Pagoda

Great hype video dropped. https://x.com/indianafootball/status/1932145654475677775?s=46&t=zoBJGD5TXRBDk1ODyOZqlg

3* from St. Louis -- more of the regional recruiting approach Lebowski posted about in the other thread. 20+ schools offered, notably BC, Purdue, and MSU. More of the IU-wrapped IndyCar too.. This is the busy time for recruiting...

3* TE. Visited over the weekend and committed. He had a Missouri visit scheduled, but he committed anyway. He had a bunch of B1G offers and some SEC schools too. https://x.com/macfarlane_pj/status/1931780140431782050 Interesting detail, in watching his commit video, IUFB now has their IndyCar prop wrapped in IU colors with the CFB Playoff logo. Previously the car was blue and black with "IndyCar" on the side. This is another example of IUFB caring about the little details, which I love. See pics below: I know it's been around since last fall, but this little IndyCar promo partnership is cool. It's unique and it fits with image of Cig's IUFB (at least the fast and relentless parts). And I bet it annoys Purdue a little bit, who is pretty tied into racing with all their engineers and their marching band stuff at the 500. But hey, IU has The Little 500, which is a helluva tie in too. Good stuff.

I can only guess, but I think this will at least be a continuation of the post-McRobbie era increased focus on sports. Frankly, anything post-McRobbie was going to be an increased focus on sports, that man did not get it. I've never seen IU spend on athletics like they have the past two years. Not even remotely close at all. Last year IU provided an unprecedented $34M loan to the athletic dept, mostly to support football. This will get paid back as media rights increase and gameday revenue improves, but the key takeaway is prior to this (and excluding covid), IU would never send more than a few million to the AD in any given year. That has completely changed. So, the basic logic is this support has occurred under Quinn/Pam/Scott, and since they're continuing, we'll probably continue to see more of this higher level of support for athletics. I'm biased because I like sports, but I think it's worth it. Football is the only sport that can produce a material return on investment for the athletic dept. Big MBB programs like IU can make some money, but it's not close to football. If we can become a midpack, or ideally top 1/3 B1G FB team, that will help our athletic dept immensely and help IU sustain all sports. As of today we're still one of the smaller P2 athletic depts and only football can change that. Last thing on this athletics support topic -- what Scott has started and in my opinion needs to keep doing is monetizing our improved football team. Like it or not, almost all the athletic dept revenue comes from fans directly or indirectly. We need Memorial Stadium sold out every game (should hopefully happen) and the fans have to absorb some ticket price increases, which seem pretty fair given the team they get to watch now. Other things that would help out our tapped out athletic dept are (i) a stadium sponsor, (ii) enough corporate interest, probably mostly from Indy area firms, to justify building suites, (iii) getting more whale donors engaged (Mark?), and (iv) chatting with Adidas about improving our contract with them (Cig is a material change since we signed!). Our athletic dept is tapped out with all this spending on coaches, NIL and rev share -- more money would help a lot. Maybe the BoT can help with some of this, I don't know.

Unfortunately, it appears this Bomba issue is not over. https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/45444572/more-men-allege-sexual-misconduct-ex-indiana-team-doctor

3* OT take from Wisconsin. His other top offer was Iowa State, and then some smaller schools offered too. With Bostad's connections in Wisconsin (and UW being down), we have been getting nice some recruits outs of that state.

I'm looking forward to it. I'm guessing we'll get the usual positive tidbits and hopefully this year those are true. Key question: Will we get strength and conditioning hype videos? The classic sand pit and battle ropes? This is a quiet staff, so I'm not sure it's a given...

This recruitment will likely take some more work. He just got an offer from his Pop's school, Florida State. https://x.com/jay__timmons/status/1929316491658215785 Update: This one doesn't look good: "It feels great. I came here last year as a freshman with one offer from Akron. I've been here four times now. This has been a dream since I was a kid. I've never been a big sports fan but I've always been a Florida State fan. It's crazy. It's a great feeling. It could possibly switch things around. Indiana is home right now but we'll see what happens," Timmons told Noles247.

Spot on. Update: I heard this guy in reality owns a roofing business. Ha. Very close guess in the tweet.

Gregg Doyle is up to his usual self -- he had a very awkward moment with Pascal in the postgame presser. https://x.com/bleacherreport/status/1928294875369197657 I don't know why the Star keeps him around. He must have some friends there or dirt on someone. Stuff like this, the Caitlin Clark incident we all know, and his nonsensical IU takes... he's turrible.

I really think IU is trying to give him what he wants: - Cig and staff got big raises -- well deserved. But after that first round of huge raises, Haines got two more raises after PSU started sniffing around. Owings got another raise when USC tried to get him. We retained the whole staff minus Tino who got a legit promotion to play call that he had to take. Tino's replacement is absolutely top notch -- we didn't go cheap there either. - We retained basically all our key players. I am positive every school and their mothers were tampering with them, and many of those schools have a lot of money. - Portal class ranked around #20. Got Fernando, potential mega stud. - Now we're signing higher grade high school kids We can always be better, but I'm just outlining some positives. Anyways, I think about the Illinois game a few times every week. Huge game. Big Noon Kickoff likely in town, outside shot for GameDay. Massive chance to set the tone and avoid trying to bounce back with two hard road games @Iowa and @Oregon. It's fun having such big games to play, but nerve-racking.

I’m not sure the roster overhaul materially changed our bball player payroll amount. If it’s an overhaul we spend $10M on 10+ portal guys plus Sisley. If it’s not an overhaul we pay $10M to retain 6-7 guys and get 5+ more from high school and the portal. The general view is our bball spend is borderline top-10, maybe in the 10-15 range nationally. It’s not an excessively huge amount that is top-3 or something and really sucking money from football. Just some thoughts on the FB vs MBB dynamic. Not arguing, more thinking out loud. I don’t exactly know how money gets allocated between the two.

Ha. The Knicks celeb fans have made a point of sitting courtside and making themselves a part of the game as much as they can. Spike started this in the 90's as we all know. When they put themselves out there like that, they become fair game. Spike found that out when he tried his schtick with Reggie. Now these guys are finding out with Pat when he incorporated them into his bit. Pat is good at this -- his presenting and WWE background is perfect. And clearly this is all understood to be not that serious -- stick and stones... If they want to avoid getting a ribbing and some booing on the road -- all they have to do is fade into the background a bit more, maybe sit in a suite. But they didn't, so boo friggin' hoo.

As for the NIL/rev share estimates, Allen and Year 1 Cig are from the IndyStar/Herald Times folks, so I feel pretty good about those. Year 2 Cig is from Cig himself in an interview/article and corroborated by someone at our collective. I think I'm directionally right from pretty good sources, but you can take it or leave it. I interpret his comment differently -- he's a sarcastic dry humor guy. And I'm sure he wants more money, every coach does except the ones at Texas, OSU, Oregon, and Georgia (maybe TAMU?). But, again, no big deal if you see it differently, at the end of the day we're both IU fans I'm not here to fight. Maybe I am wrong! I'm pretty thrilled with IUFB right now. But I am worried about money -- mostly about how much more we can raise. Our athletic dept is stretched right now -- we've had layoffs, a $25M "loan" from IU to the athletic dept, and a huge increase in player costs with rev share and NIL. Media rights will help, but we're still a smallish-athletic dept for the P2 schools. We need to keep getting our alumni/fans engaged, maybe get a big sponsor like Lilly, or maybe further engage one of our whales like Cuban. Easy for me to say, I'm not the one doing the fundraising. And sadly, I am not billionaire that can materially chip in.

Get Wilkerson to commit. ;-) Aside from that I don't know.

Wait a minute here. I think some facts are being missed. And bear with me, some of these numbers are best estimates from what I hear from media and AD folks. 1) First off, Pat is misinterpreting that comment. That's mostly a joke. If you listen to Cig's other interviews, he thanks the donors and Scott and Pam and says "our pot of money is nice." I'm sure he wants more money, but I don't think it's an issue right now. 2) Here's the trend in IUFB NIL/rev share for players and money for staff, which is important to keep in mind. End of Allen Tenure - $2M NIL. Grim! Our staff budget wasn't great either. Cig Year 1 - We promised Cig $3M NIL and he got ~$4.5M. He was very happy. We were only 20-30% of the big programs last year who had $16-20M NIL. Cig Year 2 - With the rev share, we are about $22-23M (something like ~$16M rev share and $6-7M NIL). He's getting the bulk of the rev share like most P4 schools and our NIL is up again quite a bit in Year 2. The big programs are $35-40M total. We are now 55-60% of the big programs, which is a big improvement from last year. I'd guess we are around #25 in the nation for player payroll -- just an estimate. Maybe as good as #20. Also, we gave Cig a significant increase in staff budget, $11M is now top-5 in the country which is amazing. And Cig himself more or less doubled his comp and is now a borderline top-10 paid coach making about $9M+ after incentives/bonuses. IU's commitment to football is good. The progress in 1.5 years is immense. 3) Basketball NIL went from ~$6M last year to what looks like ~$7M NIL + ~$3M rev share this year. We increased NIL for bball, but not a lot. Cig can't be surprised at NIL levels for bball at IU. So, overall, I don't think Cig can complain too much right now, and I don't think he is. I'm not seeing false promises or a bait and switch. HOWEVER, we have to keep improving each year, or else it could become an issue. On the money point, unfortunately I think we need more for football, and basketball, but let's focus on football. Ideally we would have $10M more per year for football payroll, which would get us to 75-80% of the big programs. That's about as good as we could do, we will never match OSU, Texas, UGA, etc., they're just way bigger. I think Scott has to keep engaging new donors and sponsors and next year find a way to increase our player payroll $3M+ so we can keep the improvement going and keep chipping away at the bigger football programs. And Cig has to continue to deliver with the resources we are giving him. Tough job, but that's what it takes to be good in the hyper competitive world of CFB. So, what I'm saying is from what I can tell today, things are really pretty good. I'm not seeing or hearing about an issue with IUFB funding -- we'll see if anything else comes up.

Our logo made the cover of the CFB ‘26 video game. It’s a little thing, but kids see it and all the little things add up as IUFB changes its perception.

Here is most of the staff talking in front of the crowd at Huber’s. Moderated by Don.

CDD interview at Huber’s. Talks roster, size/rim protection, Goode/Leal, recruiting, and more.

Now that the bison mascot rollout is done, the athletic dept has shifted their focus to announcing the key leadership hires for our flagship program* that we hired several weeks ago! :-) Still no players listed on the website though. Maybe that's a summer project for the AD. * I know football brings in more money and it's growing at IU, but we're still technically a basketball school... for now.

This is the first clip I've seen of Tucker post- shoulder surgery. Looks good. https://x.com/CoachBasye22/status/1927410311704850818 Hopefully the WVU fans don't see this... they may (probably will) fire up their conspiracies again.

IU is selling a toy mascot in their store already, and the description says: "This plush uses the best fabric, designs, and captures the details to make our mascot authentic." Decent chance the new mascot looks something like this? Maybe.

Per 24/7, last year the two comparable new coach, big rebuild teams had portal classes ranked #5 (UK) and #27 (UL). Both teams had generally speaking good years with their new coaches. Our class portal class is ranked #9 this year. Rankings aren't everything (but they're directional) and things are very TBD, but what has happened so far doesn't look to be an outlier situation or notably alarming.

This is coming from an anon poster who generally believes in firing coaches quickly. I'm not in the need to give a coach four to five years camp. To level set: CDD has been here for two (2) months. Not only has IUBB generally been bad for 25 years, CDD inherited Mike Woodson's four alarm tire fire of a program where almost all the staff and players were unusable and had to go. The only useful thing CDD inherited was one (1) 4* high school recruit who committed despite Mike. Even with our resources, no staff and no players is a tough starting point. I think a turnaround can happen pretty quickly and it should be expected, but it will take some time when a coach inherits a four alarm tire fire. There is just no way around it. I don't mind folks being critical when we get some concrete signs of trouble, but it's been two (2) months. Give me a break. We have a whole new staff and roster -- we're going to have to wait and see how this goes because we just don't know right now. The goal in Year 1 is not to be top-10 or whatever -- the goal is put out Woody's four alarm tire fire and establish a culture and foundation we can build from for years to come. Think big picture. In my view, a reasonable Year 1 of culture and foundation building includes playing modern/smart/tough basketball, making the tournament, signing very good high players again, and then doing well in the spring 2026 portal. All of this will set us up for Year 2 when expectations can ramp up. What I cannot see a reasonable case for in Year 1, and especially not two (2) months in, is comparing ourselves to programs that have been healthy and successful for many years or decades. Such as Duke. It's a free country, but if you're expecting this in Year 1 you're going to be miserable. I don't think a turnaround in the portal era should take long, but it's also not going to happen over night either. I might suggest watching this program play some games and compete in high school recruiting battles. If we play bad bball and miss the tourney and recruit poorly, okay hit the panic button. I probably will. But until then, getting worried seems pretty pointless. And hey, CDD has built programs before. His staff looks pretty good -- we've got offensive minds and a coach from a rich top-10 program liked what he saw at IU and joined us. CDD teams defend reasonably well. There is real talent on this team, notably shooting. This could turn out pretty good... we'll have to wait and see.