Pagoda

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.

“The Indiana Hoosiers football program added two non-conference opponents to their 2026 and 2028 schedules. The Hoosiers will play the Howard University Bison on September 12th, 2026 and the Miami (OH) Redhawks on September 16th, 2028.” (Per the Hoosier Huddle) Don’t hate the player hate the game! ;-)

Little Pat Kuntz feature here. So good. He will make you want to run through a brick wall. https://x.com/IndianaFootball/status/1957140949265420576

Fortunately, Scott seems to get "it" and I think he will likely figure out whatever we need to do to get around the clearinghouse. His track record is pretty good. He inherited a clueless athletic dept. Despite this, he was all over NIL when it started -- we were early on the collectives. He also 100% completely changed IU's entire institutional approach to football, which is very impressive given how many people he had to get on board. I'm personally not too worried about us getting NIL to our athletes. What I am focused on is our overall athletic dept revenue and closing the big gaps to many of our P2 peers, but that's a separate topic.

Interestingly, the big boys that are successful mostly focus on high school and keeping those kids in their programs and developing them. They use the portal, but in more limited spots where they have a need. ‘26 is one of our better classes the past 15 years. Historically we might have one good class every 4-5 years with the rest being bad (like 50th+). I think Cig can keep getting classes around #30, which is quite good for us and with those kids he can keep us in the top-25 range with playoff hopes. But frankly, to level up much further we really need more NIL for football… like $10M more. At the end of the day better players cost more. Not sure where that $ comes from… need Scott to figure that out.

He retired April 1st, and unretired on May 12th when he joined the Kings (ha!).

For old times sake…

Cool local news profile on Jacob. Seems like an awesome kid and real fit with Cig's culture. https://x.com/FOX19Jeremy/status/1955758820715557078

Thanks. There has been so much drama with MBB over the years that the behind the scenes viewpoints are very interesting I've got to say. The above bolded lines sure sound like old IU -- an organizational disaster with political infighting that isn't aligned and produces crap results. Fortunately, it appears our AD is now in control with outside influences (who are almost never helpful) much more minimized. Plus he has the President's support, and very likely the BoT as well. We saw this with the last MBB coach search where basically only Scott knew who he was going to hire, along with the significant and unprecedented investment in football. IU athletics is looking functional for the first time in decades -- thank goodness. And yes, we do have to hope Scott got the hire right, but the key takeaway is he made the decision. So if things go wrong, we know who is to blame and who may need to be changed out. Though to be clear, I think Scott is doing a good to very good job. I'm also really hoping we don't have a MBB or FB coaching search for 10+ years. I've had enough of those for a lifetime already.

Louis got his injunction. Eat it NCAA. https://x.com/michaelniziolek/status/1955705368106901832