Yes, another football season will start the last weekend of this month. This is good news for some of us. From March 27, 2026, until Super Bowl Sunday on February 14, 2027, there will be football to look at. UFL in March, CFL in May, NCAA in August, NFL in September. The stars line up again. For many of us, this is a very good thing. Look, I enjoy watching a basketball game now and again. I keep up with the Indiana Hoosiers. During basketball season, I usually know when and where and against whom the Hoosiers are playing. Much like college football, I ceased trying to keep up with the players closely. They come and go like a sunrise and the coming sunset. In between there are times of clarity and there are times of rain. Either way, I don’t enjoy following players like I used to. What’s to follow?

I don’t enjoy watching college basketball like I used to. That has the potential to sound like a comment from a grouchy old man. Not so. Just a sign of the times. When I can’t keep up with a roster of players from lunch to dinner, thanks to the cracked landscape that college sports currently offer, much of my fun has been removed. Many of us, some much younger than myself, miss the old recruitment process when we took guys out of high school and hoped that they would pan out. You know, you rooted for them before they got on the court or the field. There was an emotional investment that meant more than the game itself. He’s a Hoosier now and will be for the next four or five years, depending on a red shirt status. You remember those days. The days when we could not fathom seeing our quarterback line up against us the next year in a conference uniform that was not cream and crimson.

So. I get it. You don’t have to tell me. The model, the old model I pine for, probably would have never attracted the likes of Curt Cignetti to Bloomington. That old model would have seen the Hoosiers clamoring gleefully over a 7-5 season and delighted to be heading to Nashville for The Music City Bowl. My dream was to one day, in my lifetime, see the Indiana Hoosiers play in The Rose Bowl. Some dreams do come true. I can tell you all about it. Was it worth it? Yes, it was. Even an old rear-view mirror purveyor like me can appreciate what is in the here and now, though it comes at the cost of a one and done Heisman Trophy winner we just started to get to know. I will root incessantly for Josh Hoover, if he is indeed the man under center for the Indiana Hoosiers come September in the first game of the season against North Texas. Ironically, the expected North Texas starting quarterback figures to by Tayven Jackson. The same Tayven Jackson who started games for the Indiana Hoosiers in 2023. Jackson is now wearing his fourth college football uniform. How much fun can that really be? Whatever he is being paid by the Mean Green, an appropriate nickname, I hope it is worth it for Tayven. My regrets will probably be larger than his will.

That’s the kind of investment that I deal with missing. You know, the loyalty thing. Anthony Thompson graduated from high school the same year I did in 1986. He played four years for the Indiana Hoosiers. The first three of those years the Hoosiers played in bowl games. Indiana’s previous bowl history included 2 before Bill Mallory, AT, and his teammates showed up. The ’68 Rose Bowl and ’79 Holiday Bowl. In 1989, the Hoosiers finished 5-6. Anthony Thompson was the runner-up for The Heisman Trophy on a team with a losing record. He was that great. And we got to watch it for four seasons. Four great falls. All of this for a school that, at the time, was all too ready to shut the lights off on Memorial Stadium so they could fire up the popcorn machine inside Assembly Hall for Bob Knight’s Hoosier Basketball team.

So, I’m hearing the same refrain from a talented player these days, “Where’s my sugar?”

In the hours leading up to the kickoff of Indiana’s 2025 primetime debut against a top ten ranked Illinois team after a three-game preseason against lower teams that would have never been allowed to play on Indiana’s or any other Big Ten team’s field in the 1980s, there was something in the air in Bloomington. The crowd. The vibe. Something was cooking. You could feel it. Never once, even in the worst of times, did I cease to feel something special passing through the turnstiles at Memorial Stadium. That’s my love of the game coming out. But before the Illinois game, a game the Hoosiers would dominate 63-10, the sense that something special was happening was tangible. I wrote about it after the game. This 63-10 shellacking of Illinois was the game that allowed me to retire the 1988 41-7 win over Ohio State as the greatest moment for me in Memorial Stadium. Old fans, true football people, I guess there may be a few, felt the same weight lifted, the same exhale, the same sense of “FINALLY”.

The road ahead for the Hoosiers after the Illinois game was paved with gold. An undefeated regular season. Beating Ohio State for the first time since that 1988 game. This time for The Big Ten Championship. Then The Rose Bowl. Then The Peach Bowl. Then The National Championship. We can’t measure with existing technology how unglued so many SEC boosters must have been watching the Indiana Hoosiers kick the crap out of college football like they have never seen it done before. That’ll make a man grin too.

What now? Josh Hoover under center? Maybe. Will he last that long? Will he be gone before summer? I don’t know. I know nothing. Nothing but how this college football scene has turned into the soap opera is has turned into. Without the soap opera seismic shift college football has gone through, there is no Indiana University Football National Championship. Hoosier Fans will gladly take it, like sands through the hourglass…