Category: IU football

Are you ready for some football?

July 29, 2009by Jeff TaylorLeave a comment

Last night I went to an IU football kick off event hosted by the the IU Alumni Association. There was free food, free beer, lots of Hoosiers and special guest speakers.

Athletic Director Fred Glass was there to introduce the main speaker for the night, your coach and mine Bill Lynch.

Lynch spoke for maybe 15 minutes and took some questions from the audience about the Pistol offense, our back up quarterback situation, the new facilities and the outlook for this year’s football team.

But the conversation that I found myself involved in most often, whether it was with the ’73 and ’62 Alumni I sat with during the speech, or with a former Hoosier football player from the Rose Bowl Team and Coach Lynch himself, was about getting the students excited about the team, creating an atmosphere of excitement in Memorial Stadium and generally getting people involved in IU football again.

Or, as I like to think of it, the same conversation Hoosier fans have every year.

There are two ways to get people excited about your program, and we saw both of them work a few years ago. The first, and most important, way is to win.

If IU puts a fun, exciting and successful program on the field people will fill the stadium. You want proof? Go back and watch the Purdue game from 2007. That place was packed with excited fans. Hoosiers want to get excited about IU football, but they need a reason.

Give us a winning football team and watch the fans show up.

The second way, and this is only a short term fix because if the team doesn’t win eventually this won’t do much, is to hire a coach who is vibrant, exciting and a great pitch man for the program. Terry Hoeppner was all of that and more. He was excited about IU football, and he made us excited about it as well.

I’m in no position to tell you if someone is a good X’s and O’s football coach, having never played the game in my life, but I can tell you this. After watching him talk last night and then speaking to him for 15 minutes after that, Bill Lynch does not have the ability to get the fan base fired up.

He may be a great X’s and O’s guy. I can’t say, but the purpose of last night’s event was to get us excited and ready for a great IU football season.

My mood, as I left there last night, can best be described as cautiously optimistic.

I don’t make it to many football games. The drive from Chicago is a bit much to do every week, but I make it to at least one game a year. I do, however, watch every game on TV, which puts me on the high end of the Committed IU Football Fan Scale.

If you can’t make me excited, then you can’t make anyone excited.

The theme song for last night’s event is a little something I like to call Bill Lynch is excited.

It’s my computer reading the lyrics to “I”m so Excited” by the Pointer Sisters while we watch paint dry. Enjoy.

“I just floated to the surface and said to myself, `it’s wet’. If you know what I mean.”

November 17, 2008by Jeff Taylor1 Comment

I got this article from my mom this morning and I was very excited that I wasn’t being asked to forward something to ten friends.

She sent it to me because one of the IU fans quoted in the article is someone she was worked with for years.

The part of the article that interested me, interested me enough to write about IU football, when I have yet to write about our first basketball game, was this:

He said the current Hoosier team doesn’t have former coach Terry Hoeppner’s ability to motivate and draw excitement from fans.

“He just goaded you into unbiased enthusiasm,” Brad Snyder said. “I mean, you just wanted to believe you were going to win, because he had magic about him.”

To my mind, that is the crux of the issue.

Under Hep, I was excited about our chances every game we played. He came in with such enthusiasm that he swept all of us up in it. So fierce was his passion that it extended after his death.

Bill Lynch is Eeyore to Terry Hoeppner’s Tigger.

Terry Hoeppner bounded into the room singing a song praising everything about IU football. And you wanted to join in on the song. Sadly, he bounded out of the room and into the clearing at the end of the path far too soon.

Bill Lynch does not inspire that reaction. He is someone you check in with every now and again to see if his house has fallen down or his tail has come off.

It’s not that Lynch is a bad coach, though based on his career record of 12 wins and 45,000 losses that argument does have some legs.

He has no cult of personality and, sadly, you can’t fake that.

On the plus side, he’s also no Glamour Boy.

I called the English Teacher Daddio

November 12, 2008by Jeff TaylorLeave a comment

I don’t know why I do this to myself year after year, but I imagine that many of you do the same thing.

Despite all the evidence that says I shouldn’t do this, I do it anyway.

I hope.

The weather is warm. It’s a great day to be outside. IU football comes up to me and says, “Hey, how about I hold this football and you kick it.”

“Oh, no! I know how this works, you’re going to hold that football there and I’ll come running up to kick it and at the last minute you will pull it away. I’ll miss and end up flat on my back.”

“Not this time,” IU football assures me.

I agree, putting aside all of my years of experience that have informed me to this point, telling me to just walk away cause this IU football is a cruel mistress. I run up and take a big swing at the ball, and sure enough, IU football yanks it away.

I am the Charlie Brown of college football fans.

And what makes it worse, is that last year, in an act of supreme cruelty, the let me kick the ball.

So this year, when they offered to hold the ball for me, I thought, “This is great! They let me kick it last year. They’re sure to hold it steady for me this year. Maybe I’ll even be able to kick this one through the uprights instead of squibbing it.”

But here I sit, bowl hopes gone, lying flat on my back in the middle of a field, the football long since taken away, and I know two things without question.

1.) Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

2.) Next August, I’ll be standing there, rubbing my hands together, just convinced enough that they’ll hold the ball for me to be willing to take another run at it.