On Saturday night, on NBC Television at 7:30 PM, the Indiana Hoosiers will host the Illinois Fighting Illini. This will be the first time a ranked IU team has taken on a top ten opponent in the history of Memorial Stadium. The stadium opened in 1960. Now, realize that from 1962-1967 there was only an AP Top 10 (and you think that only recently things have been really screwed up). In 1967 the Hoosiers were in the Top 10 the week before the Purdue game. They lost to Minnesota. So, out of the Top Ten Indiana went. Purdue came to Memorial Stadium ranked # 3 in the land. IU won 19-14 and headed to Pasadena. Hold was I then? I wasn’t. I WAS ‘on the way’ and got here in March of 1968.

There are folks in SEC Football Country that can’t believe I exist. A guy from Indiana who has seen 80 FBS teams in person over a football life and didn’t get paid to do it. I am an English teacher. Thanks to this webpage, where I try to show my students that anything is possible, I did sit in the press box for Indiana’s first three nonconference games. I thank IU for that going on four seasons now. Two weeks ago, I was in the Louisville press box for U of L against James Madison. I did an interview with Co-Defensive Coordinator Mark Hagen recently. Mark, playing linebacker at IU in the late 80s and early 90s, probably made more tackles than any Indiana player has.

Nothing like getting your earwax melted by a UT fan in Knoxville.

Yep. This Indiana Football fan has seen 80 FBS teams play from coast to coast. How many college basketball games have I seen? One… and that was in Indiana’s Assembly Hall after my son came home from a meeting he attended two years ago and claimed an envelope with two tickets and a parking pass that everyone had PASSED on. Yes, it was a nonconference game against Wright State. That is not the point. The point is that after football season is over, I need to give my eyes a rest. They have been glued to football.

Folks like Blake Toppmeyer and John Adams and Paul Finebaum can’t conceive my existence. They think the SEC invented football and the rest of us need to bow to the Football Mecca, be it Tuscaloosa or Athens or Baton Rouge or Birmingham. I give a tip of the cap to all of those places.

My dad was a high school football coach. He and my mother were born in Mississippi. My Mississippi roots run deeper than any magnolia tree you have ever seen. I have many relatives who “finished” at Ole Miss. I get it. I have been to Oxford. I have seen the Rebels play in Winston-Salem, Oxford, Lexington, Nashville (Vandy and Music City Bowl), Jackson, Knoxville, and Tuscaloosa. The 2019 Ole Miss- Bama game in Tuscaloosa pretty much summed up my disbelief of SEC Football Fandom. I thought I knew. I didn’t know. In that game, Tua Tagovailoa threw a school record 6 touchdown passes. In the postgame ruing at our tailgate, a guy said, “I know he threw 6 touchdown passes, but Tua left some balls out there.” I thought I was going to faint. I wanted to grab the guy and tell him I have waited for November watching the Indiana Hoosiers in my lifetime to throw 6 touchdowns on the season. Some of them don’t get it. Some of them never will, even though they think they know it all.

I get that notion that college football in the south is your way of life against ours. It is like that up here in Big Ten country too. Maybe some in the south see it as that last vestige of “we’ll show those Yankees”. Old habits die hard. A part of me doesn’t blame them. If Ohio State was playing Georgia, I’d get on all fours and start barking myself. Any day Ohio State loses is great day.

But on this coming Saturday, Indiana has a chance and good chance of climbing a little bit higher on that mountain of college football that may or may not be atop Stone Mountain. SEC pundits will still find a way to put Indiana down. That is what they do. They love their punching bags.

Again, I get it. I do. In the 1970s, when there was limit on how many times a school could be on televised games, the Alabama Crimson Tide was featured on ABC, the only game in town, 30 times. Indiana’s only televised game on ABC in the 70s was a 69-17 loss in Bloomington to Nebraska. I was there. I.M. Hipp is still running. I was there in 1976 when IU played #1 Michigan one week and lost 35-0 only to face #8 Ohio State the next week and lose 47-7. I was there in 2000 when Indiana had a 12-point lead against North Carolina State in the 4th quarter with less than five minutes remaining. Indiana lost 41-38. Some freshman named Phillip Rivers, an Alabama boy, threw for 401 yards and 5 TDs to lead the comeback. I was there in 1994 to watch an Indiana team lose to #2 Penn State 35-29. In the process Indiana, who came back with 16 points in the 4th quarter, ruined Penn State’s National Championship hopes. Look it up. I was there in 1988 when a Bill Mallory led Indiana team played on ABC five times in the regular season and Anthony Thompson was the best football player in the land. Those were some good times. It was a simpler time. We could talk like this all night. I have a million stories.

But this Saturday is special. I know Indiana’s Football Coach, Curt Cignetti, talks about one game at a time. I think that is a great deal of talk. Indiana’s nonconference schedule has been ridiculed. I have given it a hard time. The logic may be that while playing Indiana State, the focus in the back room was always on Illinois. I can only believe this is the case and has been for weeks.

This Saturday is Indiana’s time to shine. Those rays of light may not make it under the door of the inner sanctum of the SEC Network or ESPN and their SEC bias for that matter. Still, lurking in the shadows will be Indiana Football and these folks will hate every minute of it. If I am wrong, I’ll be wrong. There has been plenty of that to see in the SEC this year as they have handed out and taken back a Heisman Trophy in three short weeks. And I know those SEC television folks will be rooting for Illinois quarterback Luke Altmyer, a Starkville boy, when he takes the field against those imposters from Bloomington.

I get it. I do. I have seen every side of it. And this is Indiana’s time.