Know Your Opponent: The Indiana Hoosiers

Welcome back to another Buckeyes football season and another round of Know Your Opponent! For you newcomers, in this column extraordinaire, WFNY examines each of the Buckeyes’ opponents,  and parses what makes them tick: Their coach, players, record, mascot, traditions, infamous alumni murderers, that sort of stuff.

This week we take a look into the Buckeyes’ opening foe: The Hoosiers of Indiana University! This is the first weeknight game for the Buckeyes since the 2015 season opener against Virginia Tech. I view this as an insult. Everyone knows real college football is played on Saturdays, and only the scrubs get the weeknight games. This will be only the Buckeyes’ third weekday opener since 2010, but it is still degrading. In my opinion, it’s putting us in the same category as shitbags like Buffalo, Eastern Michigan, and Miami (of Ohio). Anyway, on to the Hoosiers!

Take a gander at last season’s Indiana KYO for mascot, traditions, famous alumni, and all the other shit that hasn’t changed in eight months.

TL; DR: They have no mascot, “Hoosier” is an old-timey word for slow-moving or lazy, Indiana has been a vile bastion of white supremacy for centuries, and their previous head coach is now our offensive coordinator. Also, there are no stats or records as this is the first game of the season. We’ll focus on the new and exciting stuff in this column…. I’m trying to make this work, people, cut me some slack.

Coach: Tom Allen

Replacing Kevin Wilson, who was unceremoniously fired amidst rumors that he mistreated players, including pressuring them to play with injuries, is former Indiana defensive coordinator, Tom Allen. Wilson, who had just signed a six-year, $15.3 million contract extension in 2015, was of course immediately scooped up by Urban Meyer and made the Buckeyes’ offensive coordinator and tight ends coach. I wish I could continue receiving millions of dollars from every job I’ve been fired from. A deal like that would preclude the necessity to have a job at all, which to me is the only point of being a millionaire. If I did want to keep working, there’s no other boss I’d rather have than Urban Meyer, who obviously has zero qualms about hiring coaches of questionable character (See: Schiano, Greg), so I would easily fit in on the staff.

Allen, an Indianan by birth, attended Maranatha Baptist University, then got his graduate degree from Indiana. I’m assuming he played football at Maranatha, but none of his bios on the Webz mention him ever playing. His first coaching gigs after grad school were as the DC for a bunch of Indiana high schools; it doesn’t matter which ones. He moved up to college coaching in 2007, as the DC and special teams’ coordinator of Wabash College, again in Indiana. Wabash is “famous” for being one of America’s three remaining male-only liberal arts colleges. Fun! I certainly knew this school existed before writing this. He then moved to Lambuth, Drake, and Arkansas State, all as the DC or associate head coach, a position that definitely needs to exist for football reasons. In 2012 he moved on to Ole’ Miss, where he served as the linebackers and special teams coach. In 2015 he jumped to South Florida to be the DC, then in 2016 to Indiana to be the DC and associate head coach. According to his official IU bio, Allen “engineered one of the top defensive turnarounds in the country in 2016. IU’s defense improved in every major statistical category against a schedule featuring four top 10 opponents, a program first.” So, uh, watch out for that defense, Scarlet and Grey fans.

Allen seems like an all-around good guy, and a normal dude as far as high-level football coaches go. However, he does bear an uncanny resemblance to Clarence Boddicker, the main villain from Robocop. You cannot un-see it.

Now all I can imagine is Allen pacing the sidelines, being comically evil for no reason, chain-smoking cigarettes and tonging the pins out of grenades to chuck at players not giving 100 percent during dummy drills.

Hoosiers currently in the NFL (13 total):

• Tevin Coleman, RB, Atlanta
• Ethan Cooper, G, Pittsburgh
• Dan Feeney, G, Los Angeles Chargers
• Stephen Houston, RB, Baltimore
• Jordan Howard, RB, Chicago
• Darius Latham , DT, Oakland
• Cody Latimer, WR, Denver
• Mitchell Paige, WR, Los Angeles
• Devine Redding, RB, Kansas City
• Rodger Saffold, G, Los Angeles Rams
• Jason Spriggs, OT, Green Bay
• Nate Sudfeld, QB, Washington
• Shane Wynn, WR, Jacksonville

A lot of lineman and no-name skill players here, let’s be honest, and the NFL season hasn’t started so I can’t say if any of these dipshit RBs or WRs (sans Howard and Coleman) are worth a flyer in fantasy. All I can say about this crew of winners is perhaps we’d have a Falcons Super Bowl championship if offensive wunderkind Kyle Shanahanrahan ran Coleman a few times in the second half, instead of passing 17 times for no reason.

Noteworthy Players:

• Whop Philyor, WR
• J-Shun Harris II, WR
• Taysir Mack, WR
• Tegray Scales, LB
• Ty Fryfogle, WR
• A’Shon Riggins, DB
• Greg Gooch, DL
• Coy Cronk, OL

Pop Culture Soul Mate: Creed

Hoosiers would have been the easy choice, but I get paid the big bucks here at WFNY, and for their money, management does not put up with their writers phoning it in. Besides, Creed is the more befitting comparison to Indiana Football on a deeper, fundamental level. Like Indiana, Creed is a flat, featureless dumping ground for white cretins pretending their brand of warmed over, soulless pap is an emotive expression of their craft. As Indiana presents a sad facsimile of football on the field, Creed presents a tortured likeness of music with a veneer of pop Christianity to the cultureless masses of fat, pasty, rage-addled crackers that populate America’s forgotten hell-scape known as the state of Indiana. If you’ve ever met someone from Indiana, you know what I’m talking about. If not, read this about how our illustrious Vice President single handedly set in motion the worst AIDS outbreak since the 1980s when he was a congressman and Indiana’s governor.

Prediction:

I almost nixed the predictions this season. I’m predisposed to not making projections about anything, because then someone can hold me to them in the future. Sure, college football is a trivial subject in the grand game of life, so it’s not really that big a deal. But, these predictions bring to the front how much this silly sport, played by this team of poor, unpaid kids a generation younger than me, who’re coached by millionaires a generation older than me, means to my life, and it’s embarrassing. I don’t like the revelation that what’s supposed to be a fun sport and excuse to hang out with friends and drink some beers causes me real anxiety for a third of the year. No sir, that’s a sucker’s game. Better to avoid the hard questions. However, I’ve set the standard in seasons past and the fans demand prognostication, so I carry on. Consider it my burden. You’re welcome. On to the prediction.

Indiana does have a decent defense; they have some genuinely good receivers, and they’ve played us well for years. We have, however, their former head coach as our new OC, so I think we have the advantage there. The real problem with playing teams like Indiana with a roster as consistently talented as OSU’s is finding the motivation to play against weaker teams consistently selling out to beat you. It’s a good problem to have, but one the Buckeyes have not solved in a few years. Also, first games of the season are always a crapshoot to predict with no sample to go on. With those caveats out of the way, I think the Buckeyes get the win, 42-24. The Scarlet and Grey have something to prove after that Clemson debacle, and I think they take it out on the Hoosiers.

That’s it for this week, folks. Stay safe, don’t drink and drive, and Go Buckeyes!