Pagoda

You’re a lot harder on the football program than the bball program!

We left 14 to 21 points on the board. I’m definitely not panicking. We are still a portal heavy team, which makes getting everyone in sync more difficult — last year was sort of an anomaly in terms of how fast it came together. And our QB is much younger than our last guy. Let’s wait and see. Cig and staff will likely fix a lot of this. They didn't forget how to coach.

That is not what I hoped to see today. But, it’s one game. We have three weeks to evolve as a team and figure some things out. Unfortunately, we have a lot of work to do.

Our only guy out is Baldwin, hope nothing serious. Great student turnout today. They’re are powering the crowd. Alumni… mediocre.

Yea. Wisconsin is really slipping. Mediocre coach, they can’t hide in the Big 10 West anymore, and now other programs, including us, are starting to have some real recruiting success in their state. I’m finding these developments to be… enjoyable.

Louis’ battle against the NCAA continues. He can play at least the first two games. To the NCAA:

I don't think it's a big deal, but it looks too cartoonish and unserious to me. I'd like a meaner looking bison -- college sports are tough and competitive. @Stuhoo makes a good point it's not the most bison looking bison. If you asked people who knew nothing about IU what it was, I'm not sure how many would say bison. We'll see how the real life one looks here in a few days. I'm still pro-mascot -- kids like it, it's fun, and the mascot design/suit can evolve if feedback isn't super positive.

Great work from Myles.

First Rally Towel of the season.

We need more fan interest first. Interest has grown a lot but our FB fanbase is still quite small. Current ticket availability per Trevor Burch: OD - 8,518 Kenn St - 10,541 ISU - 9,865 Illinois - Sold Out Mich St - 4,734 UCLA - 4,741 Wisc - 7,204 I’d love enough fan interest to justify a larger stadium. It could happen… The thing I’d really like to see is enough corporate interest to justify suites. Those can be nice revenue drivers. Lucas Oil is sponsoring the field suites, so it’s starting to happen… My guess is over the next five years we are going to complete redo the east and west stands which are 65 years old. Hopefully IU nails the design. Anyways, this is all good stuff.

This and the shorter videos posted during the trip are really helpful when we’ve got an entirely new roster the fans don’t know or have a connection with. I feel like I know some of the players much better now, and what do you know, I’m more interested in the season! Good job by IU on this.

UK may be tough to schedule -- I'd guess their P4 game will be Louisville?

Good stuff. Overall, our fans want to love the bball program and will do their best to — in my view they only flip when things are obviously going very bad. The fishbowl narrative is nonsense. I like the fit with CDD here and I think he will get a fair shot to succeed. Fingers crossed we got our guy for the long run.

Thanks. I'd say very newsworthy. Our athletic dept needs the money and this and the Lucas Oil sponsorship for the field suites, etc. all adds up. This is like an extra home game worth of cash flow every year, or a little over 10% of our rev share costs. The name sounds fine too -- Merchants Bank Field. Sometimes sponsors names don't sound good.

One thought on the TBD's -- I think Peacock is the most annoying one for a lot of folks. Peacock gets eight or nine B1G games per year. We got stuck with one last year and my hope is we avoid a Peacock game this year as the schools who avoided it last year get stuck with one this year.

1) If we play Oregon and PSU reasonably competitively I’d say we’re in. 2) Playoff. That’s what the team would want and the other bowls don’t really matter much anymore and players often sit out, etc. Making the playoff is a huge deal — you’re either a playoff team or you aren’t. Just my $0.02.

I agree high prices are atmosphere killers. The corporate folks don’t care and honestly rich older people just aren’t as wild as younger people (see student sections). Fortunately, I haven’t seen the tribalism that powers college sports dissipate much if at all since NIL/portal started. Just my opinion. We may not know the players as well, but people see their school’s name on the jersey and they still lose their minds. As for fans getting priced out of college sports — it doesn’t seem too bad yet. Stadiums are bigger and less luxurious, which helps. But it will probably happen slowly over time like you said, hopefully very slowly. I look at Baylor’s new arena, Houston’s renovated arena, and Northwestern’s new stadium… maybe some early warning signs… The other consideration is home/bar viewing getting so good it’s hard to get fans to show up. VR will eventually be perfected and widely adopted and those new sports bars with an IMAX-like screen are unbelievable. That will be a sad day.

He may be a little annoyed, but we’re paying him $9M/yr and his staff like $12M+/yr (top-10). Plus we have exceeded our NIL promises to him. That’s a massive commitment. He’ll get over so-so interest in the cupcake games, especially with $60 tickets. We are still way up on ticket sales.

Here is something good. A lot more NFL folks around...

Yea. It's been disappointing to track. At the end of the day, pre-Cig we had one of the smallest fanbases in CFB, and I get why, IU didn't care about football for decades. And even with the growth in fan interest over the past year, our fanbase is still one of the smallest in the P2/P4. I wish more folks would jump on board, but it is what it is, I can't change what people are interested in. I don't know how many tickets will be sold closer to gameday and what the walk-up crowd might be -- may depend on promotions. IU probably priced the cupcake games a little too high ($61 is the cheapest available for the general public). I've seen some other schools selling cupcake games tickets for quite a bit less than we are -- $20 or less and some are just giving them away. We've sold about 44K tickets for the opener so far and last year's opener was 44K, so I'd think if the weather is good we'll get few more thousand tickets sold.

ESPN did an article on our bison mascot. It's good. https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/45871194/indiana-hoosiers-bison-mascot-return It's nice when ESPN actually does sports journalism.

Exactly. I wish I could find the graphic that had each voter — a lot of people had us last.