I am breaking from journalistic protocol. There is no mention or inference of Bob Hammel in the title of this post. There should be. There might be a future post just about him. There should be. From me and every other writer who was ever in his presence. Bob Hammel was one of the last GREAT sports writers. That’s what he wrote about. He was not superfluous and never tried to impress you with his knowledge. With the amount of knowledge that he had about sports, writing and telling us about it was the only way he could get to us. To be in a room with fifty other people knowing only a thimble of what he knew was no doubt at times a lonely existence. Bob Hammel was a sports reporter for the Bloomington Herald-Telephone and Herald-Times for 40 years. In 2020, retiring Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said, “Bob Hammel is simply the most important Big Ten writer in the last 50 years.” Bob Hammel passed away on July 20, 2025. He was 88. His seat at the top row of the press box at Memorial Stadium will be tough to look at this fall.

Let the games begin.

Here’s a blast from the past on a cool November day.

So Indiana University had its time at the podium during Big Ten Media Days yesterday in, of all places, Las Vegas, Nevada. Elvis would be proud. He loved his touch football games. Seeing this take place in Vegas seems like a portent of doom for the future location of the Big Ten Championship Game. Every one of them thus far has been played out at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

During his time at the podium, Indiana Head Coach Curt Cignetti did not disappoint. There was the normal Coach Cig speak. You know the phrases…”fast, physical, relentless”… “What’s cheap doesn’t last. What lasts isn’t cheap”… “… 98% of this game is between your ears.” Great coach speak. Great.

Coach Cignetti is not wrong. The Indiana Hoosiers were 11-2 last season after a playoff loss to eventual runner-up Notre Dame. Coach Cignetti meant all the things he said last year, after his team was picked to finish 17th out of the 18 teams in The Big Ten. Coach Cignetti has the “secret sauce”. It took years of waiting and the right day to catch Athletic Director Scott Dolson to uncork the “secret sauce”. Imagine how many other schools who turned down Coach Cignetti when he came calling to them and how they are kicking themselves now. I am sure the list is long. I am also this is part of what he is driven by. That’s just human nature. Scott Dolson saw what so many others did not. Shame on them. Good on Indiana Football.

There is plenty of talk before the season. Coaches are blowing off. Players are blowing off (see QB Diego Pavia at Vanderbilt). It is a wonder what a win over Alabama will do for a returning quarterback’s ego. And the media is in the middle of it like never before. Today’s college football is made for the soap operas that are The Paul Finebaum Show, and, to an extent, the bombast of wherever Pat McAfee is running his mouth.

Every year we look at the PREDICTIONS! Let us take a look at some of the predictions from media types on how the Indiana Hoosiers Football season will play out.

CFBHome: Indiana 13th The Big Ten.

Athlon Sports: Indiana 5th in The Big Ten

Lindy’s: Indiana 9th in The Big Ten

Phil Steele’s College Football 2025: Indiana 5th in The Big Ten in a tie with Illinois, USC, and Nebraska. Phil’s rankings look like a PGA Leaderboard. The next team ranked is Iowa at 9th. Indecision may or may not be Phil Steele’s problem. My apologies to Jimmy Buffett.

Big Ten Media Collective: Indiana 6th in The Big Ten.

ESPN Football Power Index: Indiana 6th in The Big Ten.

Have we ever seen a team that finished with a conference record of 8-1 the year before being given such a slight with predictions we are seeing here? I doubt it. More fuel for the Engine Room of the team. Lift those weights. Study those teams. Run those sprints. Get the timing down on that twenty yard back shoulder throw. The Hoosiers success this year is there for the taking. There is a nucleus of players returning for Indiana that now know it can be done. This time last year they were still trying to believe it could be done. Raise your hand if you ever felt better after you knew something worked out better than you expected it to. Look out.

The games will continue to be played. The mind games. The media games. The betting games. The scheduling games. And then, on that last Saturday in August, the REAL games will begin in earnest. Can Indiana shut up the naysayers in 2025? We shall see. If they do it will be short lived; we will be reliving their assent all over again. We will be here again next summer talking about how so many writers and talking heads will still want to put the word “farce” next to the ascension of Indiana Football. If you have been around this game and this school long enough you know the college football world is still not ready for football success in Bloomington, Indiana. The Hoosiers think otherwise.

Lee Corso’s college football road is coming to an end the first week of this college football season. Coach Corso will be on the ESPN Gameday set one final time during week one of the 2025 College Football season. Word is the Gameday set will be in Columbus, Ohio to take in the Texas Longhorns visiting the Ohio State Buckeyes. Let’s hope Coach Corso picks Bevo and his prognostication is true.

I am in earnest. What worst place for Corso do his last show than Columbus, Ohio? If you have been there, you know what I mean. Let’s hope Bevo and Arch Manning show up in Buckeyeville and hand Ohio State their collective NIL jock strap.

Look, my wildest college football dream already came true.

I was there last October when Coach Corso came back to Indiana University for College Gameday. The Hoosiers were playing the Washington Huskies on the Big Ten Network. Still, ESPN College Gameday was there.

This was Indiana Football’s finest hour.

I was near tears in the press box knowing this is what we IU Football fans had all dreamed about for so long. We never thought we would ever get HERE. But, thanks to Coach Curt Cignetti, we got here. And I will face the music. No one was more skeptical of Cignetti’s hire than I was. I wrote about it. I own it. I apologize.

I assure you; I will revisit all of that and move forward with the 2025 season, which I am very optimistic about. Today, I celebrate Coach Corso.

This was the coach of my youth. Lee Corso was the head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers from 1973 to 1982. These were the years I was in kindergarten to the ninth grade. During this time my dad was a high school coach at high schools that were 50 or 90 miles from Bloomington. I attended MANY of Coach Corso’s games at IU. During Coach Corso’s days, the home bench was across the field from the press box. For what reason, I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to be on the side where the chains were located. I don’t know.

I would give ANYTHING, well, almost anything, to have the cassette tape my dad made of a Lee Corso speech Coach Corso made at the Coaches Clinic in Louisville in what year I have no idea. I know the speech. My audible memory remembers it. In that speech, Coach Corso taught me about discipline on defense and how to give your starting backfield so much room.

As a kid of nine years old, I was listening and studying the man who would one day being putting on a team’s headgear during the last segment of ESPN’s Gameday. We had no idea. Neither did he.

I am weary of the current college football horizon. My delight in watching the Canadian Football League, I have seen all of their games so far this season, and knowing they make a pittance compared to some NCAA players and ALL NFL players, makes me a CFL fan even more.

Still, I can’t keep my eyes off the Indiana Hoosiers. I expect Coach Corso will pick them to win in week#1.

Okay, what I am about to report will give you more insight into why I sincerely have a hard time with the current state of college football.

On October 23, 1976, it was reported that Indiana University was EXTENDING Lee Corso’s football coaching contract for another three years. Athletic Director Paul Deitzel believed this was needed to establish needed continuity moving forward. At the time of this contract EXTENSION…Coach Corso’s record at IU was 8-30-1.

1984. No, not the George Orwell 1984. Or the 1984ish foolishness we are currently suffering through.

No. The real 1984. The year. The 1984… with 12 months and 365 days. Yeah, that one.

Talk about the best of times and the worst of times. I was a junior in high school and our football team won the first game of the season. We beat up on my friends in Brownstown to the tune of North Harrison Cougars 59 Brownstown Central Braves 0. The bus ride back home was blissful. Reliving Mick Rutherford picking up a blocked punt and returning it for a touchdown was worth the time to go up there by itself.

Yep, it was nice. And yes, we were a confident bunch. No team had ever stepped onto Brownstown’s field and scored that many points. No other team has since. Next game up? The county rivals the Corydon Central Panthers. The same night we beat up on Brownstown, Corydon beat up on Paoli 26-0. And yes, we were a confident bunch.

Did I say we were a confident bunch?

I don’t know what Russ Brown had against my dad. Understand my dad was the head coach of my high school team. Once upon a time, Russ Brown was a sportswriter for the Courier-Journal in Louisville. You’re old Uncle Dan remembers when high school sports were covered nicely by that paper. I read it online now, I can’t get it delivered anymore, and there is not a word about Southern Indiana sports. Most of the news in it today is no less than two days old. Sounding like a grouchy old man was never easier.

Before my dad coached North Harrison, he coached Brownstown Central. Yes, the team we beat in 1984 59-0. In 1975, he took his BCHS team over to Paoli and they decided to celebrate the country’s bicentennial a little early. The Braves beat the Rams 76-0.

A few days later, Russ Brown wrote a story that highlighted that game and made it clear that the Braves had a good shot at beating the favored Charlestown Pirates. The Pirates were loaded. Kem Martin is still a legendary Pirate name. He ran for 271 yards. Charlestown won 41-8 in a game that featured fog so dense at times, you could barely see the other sideline across the field. I haven’t seen anything like it sense, and that will be 50 years in October.

Photo by Stan Denny

Russ Brown did it again nine years later. After the 59-0 beating North Harrison put on Brownstown Central in 1984, Russ had another story. This one was on the front page of the sports section. With the help of Brownstown Central coach Howard Jackson, whom Russ called up to whine a little, it was decided that the next day Corydon Central would have no chance against the county rival North Harrison Cougars. After all, remember, we were a confident bunch.

Corydon beat us, the confident bunch, 46-20. I think it is time for me, journalist to journalist, to give Russ Brown a call and find out what his beef was?

We won the next two games. We were 3-1 and feeling pretty good. Then we played Providence and lost half of our defensive power to injury. Dad was at the hospital tending to an injured player and yours truly, a junior on the losing team, had to call the score in to the Courier-Journal. The stringer asked me a few questions about the game; they printed every word verbatim.

We were 3-6 heading into the last game of the season. Earlier that year, it appeared we, the NH Cougars, might be in danger of only playing 9 games. We did not have a tenth game on the schedule. According to the head coach, the athletic director was fine with that. The coach was not. I don’t think those two got along very well. Coach Johnson raised cane and ultimately, there was a 10th game scheduled…in Illinois. Well, that is what Mick Rutherford said when he got off the bus 80 miles and six pig trails from North Harrison at a place that was geographically flat as a pancake, “Where are we? Illinois?”

The North Daviess Cougars hosted the North Harrison Cougars. In the process the North Harrison Cougars made Indiana Football History and put a kid in the Faces in the Crowd section of Sports Illustrated.

That night the North Daviess Cougars ran the ball 59 times. Brett Markel ran 53 of those for 411 yards and 8 touchdowns. The 411 yards were a state record, besting 380 by Andy Knecht of Covington in 1980.

I think I may have set school record that night for the most punts in one game. The first half I punted barefoot because I wanted to. After all, we were a long way from home. At halftime, I was hailed by a ref, “56! Hey 56! Come here. Look son, you’re going to have to put your shoe back on to punt in the second half. “Why?” I asked. Turns out that was the rule according to them. I asked if they had a rule book on them. They didn’t take too kindly to that. In the second half, wearing a shoe on my right foot, I had two punts blocked. I told the ref, “That wasn’t happening in the first half, thanks a lot.”

You know that fog that they played in during that game in 1975 that I mentioned? I think some of it showed up at North Daviess in 1984, but the North Harrison Cougars were the only ones who saw it.