Belief in an IUFB Breakthrough Starts with the 1967 Rose Bowl Team

Written By Sammy Jacobs (@Hoosier_Huddle)

Breakthrough.

If you are an Indiana Football fan you have seen this word plastered everywhere heading into the 2017 season. Tom Allen wants his players and coaches to believe that a breakthrough is possible and he wants the fans to buy into that belief as well.

The Hoosiers have been close over the last couple of seasons, but have ultimately had fallen short against top-25 opponents and in a couple of bowl games. The last shortcoming was a 24-22 loss to Utah in the Foster Farms Bowl and that was when Tom Allen put his foot down and said to himself, “I’m sick and tired of being close.”

So how do a team and a fan base start to believe in a Hoosier program that has only qualified for 11 bowl games in their history, hasn’t finished a season above the .500-mark since 2007 and last went to the Rose Bowl before man landed on the moon?

They take a trip 50 years into the past to 1967 when the Hoosiers, who were coming off a 1-8-1 season and had just 14 wins in the prior seven seasons leading up to ’67, made their magical run to a Big Ten title and a berth in the Rose Bowl against O.J. Simpson’s USC Trojans after going 9-1 in the regular season, before falling 14-3 to USC. However, the lesson here is that great things have been accomplished at Indiana and can be accomplished again.

That 1967 team, led by quarterback Harry Gonzo and wide receiver Jade Butcher, started the season 8-0 and knocked off the third ranked Boilermakers 19-14 on the season’s final day to clinch the Rose Bowl berth. Despite the loss, IU finished the season ranked fourth in the final A.P. Poll. That season featured five games in which the Hoosiers won by five points or less. Close games, sounds familiar right?

During the 2015 and 2016 seasons the Hoosiers played in 15 games decided by one possession or less. The Hoosiers were 7-8 in those games. Those eight losses include a seven-point loss at home to the top ranked Buckeyes, an eight-point loss to No. 9 Iowa, a double overtime loss to No. 14 Michigan in 2015 and a five-point defeat to No. 10 Nebraska. The Hoosiers are close, really close and a channeling of the 1967 Rose Bowl team could help the Hoosiers get over that hump.

As Tom Allen put it at Big Ten Media Day in Chicago last week, “the bottom line is that it creates the visual picture of what you want.”

When new Indiana head coach Tom Allen was introduced in December said, “my goal for this program is to break through in 2017. We've been close. I joked about it in my last press conference. I'm tired of getting text messages from my buddies telling me how hard we play, how close we are. Those things are true. It's time to breakthrough.”

In order to have a breakthrough, Tom Allen needs to have his staff and players believe that Indiana is capable of completing that task.

When Allen first took over the head coaching duties from Kevin Wilson he "met with our players after I took over, I wrote these three numbers on the board -- I did this with our staff as well -- 50, 26, 10. And I asked them if they knew what those numbers represented, and they didn't.”

Knowing a program’s history is important to the process of changing the culture, so Allen told his team, “it's been 50 years since we won the Big Ten; it's been 26 years since we won a bowl game; it's been 10 years since we had a winning season at Indiana.”

Those are goals that aren’t just going to magically happen at any school. There are a lot of moving parts that go into breaking those streaks. Allen and his staff must continue their upward trend in recruiting, players and coaches must continue to improve in all three phases of the game and finally, IU has to start finishing off the close games that have haunted them over the past five-plus years. However, all of that starts with buy-in and belief in the coach whose attitude and enthusiasm is infectious.

”We're going to accomplish all three of those, I told our team. If you don't believe that, you need to leave. Said the same thing to our staff. I love them. I appreciate them. But I want a coaching staff, I want a football team that believes.”

A coach cannot control the odd bounces that happen in football or which way the wind blows when kicking a field goal, but they can control is how a team attacks each day and the belief that they have in each other. Tom Allen believes he has the team to end these streaks. It may not happen all at once, but Coach Allen can point to 1967 and say ‘It’s happened before and it will happen again.’

Indiana’s march toward a ‘breakthrough’ starts when fall camp begins on August 2nd and fans will get their first look at the Hoosiers on August 31st when IU takes on Ohio State in what many, including Tom Allen, have called the biggest home opener in program history.

2017 is filled with ‘breakthrough’ opportunities as three potential top-10 teams come to Bloomington and the Hoosier schedule features seven teams that failed to reach a bowl game in 2016. Can these Hoosiers follow in the footsteps of the 1967 Hoosiers? Only time will tell, but it all starts with the power of believing it can happen.