BLOOMINGTON — The congestion typically found on the streets of town leading up to kickoff of an Indiana football game was nowhere to be found last week.
The tailgaters arrived early and filled the parking lots surrounding Memorial Stadium making it a free-for-all for the few late-arriving fans.
Every bit of asphalt was teaming with RVs, pop-up tents and folding tables filled with generous helpings of finger foods in anticipation of IU’s showdown against Michigan, and it was a scene that didn’t go unnoticed in the athletic department.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it like that,” Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson said in an interview with The Herald-Times.
Dolson was named athletic director in 2020, but he’s been a fixture in the department going back more than a decade. He also graduated from IU and was a student manager for former basketball coach Bob Knight in the late 80s.
“People got here so early, which is exactly what we wanted, and the energy was amazing,” Dolson said. “They were having so much fun and there was so much excitement.”
That excitement carried over to the game itself as a sold-out crowd of 53,082 fans did their part in helping Indiana football maintain its undefeated record.
The No. 5 Hoosiers (10-0; 7-0) are off to their best start in program history — this is the first time they have won double-digit games in a single season — and have crashed the College Football Playoff picture as one of just four unbeaten teams left in the country under the watchful eye of first-year coach Curt Cignetti.
They head to Columbus on Saturday for a game against No. 2 Ohio State (8-1; 5-1) that will have a seismic impact on the CFP rankings and likely determine which team gets a spot in the Big Ten title game.
“It’s the first year of the expanded College Football Playoff, we found out last week we were eighth and we were disappointed, that’s what we call progress,” IU senior associate athletic director for strategic communications Jeremy Gray said with a laugh. “It’s a pinch-me moment. Like on Saturday, when it’s the middle of the game and the quarterback has to call a timeout cause the crowd is too loud. Where are we? It’s just awesome.”
More:‘It was one of the goosebump weekends’: Indiana AD on College GameDay visit to Bloomington
Indiana assistant athletic director for alumni relations Mark Deal has a unique historical perspective on this year’s team.
He’s the longest-serving member of the athletic department with ties to the school dating back to before he was born. His father Russ is a member of the IU football Hall of Fame as a captain and former All-American of the 1945 team that won a Big Ten title.
Mark was in the stands for every home game during the 1967 team to watch his brother, Mike, take the school to its first-ever Rose Bowl appearance. He later suited up for the Hoosiers himself and was part of a 1979 team that recently celebrated the 45th anniversary of winning the Holiday Bowl.
He lists Indiana’s upcoming game against Ohio State as one of the most consequential games in program history.
“Probably 1987,” Deal said of the most recent game with similar stakes. “We played Michigan State, the winner was going to the Rose Bowl and it was the second to last game. The game in ’67 (against Purdue), obviously and Nov. 24, 1945, my dad’s team when we had to beat Purdue to win the Big Ten.”
The 1987 game against Michigan State is remembered for then-coach Bill Mallory going to the Spartans locker room after losing and giving the team a pep talk. That was the first Hoosiers squad to beat Ohio State and Michigan in the same season, a feat that hasn’t been accomplished since.
Deal likened IU’s gritty win over Michigan — the Wolverines had only 206 total yards of offense, their fewest in the rivalry since at least 1960 — to those very same Mallory teams.
“That game was an old-school Big Ten football game,” Deal said. “I told my wife, Bill Mallory would’ve loved that game, holding Michigan to 206 yards of offense? That was his kind of game. No doubt about it.”
Indiana won the games over Purdue in 1945 and 1967.
The Boilermakers were the No. 3 ranked team in the country in ‘67 and a win over their rival would have given them a path to the national title.
Deal also mentioned IU’s 2020 game against Ohio State during the COVID-shorten season. Both teams were undefeated, but the feel of that game was a bit different since it came at a time when crowds weren’t allowed in the stadium and each school had multiple games remaining.
“It was Big Noon Kickoff and Urban Meyer, Brady Quinn and Reggie Bush were just standing alone near the end zone,” Deal said. “They were the only people there.”
The Big Noon Kickoff crew won’t be by themselves when they head to Columbus next week and there’s a possibility the showdown at Ohio Stadium could also be the featured game on ESPN College GameDay.
“It’s just built up,” Deal said, of this year’s success. “I think Curt’s belief and confidence has rubbed off on everyone. I think it’s rubbed off on the fan base, I don’t think there’s any question of that, and our players feed off it, the coaches feed off it and it just keeps growing.”
More:Bold. Brash. Entertaining. IU football’s Curt Cignetti makes his Big Ten Media Days debut.
While Cignetti takes care of business on the field, the athletic department is making sure the university meets the moment.
“I think you are witnessing an entire coaching staff and department working in sync with one another,” Gray said. “You’ve probably even felt it coming into games.”
That commitment from the university goes back to what Dolson and Cignetti talked about when the coach interviewed for the job in December. He didn’t want to come to Bloomington unless the school was all-in on football, and that went beyond just providing the necessary financial resources to compete.
“We weren’t just handing him the keys to the football office and saying let us know how it goes,” Dolson said. “We are in it with him. He learned from the best with his dad and Nick Saban, and that vast experience he had growing up as a head coach starting at Indiana (Pennsylvania), I think he understands better than most what it takes to build a successful program.”
One recent example of that synergy was the rally towels that debuted earlier this season.
Cignetti was focused on improving the in-game atmosphere at Memorial Stadium after some sparse crowds earlier in the season. He also wanted them more engaged in the action and to stay in their seats through the end of the fourth quarter.
One request he relayed to the athletic department was finding a replacement for the relatively recent tradition of encouraging fans to make a chomping motion to distract opposing teams on third downs. Gray’s team brainstormed ideas and settled on towels that called back to Cignetti’s Pittsburgh roots.
The Steelers are famous for their yellow rally towels that fans wave throughout the game.
“At James Madison, when they would score touchdowns they would throw streamers down the stands and we kind of took that feedback and this kind of served the same visual purpose,” Gray said. “But instead of just on touchdowns it’s literally every play of the game.”
They debuted in the student section for the Nebraska game and proved so popular that they laid out towels for every fan in attendance in the two games since. The initial rally towels had the phrase “Study Later” on them in reference to the letter Cignetti sent to fans before the Maryland game encouraging them to show up.
The towel for the Washington game had Cignetti in bold letters below a logo similar to that of a famed cigarette company.
“We got in a little trouble for that,” Gray said. “It was too close to a copyright issue and got told to stop doing it.”
The most recent rally towel had Cignetti’s “Fast, Physical and Relentless” motto on it. Gray confirmed they will hand out towels once again for the regular-season finale against Purdue.
“It also got people getting into the stadium early, which has long been a problem,” Gray said. “It solved a series of historical entrenched fan issues all at once.”
The university did a lot of work to improve the fan experience before the season as well, which included overhauling all the concession stands at Memorial Stadium.
There’s an ongoing dialogue between Cignetti and the department on further improvements. His director of operations Blake Jackson meets with Gray and senior assistant athletic director for marketing Mark Skirvin on a weekly basis.
“It just can’t be on them,” Dolson said. “It’s part of our real vision we shared together. We need to make certain in every way that we are rising to the occasion. Everything from our promotion to our game operations and everything that we do.”
“At the same time, our fans have risen to the occasion. In order to build the consistency we want to have, everybody has to do their part. We take a lot of pride in that responsibility and don’t just put it on coach Cig and the team.”
Cignetti has taken notice as well.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, Cignetti told The Herald-Times that he appreciates “everybody rowing in the same direction.”
“They are certainly doing their part in terms of supporting the program and you’ve got the sports marketing group and everybody has played a key role,” Cignetti said. “Now you are seeing the sold-out stadiums and people are over the top excited. Everybody plays a role. it’s critical.”
But Cignetti wouldn’t be who he is without keeping the “main thing as the main thing” as he said earlier this year.
“At the end of the day, you got to get it done between the white lines,” Cignetti said. “That puts them in the stands.”
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
