For Indiana Football, Sustained Success and Consistency are Next Steps

The Hoosiers hope to celebrate more in 2020 Image: Amanda Pavelka Hoosier Huddle

Written By: Nate Comp (@NathanComp1)

You can officially put a bow on the 2019-20 Indiana football season. The Hoosiers finished the year with an 8-5 record, its best season since 1993. It was the first winning season since 2007, the Hoosiers had a positive conference record, they left West Lafayette victorious with the Old Oaken Bucket and they broke the nation’s longest streak for being unranked. But now, all that is in the past and the question becomes…

What’s next?

It’s a valid question. A January bowl game that was a couple plays away from a program-defining victory, a number of players returning on both sides of the ball and an athletic department that seems to be completely backing the future of the program warrants excitement for what is to come.

What needs to come can be summarized in just one phrase. Not “national title contender”, not “Big Ten champion”, I don’t even need “top three in the Big Ten East.” What this program needs is as simple as this: sustained success.

Sustained success. It doesn’t have to be playing in a January bowl game against one of the SEC’s elites every year. It doesn’t have to be a team that is perennially ranked in the AP poll. Rather, what this program needs is sustained success.

It needs to continue to play in bowl games year-after-year. It needs to continue to beat the teams it should and compete for 60 minutes in games in which they are not favored. It needs to continue to earn the extra practices that comes with postseason eligibility, and it needs to get incrementally better in each of these practices.

It needs this because, let’s face it, the only thing that’s been consistent about Indiana football over the past couple decades has been its inconsistency. New coaches, new schemes, flashes of greatness from a couple players that ultimately lead to little and the program finds itself back at square one. Everything around the program has been inconsistent.

And that’s what can’t happen with this season’s success. It can’t be just a blip on the radar, an outlier from the mean.

Every next step that this program must be in the pursuit of sustained success. The February signing class must build on the team’s depth and develop to become the next superstars and consistent starters that Coach Allen and his staff envision them to be. Spring practices must make the fundamentals habitual.