgate option, I think Woodlawn Field (10th and Woodlawn) would be a great tailgate spot. It's a little disconnected, but that's probably the best view of campus there is and some folks like a more quiet tailgate. Would need to add some ingress/egress, but that's a nice spot one can get to with minimal traffic.

Here is Fernando spending hours having genuine interactions with fans. What a person.