Indiana's storybook season demands media covering Hoosiers shift attention from hoops to football

SN Staff
Mike DeCourcy
Indiana's storybook season demands media covering Hoosiers shift attention from hoops to football image

Is it possible the most surprising element of Indiana football’s astonishing 2025 season is that it’s caused Indianapolis Star beat writer Zach Osterman to miss only three Hoosiers basketball games? Nah, probably not.

From all-time losingest power-conference program to No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff, from two consensus All-Americans earlier this century to two this season, from zero bowl victories in the previous 30 years to a pair just in the past month, everything about this edition of IU football has been close to unprecedented.

That includes, though, how it has rearranged the responsibilities of those journalists who have covered the university’s athletic programs in recent years. Men’s basketball season for all Division I programs starts in early November, and for the longest time that’s when football season pretty much ended for those responsible for documenting the activities of Indiana’s two most prominent teams. Major developments would be addressed, but if there happened to be a conflict between a significant Hoosiers hoops game and another likely football L in still another hopeless season, well, this is the place where such slogans were introduced as “We Grow Basketball Here” and “In 49 other states it’s basketball, but this is Indiana.”

“I’ve been to every basketball venue in the Big Ten multiple times,” Osterman told AllSportsPeople. “But there are still football stadiums in the conference I have not visited, and that’s not because of the expansion to include the four West Coast teams. That has shifted completely.

“Football is eating up plenty of oxygen.”

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Curt Cignetti’s arrival in Bloomington has led to a revolution on the field, which will reach a new pinnacle when the Hoosiers meet the Miami Hurricanes on Monday night in the College Football Playoff National Championship. IU has won 26 of 28 games in the past two seasons, which is more victories than were gained in the previous half-dozen years combined. That has impacted reporters’ emphasis, attention, workload, sleep schedules and travel budgets.

Jim Coyle, publisher of On3's TheHoosier.com and host of Indiana Sports Beat Radio, had serious issues with his travel agent after having to journey to the Rose Bowl in Southern California through a flight connection in Fort Lauderdale.

“I don’t know how it ended up like that, but I was so mad at my travel agent I fired him,” Coyle said. “And, unfortunately, it was me. It was a 6-hour flight from Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles. That was dumb, was what that was.”

Indiana media witnessing history

It was essential to be there, regardless, because what he and the rest are reporting on is American sports history.

“Indiana is being inserted into a national narrative that not only were they never a part of, they weren’t even allowed to stick their eye, if they cracked the door open, and look to see what was going on in there,” Coyle said. “They are now at the table, and I don’t see that changing because of this coaching staff and how good they are. Yeah, there will be key guys leave here and there, but it’s not going to be the important pieces, I don’t think, for a while.

“Football never had this, but fans had been so craving for success that, ‘Hey, we’ll take this instead. Because damn, we’re kicking the crap out of people!’ Football has become the deal. Indiana has been part of the team leading the new age in college football. It’s still crazy to say, but fans are not having a problem accepting it.”

Indiana fans

Indiana is having this success without a single 5-star recruit on the roster and fewer than 10 who were ranked as 4-star prospects out of high school. Now, Coyle is fascinated to see where Indiana might be able to advance as many more such players are committing to the Hoosiers.

“Someone asked Mark Cuban: What percentage is it you pay? Because everybody thinks Indiana is buying this,” Coyle said. “The No. 1 team in NIL, Texas A&M, spent three times as much as IU did, and IU was ninth out of the 12 CFP teams. They’re not doing this with money. I don’t know where that even comes from. They’re winning teams because they are precise.

“What they’ve done with this level of talent, the zero- to 3-star guys, well that’s going to change. It’s selling itself. How good can this program get if they start getting 4- and 5- star guys that Cignetti likes and will do the things that Cignetti wants?”

Jeff Rabjohns is a former Star sports reporter who joined Peegs.com on the 247 Sports network more than a decade ago, in part because of his expertise on basketball recruiting. He now is publisher and told SN his site has four reporters currently covering the Hoosiers’ advance through the CFP.

“When they crushed Illinois when Illinois was top-10 in the country, it really started exploding after that,” Rabjohns said. “And then when they reached No. 1, when they beat Ohio State in the Big Ten title game and reached No. 1, the mushroom cloud exploded. And it’s almost like now we can’t write enough. Everything we write about IU football is just gobbled up by an audience 15-20 times the size of normal readership. It’s incredible.”

Osterman has been the primary IU beat writer for the state’s largest paper since 2015. That meant he covered as many basketball coaching searches (those that brought in Arch Miller and Mike Woodson) as winning football seasons (2019, 2020) by the time Cignetti was hired away from James Madison in November 2023.

The differences Osterman soon noticed were less obvious than Cignetti’s “Google me” quote at his first press conference and “Purdue sucks” declaration at his Assembly Hall introduction. But they likely were more impactful to the program’s effort to escape the bottom of the Big Ten Conference.

“I would say there was a tone shift even before a game was played,” Osterman told SN. “There was a lot of excitement around Cignetti. Indiana saw a pretty significant uptick in NIL support after he got the job. I think he had a keen understanding of what was necessary for him to do to raise that money. Even thinking back to that summer before his first season, there was a groundswell of excitement I had not really seen around IU football before.

“By November of ’24, it had changed substantially … When the interest is as high as it is, that’s when you realize just how much more of a behemoth football is to cover than basketball. There just are so many more players, so many more storylines. And national statistics back me up, this is not me saying it: It’s just a more popular sport.

“I’ve written this: This place has been recoded for football. They still care about basketball, don’t get me wrong, and if Darren DeVries gets it going, they’ll sell that place out and they’ll be excited. But there were 11,000 people at the Washington game, which was the last basketball game I covered in person, as compared to there have been well over 100,000 IU fans at the last two bowl games. That just gives you a sense for how all-in on football this place is.”

Journalists in attendance estimated Indiana fans occupied represented 80 percent of the 90,278 at the CFP quarterfinal in the Rose Bowl, though the similarity in school colors between IU and Alabama made that assessment a bit challenging. There was no doubt when the Hoosiers got to Atlanta for the semis against Oregon. There was little green and an estimated 90-plus percent sea of crimson among the 75,604 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.

Indiana University claims it owns the largest living alumni base in the United States, with more than 800,000. It may be the basketball program’s relative absence from national prominence – they were the No. 1 overall seed in the 2013 NCAA Tournament but eliminated in the Sweet 16, and three such finishes in that decade are the farthest they’ve advanced in the past 15 years – created a desperate hunger for the achievement football lately has delivered.

Hoosier-mania great for media outlets

It's been great for business. Coyle's syndicated program, Indiana Sports Beat Radio, added an affiliate in Bloomington after one of the stations there, WWZN, at last adopted an all-sports format. Rabjohns and Osterman are seeing massive increases in online traffic -- the one place where "traffic" is not a four-letter word.

“That fan base has always been tremendously passionate,” Osterman said. “That passion has always been directed at basketball, and so we’ve recognized Indiana as a basketball school. Growing up in the South, I saw so much in the Indiana fan base that I saw in Alabama, that I saw in Georgia, that I saw in LSU.

“What I don’t think I thought possible was the institutions that held Indiana back – for example, recruiting bases, and the state has gotten a lot better at football in the last 20 years, but it’s not Louisiana or Alabama, much less Florida, Texas, California. There was, until recently, no more cement-ceiling, caste-driven sport in America than college football. Those conventions have been overturned. You can recruit your state now, but you can also go as far afield as you need to. You can recruit a bunch of guys to one school, and then you can pick it up and move it a thousand miles.”

Cignetti did this with a large portion of his James Madison roster, but his transformation of Indiana football has been much more profound than that. Part of that is making it a story that demanded to be covered, and he’s accommodated the increased interest.

MORE: Curt Cignetti's past met his future in College Football Playoff

“One of the reasons I wanted to get to Indiana, the state, was I wanted to cover basketball at a place where it’s a big freaking deal. And, to me, Indiana was sort of the Holy Grail, whether it be high schools, college, the Pacers. Covering IU basketball was the dream,” said Rabjohns, who grew up in the DC area as the son of a career Navy man.

“Now, all of a sudden, IU football comes along and is beyond magical. You look at it, and you can make a case they’re potentially the greatest story in college football history. It’s kind of crazy it has happened when you consider IU’s historical context, but it’s been wonderful. Cignetti is fantastic to cover day-to-day. He is absolutely fantastic. The public sees the sound bites that make social media from the podium, but day to day, if you ask Curt Cignetti a good football question, you get a great football answer, and you’re probably going to learn something about the sport. He kind of has the heart of a teacher. He wants to help you understand.”

The end of this, following Monday night’s game, will mean basketball season really has arrived for the journalists on the IU beat. The Hoosiers are in the middle of the Big Ten standings at 3-3 and will play at first-place Michigan on Tuesday. Osterman is promising himself “a long nap” after the football championship game concludes. Eventually, though, he and others on the beat understand the real offseason won’t arrive until April.

“These are the things you live for,” Rabjohns told SN. “There might be some 12-, 14-, 16-hour days, but there are a lot of people in the world who have really rough, difficult jobs they have to do for 20, 30, 40 years to make ends meet. Getting to cover IU sports, getting to cover IU football making a run to the national championship game, this is the good stuff.”