Pagoda

A friendly reminder the first "College Football Playoff Top 25" show is this Tuesday at 8PM ET on ESPN (barf). Just like last year it will run every Tuesday at various times (7-8:30PM ET start times) and until the final selection show which is the Sunday after the conference title games at noon. IUFB will be a topic on Tuesday's show! ;-)

We should get a BTN pass after getting jammed with two games on Peacock this year! One other notable thing related to the PSU game: the line opened around 11.5 and it’s moved to 13.5. Any win there would be great though.

My issue with ESPN/ABC is they carry the CFB Playoff and their regular season bias nonsense carries over to that, which is poor form.

For folks in the thread. Pretty good news.

Okay not too bad I guess is the positive spin…

Some positive news.

Sounds like there are a decent number of IU fans at this game!

Chatter is Drew didn’t travel to the game. Not great news we just have to hope now.

Fisher is going through warm-ups. Update: Now Fisher isn’t. Isiah warming up with starters. Zen is taking the LG reps in warm-ups

Surprising to see Drew on here. Reason still unknown from what I can tell. Darn. :-( Wyatt moved to “out for season” too.

Interesting and makes sense.

Dang, I can’t imagine us getting 15K IU fans at an away FB game. I’m thinking 5K — 10% of capacity. But I’d love to be wrong!

Agree. That plus the general dysfunction and politics around their program right now, in addition to the governor wanting to limit the contract terms/money, are all serious issues for their search. They can talk a big game, but it's not looking great right now. Coaches have to be wondering if they want to jump into that mess even if it's a historically top job in terms of being able to win titles.

To the surprise of no one LSU is firing their AD. They will now owe him a $6.4M buyout, which is pretty funny. Also, an fyi to LSU: our excellent AD is not available!

LSU should be looking at cautionary tales from IUBB and other situations like that. Boards aren’t good at hiring coaches. Either are most Presidents and donors. If you don’t trust your AD then you need a new AD. But this ain’t our problem thankfully!!!

Dittos. We've got a target on our back and something to lose. Our opponent has the home crowd and nothing to lose. If we come out mediocre and they play well I could see an Iowa-like game situation. Any conference win on the road I'm never going to be upset about. That goes for a down PSU squad and also the teams at the bottom of the conference -- these are still serious P4 programs amped up to try and upset a top ranked team.

Here is a midweek, rah-rah, positive, quasi-propaganda post: - IU-UCLA was a ho-hum match-up in the world of CFB and still drew 3M viewers and was the T-5th most watched CFB game last weekend - I did an AI query, so it's probably not perfect, but it seems directionally correct to me when I do the rough math: Our total viewership across all FB games was ~11M in 2023 It increased to ~35M in 2024 2025 is still TBD, but we're more likely than not going to blow past 35M this season - The 2024 increase in viewership and exposure ("earned media") has been estimated to be worth $15-20M+ depending who you ask. As noted above, 2025 should be a decent to significant increase over 2024 depending how things go (knock on wood). Anyways, for anyone for who finds this stuff interesting, that's what the TV viewership increases have been and the value of that is in the eyes of media/marketing people. You can see how being good at football has quite the snowball effect.

Another narrative that irks me a bit is some people say IU/Cig tries to run up the score. I'd guess they just look at the score in a few games and conclude that. Yes, last year, we did in certain instances (lol!). But, we were under fire from many parts of the CFB landscape and had to make statements to the committee. This year though, as anyone who pays any attention knows, in our two big blowouts we pulled Fernando and other starters at the end of the 3rd. And it's not realistic to ask Alberto and the second stringers to not try for 15+ minutes. Duh. This is not a big deal. But it's just another instance of an odd narrative.

Yea, he is. It's interesting -- after he said some attention grabbing things early in his tenure he developed an image as a cocky sh1ttalker and that kinda dominated the discourse around IUFB. I get why, it was entertaining. But as we know his statements (Google me, PU/UM/OSU suck, etc.) were mostly directed at the IUFB program and IU fans to let them know that our old loser mentality is over and we aren't going to be a doormat anymore. But almost no one in the media was going to pick up on that nuance or care. The reality is he's a much more lowkey guy in press conferences. It's nice to see the sh1ttalker "image" mostly fall away and the focus is now on the program and the results, where it should be.

That is interesting. My guess was the same as yours: 3 or 3.5, maybe 4. But 7? I guess the books see OSU as the clear standout team in CFB with that defense. Hopefully we get a crack at them with a healthy team and we will find out. We would have a decent shot.

Someone just asked at the end: Questionable.

Cig Monday presser: Aiden is "probable" for the Maryland game. Good news.

Yea, agree from a job security point of view. But like you said top coaches are sickos and LSU is a place where you can win natties. Before Brian Kelly the previous three coaches won 'em (Nick, Les, Ed). No other school has delivered natties that consistently to different coaches except OSU. This makes Brian's failure and firing even funnier, especially with ND doing pretty well after he left. LSU with it's resources and high school feeder system is the first Tier 1 job to open this cycle. But, in this NIL era their old advantages (under the table payments) are reduced and the job gets very political, it's even worse than our basketball program before Scott wrestled control from Quinn and the old guard and fired Woody's sorry behind midseason! Florida and PSU are very good jobs, but Tier II imo. All this stuff is fun to follow. Especially when we've got our guy. Wherever Lane ends up, he's getting a huge arse raise.

Glad we didn’t hire Scott Drew! Loser! ;-)

We win!