BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Writer’s bloc is a real and weird thing.
I knew I wanted to write a Thanksgiving column about how the Indiana football team has given Hoosiers fans something unprecedented to be thankful for. You’d think it would be like shooting fish in a barrel given that the Hoosiers are 10-1, but today I struggled with what approach to take.
I wrote two different aborted versions of a column, but neither stuck. I had to set it aside for a bit.
Meanwhile, with a busy week of big events for Indiana athletics, we’ve divided the labor this week at Hoosiers On SI between basketball and football. Jack Ankony is in The Bahamas covering basketball at Battle 4 Atlantis and is doing a great job per usual.
I have football duties during Old Oaken Bucket game week with the Hoosiers on the precipice of the College Football Playoff. Just because I’m all-football, all-the-time this week doesn’t mean I’m not keeping tabs on basketball. So at 2:30 p.m., it was a good time to set the column aside, as I turned on No. 14 Indiana’s Battle 4 Atlantis consolation semifinal against No. 3 Gonzaga.
Sometimes inspiration finds you in the strangest, most bittersweet ways.
Surely, I thought, Indiana’s basketball team wouldn’t play as poorly as it did in its 89-73 opening loss to Louisville on Wednesday.
By the score, the Gonzaga game wasn’t as bad. The Bulldogs only bested the Hoosiers by 16 points in an 89-73 Gonzaga victory. Hey! That’s a 12-point improvement from Wednesday! On Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for gallows humor.
By deed, of course, Indiana’s trip to the islands has been nothing short of a disaster. Indiana’s tepid scheduling put all of the onus for resume-building into this three-game burst.
In a strange twist, Indiana sort of got what it wanted as Gonzaga also managed to lose its Battle 4 Atlantis opener. However, merely playing good teams isn’t enough. A supposedly improved Indiana had to win, too. Of course, the Hoosiers came up well short.
It’s the contrasts of the world that sometimes can provide clarity. As I watched basketball struggle, it put into sharper relief the remarkable football season the Hoosiers have had.
After the Gonzaga game, Indiana coach Mike Woodson said that his team is “not connected defensively.” It made one thankful that Indiana’s football team was able to be connected defensively from game one in the 2024 season.
Woodson also said that Indiana is “a new team that’s got seven new players that we’re still trying to work things out.” It makes you thankful that football, with 27 new players, was able to be excellent straight out of the box.
Indiana’s basketball defense has been very poor in Battle 4 Atlantis. Louisville converted 56.9% of its shots. Gonzaga was at 48.4%, but the Bulldogs also steamrolled to 57 first-half points against the Hoosiers.
“I thought we were on-point from a defensive standpoint heading out here to The Bahamas. I thought our defense was where we wanted it to be,” Woodson said. “These last two games our perimeter play has gotten exposed, and I have to fix that. We have to get guys sitting down and not having miscues in terms of our defensive coverages.”
It makes you thankful that Curt Cignetti has instilled in his Hoosiers a never-satisfied attitude. When Indiana’s football team was beating Western Illinois by 74 or Charlotte by 38 points, Cignetti never once let on that he was satisfied. That team is always in growth mode.
One of the things Gonzaga did well was get down the floor in transition early in the game against a slow-reacting Indiana defense. The Bulldogs also successfully lured Indiana defenders away from the rim, creating easy chances for cutters to score. Communication and execution problems were rampant for the Hoosiers.
“A lot of it is our believing in one another. Believing in our rotations and being in the areas where we’ve played to protect the paint and to get out. We’ve been very awful in that category the last two games,” Woodson said.
It makes you thankful that the football team had both its offensive and defensive game plans implemented in fall camp, and they’ve built on their work since to solidify it. At few, if any, points in the season have the football Hoosiers had any lack of belief in their teammates.
“We’ve got to get where we’re competing against top-notch teams like the Gonzaga’s and Louisville’s. We just have to keep working at it,” Woodson said after Indiana moved to 4-7 against nonconference Power Five competition and Gonzaga going back to the 2022-23 season.
It makes you thankful that Cignetti took an Indiana team that was 3-9 in 2023 and put the current Hoosiers in a position for a probable eight-win Big Ten season in his first go-around.
There’s other football things to be thankful for, too. While Indiana’s richly rewarded, NIL-compensated basketball talent struggles to find themselves and to give the desired effort at times, the hunger that Indiana’s football team has is seemingly insatiable.
I’m thankful for their hunger. The football players get some NIL coin, but these are guys who had something to prove. The football world deemed them to be something less than they are when they began their college careers. Now? They’re having their revenge on the field by proving everyone wrong.
Football makes you thankful for the individual consistency of the players which leads to collective excellence. Meanwhile, the wide variance in form from Indiana’s basketball players continues to be confounding.
Finally, Indiana fans can be thankful for a football team that has greatly exceeded expectations. It’s still too early to know how close the basketball team will come to meeting theirs, but the current mood isn’t very thankful in that regard.
Maybe it wasn’t so hard to write about what to be thankful for as the Indiana football team is concerned. I just needed the proper inspiration to understand how good they’ve been and how poor it can be when a team can’t do the same.
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