Make no mistake, Indiana is a football school. It’s not even close

It’s not even a question.

On the same day IU football sold out season tickets in just hours, the men’s basketball team — once the school’s golden goose — lost to Northwestern for the sixth straight time, while Assembly Hall’s balcony seating remained empty.

Over the past 20 years, Indiana fans have banked far more core memories from football than basketball. An entire generation has grown up without tasting any sense of sustained hoops success — in a place that worships the sport like no other.

While Curt Cignetti flipped the campus’ priorities on its head the past two seasons, the basketball rot was well entrenched.

Since 2015:

• Indiana football has reached the postseason six times.
• Indiana basketball has reached NCAA tournament four times.

Keep in mind, before Indiana football won this year’s national championship, it entered this past season as the losingest program in FBS history. And even with that albatross around its neck, football has seen more success over the past decade than its basketball counterpart.

If the Hoosiers (17-11, 8-9) miss out on the 2026 NCAA tournament, which looks entirely possible, it would mark the eighth time in the past 10 years Indiana has sat out March Madness.

At Indiana. And in an era where it’s seemingly harder to miss the tournament than make it with the expanded field of 68.

It gets worse.

Indiana hasn’t reached an Elite Eight since 2002, when the Hoosiers upset top-ranked Duke in the Sweet 16 en route to a national championship game loss to Maryland.

Since that run, 60 teams (SIXTY!) have reached at least one Elite Eight, including the likes of St. Peter’s, Florida Atlantic, George Mason, Loyola Chicago, VCU, Dayton, St. Joseph’s and Davidson.

Already on its sixth full-time head coach since firing Bob Knight, Indiana has been chasing ghosts ever since. The Hoosiers’ five national titles still rank tied for fifth with Duke for most in NCAA history, but the last one was in 1987, and besides that outlier 2002 season under Mike Davis, Indiana hasn’t come anywhere close since.

Love him or hate him, Knight won. He had a .731 winning percentage and won 11 Big Ten titles and 659 games in his 28 seasons in Bloomington. His successors have won 493 games (.581) in 26 combined seasons with just three conference titles.

Tom Crean came closest to replicating Knight’s success. He inherited a program beset by sanctions caused by Kelvin Sampson, won the Big Ten twice and had Indiana ranked No. 1 for 10 weeks in the 2013 season, but was undone by a Syracuse zone in March. (Meanwhile, Sampson has turned Houston into a team no one wants to play.)

Archie Miller was supposed to be ‘a home-run hire.’ He wasn’t, and has a losing record over his four seasons at Rhode Island.

Indiana next looked to a ‘Bob Knight guy’ — something a large portion of the fan base had been screaming for. No one else was hiring Mike Woodson, but because his diploma said ‘Indiana’, he was their guy. IU fans ran him out of town after missing back-to-back NCAA tournaments.

Darian DeVries is the latest to try his hand at getting it right in Bloomington.

IndyStar IU Insider Zach Osterman had this to say after Tuesday’s latest setback versus Northwestern:

‘To the media, he unpacked, calmly, what led to that loss. In more private moments, DeVries might have considered in some way the wider lesson: Basketball, in this place and this time, has become harder — much harder — than it really ought to be. And restoring even some baseline measure of success here will require resetting a lot of once-sacred conventions that are now tired, worn, withered and perhaps even dead.

‘That is an almighty task.

‘Making too much of any one loss can be dangerous. No single night should act as a referendum on an entire program.

‘… It is justifiably difficult for a fan base so routinely let down by what once was its flagship program to stop itself from defaulting toward anger, frustration and blame. But impatience is a weed, not a flower. It will overrun and smother the garden long before anything blooms.

‘… At a certain point, benefit of the doubt runs thin. Impatience becomes ingrained. The sins of prior failures are passed down through coaching tenures.

‘DeVries carries that weight now. Few of these problems are of his own making. This program’s many ills and cultural difficulties predate his coming to Bloomington. These games cannot be referendums, but the relentless eroding of faith makes them so.’

Indiana basketball is as well-resourced as any program in the country. But with Hoosiers donors getting a taste of unimaginable football success, a lot of that money may be headed across the parking lot from Assembly Hall to Memorial Stadium.

The fans have already.