The Magical IU to Notre Dame Jacket

Now that football is basically dead to me for the foreseeable future, I wanted to get to a post that has been a month in the making. Ok, maybe “dead to me” is a little dramatic, but that game this past weekend took what was once a fierce hangover to complete joy, back to a somewhat tempered hangover.  I would have preferred to not go back to the hangover but losing like that was soul crushing.  It moved from alchohol induced to just “icing the kicker” induced, and no – I am not talking about Smirnoff Ice.  That would have been preferred.

Plus, I feel like we have been tearing up the football beat when there are other good things just starting to get fired up, and that is collegiate basketball.

To throw another Tom Wilhelmsen curve at you, this isn’t a collegiate post about the Huskies fast start to Pac-12 play.  I am going to save that one for another time.  I can’t decide if they are quasi-real.

I wanted to touch on a tweet that NoFairWeatherFans.com fan (I looked at that a few times, I think that looks right), Brian Creighton, passed along to me that hits right at the core tenet of the name of this site.

Now, I thought the fair weather fan really was a PNW thing – the teams here generally aren’t that good, and when they are good, everyone comes out of the woodwork.  Every Seattleite has a Huskies hoodie from the 1991 Rose Bowl victory, a Refuse to Lose sign, one of those god-awful rust colored Sonics #20 jerseys, and now the Russell Wilson jerseys.  I accept Seattle for what it is.

But, this phenomenon has taken roots in the Midwest as well, in a phenomenon I thought, seriously, wasn’t real.  I had to double take at this photo a few times.

WUT – (the original tweet here)

Hoosiers “fans” – for shame.  The description of this product just floors me.  This is a must-have?  I can think of at least one player that wouldn’t agree with that statement.

“That jacket sucks” – Antwaan Randle-El

I think my favorite part of this piece of opinion editorial is that I have used Antwaan Randle El twice in the matter of a few months.  Name another blog that has done that! (Probably for good reason, but I think I am stumbling upon SEO gold here.)

I get IU football hasn’t been that good over the years.  Now, their futbol team is actually really good, but I don’t think anyone goes to college soccer games unless you live in Akron. In fact, the American Football version of the Hoosiers has been downright terrible.  According to Wikipedia (entire piece of work debunked using this as a source) the all time record for IU in football is 454–624–45 (.424).  Ouch.  This also included one year of Sam Wyche in 1983 (who coach the Bengals to some degree of success with Boomer Esiason) and a BUNCH of Lee Corso.  That last sentence really was the most painful to type.  He coached there from 1973 to 1982.  Take that to your local trivia game and clean house.

These numbers aren’t inspiring.  I can see why students wouldn’t be so excited for IU football.  But can you really claim a private Catholic school in Indiana as your football team when you don’t go there?  It isn’t even another state school or satellite campus.  At least then I could write about “Campus Confusion” (ask Ben) but that can’t be claimed here.  Do you think ND students claim IU as their basketball team?  I don’t know if that is the case.  If anything, I would adopt IU’s sweet basketball warmup pants, but that’s about it.

You can only rock those pants when you are amazing. They are, so there’s that.

Candy-striper pants aside, I have always dreamed about the player who rocks one jersey during a game and then flashes the other teams jersey when they do something like score on their own basket or take a safety on purpose.  That would be so incredibly awesome, I don’t think the 685 previous words could describe how great that would be.  There would be a real product opportunity (reversible jersey/jacket/hat/undershirt) as this player would be emblazoned in the halls of my personal sports glory forever.  But just a straight up reversible jacket catering to people that want their cake and eat it too?  Weak.