Want to share your predictions, analysis, or thoughts about Monday’s National Championship Game between Indiana and Miami? Join our coverage. live@theathletic.com.
I’m sure there are people like this, but I haven’t found them yet. That’s Indiana fans who care more about Indiana football than Indiana men’s basketball. We might be talking about dozens of other countercultures besides former Indiana football players.
Sam Storey estimates there are about 12,000 to 15,000 people in his special group. In other words, Indiana fans who care about both equally. And, just to be clear, this was before Kurt Cignetti came along and turned the punching bag into the Mike Tyson of 1986. This whirlwind two-year transformation ranks as one of the greatest stories in modern sports, culminating in Monday’s national championship game against Miami.
“This is like a refund for all the headaches in my life,” says Storey, who graduated from Indiana State in 2006. His loyalty to the football program dates back to his grandmother’s faithful attendance at Memorial Stadium as an undergraduate in the 1940s. “I’ve seen the bottom of the barrel. It’s under about 10,000 feet of salt, and nothing could grow there.”
Now, Indiana football is a half-barrel pumping out endless crimson-and-cream joy, and the lines at keg stands stretch for miles. If there are only a few thousand people who can claim to have had a bad moment (aka all the moments), are there 1,000 people out of the country’s largest alumni base of 805,000 who don’t like this team right now?
like will leech I wrote this week: “The (Indiana) fan base suddenly became so overwhelming, it was a Greek chorus surrounding it and surrounding all of us.”
This reminds me of the concept of “fans on the bandwagon.” That’s a word I imagine Purdue fans, fans who have cut off all contact with the outside world and who wake up every day hoping that this is all a vivid nightmare and that “Cininetti” is just another Bravo cop drama, are using it pretty freely these days.
However, the whole concept is overrated. Every huge sports fan base has its rise and fall of “bandwagons” based on the quality of the product. Let’s say this is the ketchup industry. Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia and their compatriots will be represented by Heinz. Pennsylvania, Texas, Miami? Mr. Hunt. Indiana? Sauerkraut that has expired.
Elizabeth and Sam Story played in both Indiana University Football Playoff games and are expected to arrive in Miami on Monday night. (Courtesy of Sam Story)
This is the story of the people who continued to faithfully apply it to their hamburgers. A story is a story. His family essentially still has the season tickets they first bought in the 1970s, and his parents named him after Sam Wych. That’s right, Sam Wych coached Indiana University for one season in 1983 and went 3-8.
“They said they liked the name,” Storey says. “I said, ‘I hope I don’t like the result.’ But 3-8 was actually pretty good for us at the time.”
It’s one thing to tag along with your family. Finding your own passion is another thing. For Storey, it happened in eighth grade when he watched quarterback Antwaan Randle El make his debut against Western Michigan in the 1998 season opener with three touchdown passes and three touchdown runs.
“Unfortunately, I fell into it,” Storey says. “It’s tough. It’s like a virus.”
He was captivated by the thrill and greatness of one player. The hour-plus drive from the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel to Bloomington is fun enough to have a good chance of winning at basketball, but on football Saturdays it no longer feels like an obligation. It was still a losing season under coach Cam Cameron, but there were many close and entertaining games that could have gone either way.
The Chicago Cubs, the “lovable losers” that come to mind, had a team that was good enough to win it all, even though they hadn’t won a title in 108 years. Indiana football never had the 2-0 loss to the San Diego Padres in 1984, the failed Will Clark release in 1989, or the Steve Bartman moment in 2003. Indiana football never had a chance.
The closest thing I can think of to an unthinkable sports turnaround is Northwestern football. They recently upset Indiana State as the losingest program in history, winning the Big Ten in 1995 and ending a 23-game losing streak by advancing to the Rose Bowl. Back then, voters decided the national champion, and the Rose Bowl was pretty much the best. The next 30 years in the Northwest were also much better than the 30 years before that.
But this is not the case. Story just watched firsthand as his team defeated Ohio State for the Big Ten title, defeated Alabama in the Rose Bowl and humiliated Oregon State in the Peach Bowl. He and his wife, Indiana University graduate Elizabeth, and their two young sons will be in Miami in a great seat with the perks of loyalty and donations to Indiana’s NIL efforts. What about the men’s first game? Last season, they defeated former college football powerhouse Nebraska 56-7.
“I caught the bug, and it was a very expensive bug. I lost almost all my hair and money,” said Storey, who now works in real estate in a Chicago suburb. “But what a great feeling right now.”
His estimate of 12,000 to 15,000 rabid fans comes from a particularly tough home loss to Joe Tiller’s Purdue Boilermakers when he was a kid. He estimates that’s how many people stayed in their seats the whole time. By the time Cignetti was hired, the number of supporters would have been close to 20,000, perhaps thanks to the successes of the Tom Allen and Kevin Wilson eras.
But Indiana fans now occupy the entire stadium and are expected to significantly outnumber Miami fans in the Hurricanes’ home stadium on Monday. One Hoosier is my friend Buck Rising, a Nashville sports radio host and 2015 graduate.
He was also at the semifinal game in Atlanta. It was the first Indiana football game he saw in person.
basketball? If you look back at Christian Watford’s buzzer-beater to beat Kentucky in 2011, he’s an overprotective student in a banana suit, cringing with joy as the ball goes through the net. football? Rising and his teammates backed up that statement by accompanying them to home games wearing shirts that read, “Game time is nap time.”
Truth-tellers of the Bandwagon fandom may find this particularly offensive. But let’s not forget that the football renaissance is giving back to Indiana basketball fans who created a championship environment for a program that had only one Final Four appearance in the past 33 years. To quote Leach again, “Indiana football has made Indiana basketball fans feel the way they used to feel and the way they always felt they should be.”
Here I wish I could pose for the roughly 804,000 alumni on this tour, plus the millions of others who are non-alumni Indiana fans: If one of these programs, football or men’s basketball, was going to be relevant for the next 20 years, constantly knocking on the door, potentially winning multiple titles, and the other was relegated to irrelevance, which would you choose?
As expected, the latecomer Rising was a huge flop, with the answer being, “It’s not that interesting nationally, but it’s much more important to me.”
The story is a test.
“Oh my god,” he said, stepping back. “If you report this, please let everyone know that I have been on hiatus for a very long time…but growing up in Indiana, basketball is deep in our blood.”
Please stop this incident, Cininetti. Your work isn’t done yet.