Sports comment: With IU’s national championship, my life story flashed before me

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

“From the Gerry DiNardo and Matt LoVecchio days to national champions. It's still hard to comprehend.  #IUFB is the national champion,” Trevor Andershock wrote on X following Indiana’s 27-21 win over Miami in the CFP National Championship game.

Andershock is a writer for Mike Pegram’s peegs.com, the website that has chronicled Indiana University sports for decades.

There have been a lot of social media posts that have tried to sum up what happened during this season, but that one caught my attention more than most. Andershock was using DiNardo and LoVecchio as symbols for a futile football experience, not that DiNardo and LoVecchio specifically deserved any more blame than anybody else for IU football being bad.

The reason why it caught my attention is because my career as a sportswriter started when I covered the actual Gerry DiNardo and Matt LoVecchio.  I was a graduate student at IU at the time, and I worked a few football games as a freelance writer, and one of the games I covered, and it was one of the first times I had my byline appear in a widely distributed story.

One of the games I covered happened on Nov. 8, 2003, when IU beat Illinois 17-14 on an 8-yard touchdown run from LoVecchio with 24 seconds left, and I remember interviewing LoVecchio in the locker room after the game, and I remember the unbridled joy in the locker room.

IU football was not good in 2003. They went 2-10.

Move ahead 22 years later, and IU just won the national championship, and I saw my life story flash before my eyes.

Growing up in Lake County, I remember my dad taking me to my first IU football game in 1981, a 21-20 win at Northwestern. We would go see IU play every other year when they visited Northwestern.

Then I went there as a student, not ever imagining what I would do for a living. I saw well over 30 IU football games. It was a lovely way to spend a fall Saturday in Bloomington.

Prior to this year, IU had not won a bowl game since the 1991 Copper Bowl. That was my freshman year as an undergrad.

I graduated, went to work in the real world and then came back for grad school. Then I started working at the games. I met writers like Bob Hammel and Terry Hutchens.

I got to see Antwaan Randle El play football. This is no slight on Fernando Mendoza, but I felt almost guilty when Mendoza won the Heisman Trophy because Antwaan Randle El was a more dazzling college football player than Mendoza. He would make some ridiculous move and make a defender grab a fistful of air while he scrambled out of the pocket.

That fourth down touchdown run by Mendoza against Miami? It seemed like Randle El did that weekly.

But Randle El’s coach Cam Cameron was dreadfully incompetent – he actually tried using Randle El as a wide receiver instead of at quarterback at one point – and Randle El never made a bowl game.

Terry Hoeppner had some fine moments as a coach – a 2006 upset over a top 15 Iowa team stands out – but he died of a brain tumor in June 2007.

They had elite running backs like Anthony Thompson, Vaughn Dunbar, Alex Smith and Tevin Coleman. 

Things got a little better under Kevin Wilson. And I will insist that the Tom Allen era would be viewed differently had fans been allowed to pack the stadium in 2020. The Allen era as coach went in the pits when he lost his offensive and defensive coordinators to head coaching jobs and couldn’t replace them with a similar brain trust.

Ironically, the offensive and defensive coordinators were Kalen DeBoer and Kane Wommack, who are now the head coach and defensive coordinator, respectively, at Alabama, the team that IU drubbed 38-3 in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.

Again, your life flashes before you. You get older and you do not take as many things as an observer for granted. You look at the bigger picture.

It’s easy to say that it is hard to comprehend IU winning a national championship. Other than Ohio State or Alabama fans, who comprehends such things?

Sports columnist Bob Kravitz once noted that it would take a “miracle worker” to win big with IU football. But I always thought that was a cynical take.

What sets Curt Cignetti apart was that it does not take miracles, though a missed 27-yard field goal from Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game came close.

It takes hard work, sure, and it takes a little luck, and it takes a little more financial commitment.

IU skipped a step in the process. Instead of being a perennial bowl contender, they just went right ahead and jumped from 3-9 to national champion in two years.

But as my life flashed before my eyes, I knew this was always something that you could comprehend.