'LEO' Foundation is What IU Will Lean on When Inevitable Storms Come in 2021

Written by Sammy Jacobs (@Hoosier_Huddle)

As the 2021 college football season is getting closer on the horizon and pre-season predictions are coming out things are looking sunny and hopeful for every team. It’s a new year, everyone is 0-0. However, every team will face their own storms during the college football season. Some storms are major, like an injury to a key player or an extended losing streak that costs a coach their job, while some are small, like a fumble in a key spot or a missed field goal in the first quarter. Just like a ship, every team needs to find their safe harbor and for the Indiana Hoosiers, that harbor is called ‘LEO’.

“The storms are gonna come and that's why it's so critical that you know, who we are as a program and our foundational components of accountability toughness and love, and and they are branded with the phrase ‘LEO’.” Indiana head coach Tom Allen said.

‘LEO’ is more than just a catch phrase or motto for the Indiana Hoosiers football program, but like most team cultures it is tough to have something tangible to describe it. One can point to Indiana’s 14-7 record over the last two seasons and say ‘LEO’ was the cause, but what does ‘LEO’ look like outside of the win-loss column?

“It all starts with accountability and having an environment where you recruit coaches and players that want to be held accountable, that understand the value of that, they embrace that they want to be coached. They want to be held to high standards. And then with that comes the coach and the player doing his part, and then the player, taking that to another level, and holding his teammates accountable, not just the coaches doing it but the players now doing it, and that's where we got to, but then now every group, every team becomes their new, you know, DNA for that group, okay the foundations are the same, the pillars don't change,” Allen explained.

The Hoosiers have fallen back on their ‘LEO’ foundation multiple times over the last two seasons when starting quarterback Michael Penix has gone down with injury as Peyton Ramsey put the team first in 2019 and Jack Tuttle stepped up in 2020.

“That's what's going to get you to those times, it's gonna allow you to grow and I think those that have that anchor and that foundation, they just keep on growing.” Allen said. And I think even in the pandemic this program was able to continue to grow and develop because we had a strength that was bigger than the game and it showed up.”

It's still June and nobody knows when or where the inevitable storms will hit, but they will hit and the teams with a solid foundation will be able to ride them out.