Indiana hungry for Big Ten football start today

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Indiana University has a football game today. The Hoosiers play Penn State and it counts in the Big Ten standings. You can’t go see it, but by all indications it is a real game, so long in coming it might seem coach Tom Allen has had two birthdays since his team last played.

You can’t blame the Hoosiers for feeling like a guy who has been waiting for his date to call back saying yes since the Beatles were No. 1 on the charts.

It has been 10 months since the Hoosiers have played and at many points during this lengthy intermission, they seemed unlikely to play any football game in 2020.

The ups and downs of the COVID-19 pandemic, the roller-coaster ride of positive and negative coronavirus tests, the upending of the original schedule, the re-design of a new league schedule, being shut down due to positive tests for a time during a practice period, and the Big Ten previously announcing there would be no games at all this season, was a dizzying unfolding of events.

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But here they are, ready for a 3:30 p.m. kickoff at Memorial Stadium. An empty Memorial Stadium, to be sure, since the Big Ten has banned fans.

If at any time Allen took up biting his nails, developed a nervous tick, or blew his stack, he hid it well. Over the months, he has seemed remarkably calm, reassuringly placid, and capable of rolling with every punch thrown at him and his program, even if it sometimes seemed Muhammad Ali was throwing them and there was no way to escape unscathed.

“It’s been quite a journey to get to this point,” Allen said earlier this week.

That is a quickie nominee for understatement of the year in a political election year heavy on bombast.

“We’re very thankful,” Allen also said.

Meaning the Hoosiers are glad those in authority at their school and in their conference are letting them play at all this autumn. While Indiana high schools have been playing football since August and some of the nation’s power college conference and the NFL have been competing for weeks, some larger conferences, and the NCAA’s smaller school divisions have been benched.

The Hoosiers have been human yo-yos, practicing, then sidelined, scheduled to play Wisconsin in early September, then told they wouldn’t play at all, then back in business with this new schedule beginning today.

And lately, that’s even as the coronavirus has viciously spread more dramatically worldwide so that a day before football more than 42 million people had been counted as having had the illness since March with more than 1.1 million deaths.

Harry Crider, the 311-pound offensive line captain for IU, was asked if it even seemed real there really would be a Saturday game.

“It’s become a lot more real this week,” Crider said a few days prior to the game.

Allen was hired to rebuild a moribund program and the Hoosiers have taken giant steps. Last year they were 8-5, including a one-point loss to Tennessee in the Gator Bowl. They could have won. Penn State also got the Hoosiers on a last drive, winning 34-27.

Those kinds of losses are symptoms of not-there-yet teams. This is supposed to be the year of change.

“I remember everything about that drive,” said IU junior linebacker Cam Jones of how the Nittany Lions pulled out the win. “All we needed was one play to stop them.”

They couldn’t make the crucial tackle and Allen knows how that one got away. He has spent three years remaking the Hoosiers into a team that he wants to become a Big Ten and national power.

IU, he said, is “a year older, a year better.” There are more experienced players “that can help us.”

Allen keeps upping the caliber of his recruiting classes and coaching the players in place to improve and as they mature he figures Indiana will become a factor in the Big Ten, will be able to beat some of the teams that have owned the top tier of the conference, the Ohio States and the Michigans and yes, the Penn States.

“We’ve been in them,” Allen said of tight battles with the best, with teams ranked in the top 25. “We’ve been close. We’ve got to finish.”

No more beating beaten by last-gasp drives. It is time for Indiana University football players to walk off the field with Ws in the close ones. Even if there is nobody present in the stands to applaud them.

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