Indiana Football Provided Much Needed Joy to Many in an Otherwise Grim Year

Written by Sammy Jacobs (@Hoosier_Huddle)

2020 was a difficult year for everyone for a variety of reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed people’s lives, put a halt on business and school as well as took away some of the activities that people love. We have seen civil unrest and people murdered. Jobs were lost, holidays became just another reminder of what 2020 took from us. Everybody lost something in 2020.

One of the great things about sports is that it provides a distraction from the perils of life for three or four hours. That’s exactly what Indiana football did on Saturdays, even though the season was in canceled then restarted.

“As the season started playing itself out and I started getting a lot of feedback I get a lot of emails I get people send me messages write me notes and things can send in cards in the mail send people even recently talking to them.” Indiana head coach Tom Allen said. “Even here locally and they get emotional just thanking us for the joy that we brought you know during a tough, tough time I've had people reach out to me they've lost loved ones, you know late even lost loved ones that were huge Indiana football fans that, that, you know, they didn't get a chance to experience this season because they maybe it passed before the season started but but yet that gave them so much joy and hope and encouragement because they were down and they were hurting you know in a serious way and you don't really think about that because you're just man we're just battling every week just to try and stay healthy and compete and try and win football games but then man you start realizing man this this gave a lot of people in our entire fan base and all associated with Indiana as university as a state.”

The Hoosiers started the season off with a dramatic win over then No.8 Penn State as Michael Penix’s “The Reach” gave the Hoosiers a 36-35 overtime win by a matter of millimeters.

Indiana football was fun again. It became appointment television for fans desperate for an escape on Saturdays.

Fans enjoyed “having a Saturday game to look forward to. Maybe your week is just really, really hard and life's tough and the financial piece is too tough. Your health is struggling or your loved ones are struggling in those areas so I didn't realize it as much as I said initially, but I started realizing as it was unfolding that we were able to bring a lot of that to a lot of people (together) which is pretty awesome.” Allen said.

Even though the way fans experienced IU football games, the sense of community stayed the same. “Having this team to look forward to on Saturday afternoons helped keep a level of sanity and normalcy during this pandemic.” IU fan Jake Carl said. “Since tailgating was not allowed and the community that is shared at Memorial stadium, it was interesting to me that basically everyone else was having the same game/Twitter live follow experience as I was.”

Zach Sanford, an IU graduate living in Texas added that “I'm glad every game was televised so that I had something to look forward to. Especially, with the quasi-lockdown. I'm glad they were able to do as well as they did, because by going to a bowl game in Florida, I was able to attend the only IUFB game that had fans.”

The Hoosiers started the season 4-0 with wins over Penn State, Rutgers, Michigan and Michigan State. IU climbed as high as No. 7 in the AP Poll before losing 42-35 at Ohio State. The loss didn’t derail the season. Indiana would go on to win the next two games, a home win over Maryland and a streak-ending win at Wisconsin. That’s where the regular season concluded as the Hoosiers were hit by their own COVID outbreak that would cancel the Bucket Game against Purdue, but it was a major accomplishment that the Hoosiers overcame the hurdles they did to provide that escape every Saturday afternoon.

“It's not just a fact that you didn't have the preparation time.” Allen explained the challenges of the season. “You also knew that you could show up on Wednesday, and lose a guy or two at a certain position, and you wouldn't be able to have a younger guy ready to do those things…So I told our staff I said ‘guys we have to have the mindset to keep this as simple as we can to where we got three deep of guys that can execute what we need to be able to do. And that may cause us to be a little less whatever schematically’, but in the big scheme of things that we got we lost guys on game day that we'd had to list them as inactive and they failed, the COVID test, you know, on Friday night, or, you know, Saturday morning, the day the game, you know and that's a huge blow. And that happened to us, you know, and then the thing that also people will lose sight of with at the end when we had the have to, to, to go on pause there for those seven days well we had 28 guys that tested positive, those guys were out for two weeks, they couldn't do anything for two weeks, so I mean we're talking about no running no lifting no nothing.”

The Hoosiers 6-1 regular season earned them a spot in the Outback Bowl and one more Saturday to provide a much-needed distraction for the grim realities of life. Fans were finally allowed to attend a game that the Hoosiers played that day and while the outcome was not what people wanted, Hoosier fans let out all of the cheers that they had when watching this team at home. 2020 was grim for many, many reasons, however the Hoosiers 6-2 season was a light in an otherwise dark world.

The Hoosiers went 3-1 vs. Top-25 foes and ended losing streaks to Penn State, Michigan, Michigan State and Wisconsin. They qualified for their second-straight January bowl game and finished the season ranked 12th in the AP poll, their first season where they finished ranked since 1988. It was something a lot of people looked forward to every Saturday for eight weeks. 2020 taught us to enjoy every victory, big or small, in life and Indiana provided six exceedingly enjoyable victories in 2020 and IU fans are thankful for that.

Andrew Miller, who comes from a family of IU graduates, found a renewed joy in watching this particular team. “As a lifetime fan of IU now for greater than 30 years,” Miller said, “the 2020 football season was the first one I have experienced where each game played, I had a legitimate belief of them competing/winning AND their season resulting in me looking forward to next season.”

The 2021 season is still a long way off, but Hoosier Nation is anxiously awaiting a Labor Day weekend to watch their Indiana football squad take on Iowa in Iowa City.