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Yea. This is smart. UVA, especially the road game early in the season, is way more downside than upside. Every year we play a (usually) grueling nine game P2 conference schedule. Three low risk games to get ready without getting banged up is the right approach to maximize our post-season opportunities. One caveat is I hope we keep ND and I’m fine playing very high level opponents like that where a loss isn’t a killer and it’s a huge game. Though I’m not sure many top-10 programs would do home-homes with us -- we're more downside than upside to be honest. One way to help the non-cons would be a B1G and SEC challenge where everyone plays each other. Not sure if the conferences can figure that out, but it would be cool.

The bison may need a few tries to trample Bret.

Well, here is a drawing of our new mascot. The debut of the real life one is the home opener. Seems to be all good to me. Press release: https://iuhoosiers.com/news/2025/7/14/general-iu-reinstates-the-bison-as-the-official-iu-bloomington-mascot-hoosier-the-bison-to-make-first-public-appearance-on-aug-30-at-iu-football-season-opener

The final boss — if you can tune him out you’re ready:

Ha. Nothing triggers my inner old school RMK/curmudgeon IUBB fan more than the annual summer workout video. First off, I hope the team is practicing SHOOTING!!! And enough with the hype for the cameras you guys, you gotta prove it ON THE COURT!!! ;-) Also, no battling ropes and sandpit so far. The Clif Marshall era is truly over.

Best Play nominee (and winner imo): Struggling on offense with Rourke out vs Washington. Ponds put the whole team on his back until we figured it out. Roll out the Big. Red. Carpet. Touchdown Indiana! (zoom out to sold out crowd going wild with towels)

While not my winner for the category, I’d nominate for “7. Most Impactful Event”: IU cuts ties with the Hysterics :-)

Seems like a great guy. And of course our guy Prince is all over it.

Imo IUBB’s NIL is not an issue. We just spent #10 or so money. If our fans get excited more money will flow in. That’s enough to win big. USPS makes a good point that the difference in spending among the top-15 or so schools isn’t that much. Probably within 20-25% of each other aside from a few outlier schools that may change from year to year (like Duke or BYU). Buying a title in CBB looks pretty hard to do, and IU is never gonna spend $20M on a roster to try. If IUBB is going to be as good as we want it to be, we don’t need more money. We need CDD and his staff to be really good. That sounds obvious, but it’s that simple. You either recruit the right kids and get the most from them as a collective unit or you don’t. And that’s a good thing for CBB — of course a program needs table stakes money, but it takes a lot more than that to win big. I think this staff could be really good. We’ll see.

Yea this would be a great guy to land -- very talented, but also likely not a one and done, so he can be a multi-year foundational piece for the program. Let's get that commitment Kenny!!!

An indicator folks might consider is Rod Clark, our last senior staff hire. UT MBB has a lot of money and is coming off two Elite 8's. Rod got to take a very close look -- 1,000x closer than any talking head who posts preseason rankings for clicks -- at our new staff, roster, and overall program. He was comfortable enough to leave a wealthy top program and join IU. That seems to be a good sign. I don't really follow the roster angst. We have the 10th ranked portal class. Last year UK was 5th and UL was 27th -- we seem to be within range of the two total portal rebuild schools that had decent first years with their new coach. If Goode gets his waiver Torvik has us around #30-35, which seems to be a fine starting spot. I don't see IU transitioning from basketball. Our roster payroll is #10-15 in the country, but don't forget our staff/program budget (all the non-player stuff) is top-5. IU still pumps a lot into hoops. And I'm definitely not worried about our fans. Frankly, they like basketball too much. The support this program gets after stinking up the joint for a quarter century is quite honestly absurd. I'm way more worried about how much we can ramp up support for football. At the end of the day CDD inherited basically nothing useable from Woody and had to rebuild from scratch. Turning around anything (programs/businesses/organizations/whatever) takes time. We're just over three months in. So far things look okay and it's way too early to know how this will go.

4* from outside of Chicago. A lot of big time offers. Quite a bit of buzz here. Some of his family went to IU. At the moment On3 is predicting him to go our way. Would be a nice start to the '27 class. We shall see -- knock on wood. Note the shirt. https://x.com/jameson_purcell/status/1942645481986797694

CDD comments (per Alec Lasley):

Single game tickets are available to the general public today. All games have seats available — we sold a lot more season tickets this year, but not so many there aren’t plenty of single game options. Link to buy below if you’re interested in packing The Rock and supporting this emerging football superpower: https://iuhoosiers.evenue.net/events/iu-football-single-game-tickets

He doesn't seem to be a DeVries guy. In the B12 preseason last year he had WVU #15 out of 16 (vs injured impacted T-7th actual finish).

Ha. Some unfinished business.

Rivals seems to be a mess with their merger with On3.

Adolph sure is a rare name nowadays... "Junior" County sounds cool though.

I’ll take every cover we can get. . Edit: And here are Phil's B1G rankings: Ohio State Buckeyes (128.19) Penn State Nittany Lions (127.87) Oregon Ducks (123.56) Michigan Wolverines (122.92) Indiana Hoosiers (118.62) Illinois Fighting Illini (117.22) Nebraska Cornhuskers (116.43) USC Trojans (115.63) Iowa Hawkeyes (115.08) Washington Huskies (113.67) Minnesota Golden Gophers (110.94) Rutgers Scarlett Knights (109.74) Wisconsin Badgers (109.17) UCLA Bruins (106.61) Michigan State Spartans (105.8) Maryland Terrapins (100.08) Northwestern Wildcats (99.46) Purdue Boilermakers (94.57)

Agree on Jacobson, unfortunately. We’ve seen Matt do well with guys like him too many times…

Could be. I like McCollum, but he wasn’t jumping at the chance to take the job… he wanted to wait until after tourney to talk to IU. CDD really wanted the job, which I appreciate — he wasn’t lukewarm on IU like Ben was. I think we got the right guy.

This is our chance to build the FB program up to something midpack or top 1/3 of the conference, which would change the financial profile of IU athletics with tens of millions more dollars of revenue per year. We're still a smaller athetlic dept in the P2 and it's all down to football to change that. Of course Cig and staff need to keep this up. If they do, the permanence of the change in IUFB will hinge on if we can get the succession planning right when Cig steps down. We'll want him to pick the next head coach and ideally we can keep him on as some sort of GM of Football or AD of Football -- some role where he is mentoring the next generation of IUFB coaches, raising money, etc. while working some comfortable hours. Hopefully he is up for that someday.

Just my opinion but the #1 priority in the athletic dept right now should be getting Cig $8-10M more in NIL from where we are today. Not an easy task at all, but it would be worth it. I’m still hoping for a stadium/field sponsor, that should be a more appealing marketing opportunity now, or maybe getting another one of our mega donors more engaged. CFB is king and CBB is awfully close to immaterial in the scheme of our athletic dept finances. Everything IU sports depends on football, including the precious basketball program. Not all, but some of our bball fans need to wake up to this economic reality in college sports.

Part of this is likely McCollum, but also Pork Chop just cannot help but lowball high school recruits. PU has had a very good run for 10+ years and Gym Rat Matty goes and watches these HS recruits all the time, but all that won’t overcome an out of market offer. We’ve seen time and time again their top targets they put all this time into quickly drop PU once other programs come in and offer these kids what they’re worth. I’ve heard a few stories about how frustrated he gets with other programs’ comp packages (including us with Sisley). Iowa? They prioritize FB, wrasslin’, and then after that men’s bball, with a decent chunk of resources going to their women’s team too. Matt’s program works, don’t get me wrong, but he is cheap @$$ with high school kids. Fortunately, PU still isn’t too good with this NIL stuff and hopefully it continues…

Took this 4* right out of Missouri. Pretty awesome.