Indiana not satisfied with recent top-25 ranking, set controls upward
After being ranked in the top-25 for the first time since 1994 and the highest since 1993, Indiana coaches and players aren't satisfied with the latest milestone and hope to continue the upward trend when they travel to Happy Valley to play No. 9 Penn State on Saturday.
The Tom Allen-led Hoosiers took another step in the direction they want the program to finish come 2020 when the Associated Press released its top-25 poll Sunday and, for the first time in 25 years, Indiana was included.
Now, staring its toughest test since week five in the face – No. 9 Penn State – there’s a line to walk between complacency and hunger, and the common thread among the leaders of the locker room is that there is no satisfaction in simply cracking the top-25.
“I was ready to see where they were going to rank us at, and once I saw it, I was very excited but not satisfied,” sophomore running back Stevie Scott said Monday. “I know, as the season goes on, we could possibly get a higher rank.”
On numerous occasions as the four-game win streak continued to swell, Allen has referred to the moment when he told his team before the season began that he believed it was a top-25 team. He mentioned how he hoped to have a top-25 defense when he was the coordinator in 2016 and how that goal expanded to the entire team when he took over as the head coach.
And when he was asked what his thoughts were after his team became the No. 24 team in the country, he said it was, “in some ways,” expected after receiving votes in last week’s poll.
But the standard has been there since Allen took on his current position, when he labeled his first season as the “breakthrough” season and publicly expressed his hopes in 2017. The only change since then was that he expressed his expectations to the team in more private ways, he said. It’s always been the same, though.
“I've been very clear from the beginning,” Allen said. “If you don't believe, then I don't want you around us. As a coaching staff, as players, I want players that believe, just like this week. If you don't believe we can go to Penn State and win at Penn State for the first time in program history, then don't get on the bus. That's the bottom line. If you don't believe, we got no chance.”
That sentiment has carried over to not only the players within the locker room but the leaders too. Redshirt senior wide receiver Donavan Hale, who has seen his ups and downs in switching to receiver from quarterback, suffering a season-ending injury in 2017 and living through the highs and lows of recent Indiana seasons that most of the roster has not seen, also said that he wasn’t satisfied when he saw his team ranked for the first time since 1994.
He felt good, but he didn’t feel fulfilled.
“It took me until my fifth year to do it, but we did it. And it started even before us,” Hale said. “We want to be the top in the country. We’re trying to win a Big Ten Championship, a National Championship. Everything.”
Obviously, a national championship won’t be won this season, and the Big Ten Title is all but lost at this point, but taking steps in the right direction is what Hale has been waiting for. The bar is always climbing, with every win.
It’s an unusual position the Hoosiers find themselves in, winning but not being satisfied when the number in the “W” column continues to rise. Even being ranked when the basketball program is not also simultaneously ranked is unusual. But until the final game of the season, Indiana intends to reach for the stars, understanding that the moon could also bring good fortune.
The primary goal the team decided on, another step forward in the breakthrough of the Tom Allen Era, the head coach said, is to win the bowl game. That would precede the mark left by the last top-25 ranking (1994), the last four-game win streak in the Big Ten (1993), the last 6-2 start (1993) and the last season with seven wins (1993).
The last bowl win digs further back into the Bill Mallory Era, to 1991. Those are the kinds of milestones Allen is hoping to accomplish, along with maintaining a presence in the top-25, and his belief in those goals has weaved its way through the locker room.
“Our guys have been challenged in that way,” Allen said. “When you do things that you expected to do or talked about doing, you congratulate them for doing it, say, ‘Okay, let's go back to work because we got more goals to accomplish and more things that we want to do in this program.’”
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