History 1, Tom Allen 0

 And now, as night follows day, Tom Allen is out at Indiana. He was going to be out anyway no matter what happened in West Lafayette yesterday, but blowing a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter and surrendering the Old Oaken Bucket to Purdue again confirmed the regime change was coming.

For that, you can only feel a sense of deja vu, and also a tinge of sadness. Because while Tom Allen turned out not to be a good head football coach, he remains a profoundly decent and classy human being.

He had his moment of glory from 2018 to 2020, when he built an Indiana program that went 19-14, beat Penn State and Wisconsin and went to two January bowl games, the Outback and the Gator. But as has been the case in Bloomington since time immemorial, he was unable to sustain that level of competence.

The 6-1 record in 2020 was followed by a 9-27 run over the next three seasons, including 3-23 in the Big Ten. And with USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington coming aboard next year, things were only going to get worse unless Indiana did something desperate.

Like, you know, swallow the $20 million buyout in Allen's deal.

(Although they settled on $15.5 mill, with donors coughing up the dough)

That AD Scott Dolson and the Indiana administration were willing to do that at least signals football might be important to them after all, though the enormous weight of IU's mediocre gridiron history remains a so-far insurmountable obstacle. I am 68 years old, and in my lifetime the only sustained period of success happened under Bill Mallory.

Since then, Cam Cameron, Gerry DiNardo, Bill Lynch, the late Terry Hoeppner, Kevin Wilson and Allen failed to more than temporarily shed IU's implacable beige-ness. And for all Allen's failings as a head coach, none of his five predecessors approached his .402 winning percentage, nor won more than 19 games in their tenures. Allen won 33.

But what he had done lately carried far more heft. Because there is no more what-have-you-done-lately enterprise than D-I college football, enormous cash cow that it is.

So will the next guy, whoever he is, lift Indiana to at least the level of OK-ness Mallory brought to Bloomington 35 or more years ago?

I wish I could say yes.

Best I can do is "We shall see."