Culture shocked

 Curt Cignetti has an inkling now, what he's up against. At least you figure he does if he's smart, and there's no indication he's not.

What he's up against is culture. 

What he's up against began in 1967, and pretty much ended there. For one wacky, dazzling fall, Indiana University was a football school. For one dazzling, wacky fall, football got out from under the planet-sized shadow of basketball in Bloomington, and everyone knew who Harry Gonso was and John Isenbarger and Jade Butcher, and snowy-headed John Pont, too.

And then ...

And then Gonso and Isenbarger and Butcher graduated.

And John Pont moved on.

And Bob Knight came to B-town, and IU built him a swanky new lab (Assembly Hall) to work his magic, and Indiana became a basketball school again, forever and amen.

Well, to heck with that, Cignetti says.

He came to Bloomington pledging to remind everyone IU was once a football school, too, and could be again. He talked big and swaggered bigger and brought in a whole bunch of new, exciting players, and said the days when IU got pushed around in Memorial Stadium were done. And all the people said "Amen!"

And then ...

And then Cignetti rolled out his new team, and it was indeed exciting and aggressive and fearless, especially on defense. The Hoosiers plain knocked the slobber out of poor Florida International, and all the people ... um, all the people ...

Left at halftime. Same as ever.

Oh, not all the people left, but the student section -- the heart and soul of any college football crowd -- emptied out. Went back to tailgating, just like always. And Cignetti got his inkling that (as Clarence said in "It's A Wonderful Life") this wasn't gonna be so easy.

He acknowledged as much at the top of week, noting the halftime evacuation and saying there was still work to do to turn football Saturdays into a happening in B-town. Mind you, he surely understood this walking in the door; only a dope would believe Memorial Stadium instantly could become The Shoe in Columbus or the Big House in Ann Arbor or even Ross-Ade Stadium up at Purdue (whose fans did not bail at halftime Saturday as the Boilermakers laminated Indiana State 49-0). And Cignetti's no dope.

It takes time to build a culture. He knows that. 

What he might not have known, at least completely, is that to build a culture in Bloomington you first have to un-build a whole other culture. And it's a culture that's been calcifying for decades.

It's a culture in which everyone shows up on game days and flies their IU flags and wears their IU gear, and tailgates with the best of 'em. And then the game begins and they ... keep on tailgating with the best of 'em. 

Maybe they'll wander into the stadium, eventually. Maybe they'll still be sitting in the parking lot at halftime, chowing down and popping another cold one.

That's IU football.

IU football is everyone getting psyched about Ohio State coming to town, because half of Ohio will come with the Buckeyes, and they all wear red, too. So for once Memorial Stadium will be a sea of red just like, say, Nebraska is for every home game.

IU football is a particular Saturday a good space of years ago, when a decent Illinois team came to town and Indiana lost but, you know, not by a lot. A sportswriter colleague of mine was walking out next to some IU fans, and later he expressed amazement (and a bit of disgust) that they were all talking about how Indiana had put up a noble fight and didn't lose by that much, and that was pretty, pretty OK.

They were happy they only lost by 10 (or whatever it was), my colleague said, or something similar. That's IU football for ya.

And it's what Cignetti is up against. 

A bunch of Ws will help. Regular bowl game appearances will, too. When Indiana's good -- when it takes the Bucket from Purdue or beats a Penn State or scares the bejabbers out of a Michigan or an Ohio State -- the fans come and they stay and Memorial Stadium rocks with their sound, same as anywhere else. 

But it's going to take awhile for that to happen every Saturday. It's going to take awhile before the football becomes the attraction and not the socializing, and before the students stick around and turn Memorial Stadium into Thunderdome, and no one, at the end of the day, leaves happy that Ohio State helped turn the joint into a sea of red, but leaves pissed because Indiana didn't send the Buckeyes home on their shields.

That day will come, Cignetti promises.

And what a great shouting day will it be if it does?