Today, Lee Corso is nationally recognized for his work as an ESPN college football analyst. He’s right behind colleague Kirk Herbstreit as the face of college football. When he coached the 1979 Indiana football team, Corso was just a witty—if mostly unknown head coach—trying to get a program over the hump. READ ABOUT THE LOU […]
Bill Mallory came to Bloomington in 1984 and inherited a football program that was on hard times. Since their 1967 Rose Bowl trip, the Indiana Hoosiers only had three winning seasons. Mallory’s first year was an 0-11 train wreck, but the program quickly got better. By 1986 he started a run that saw the Hoosiers […]
Today, Lee Corso is nationally recognized for his work as an ESPN college football analyst. You could even argue he’s the face of the sport. At the 1979 Holiday Bowl he was just the mostly unknown, but witty head coach of Indiana looking to get a bowl victory over an undefeated BYU team. The Hoosiers […]
Football was—and is–second fiddle to basketball in the state Indiana, especially in the days before Peyton Manning came to the state and most especially for loyalists of Indiana University. But the 1987 Indiana football team was an improving program under Bill Mallory. One year earlier they had made their first bowl game since the 1967 Rose Bowl and 1987 saw them be a reliable supporting actor to the basketball program that had won a national title in March.
The place to be as a sports fan in 1987 is the same place it was in 1976, but for different reasons. In ’76 it was Indiana, with college basketball and going to the nearest baseball team. The college basketball reason holds true in 1987—this is after all, the state of Indiana and Bob Knight was at his peak at Indiana University. But now the state had an NFL team, as the Colts had snuck out of Baltimore in the dead of night four years earlier and ’87 was the year they made the playoffs for the first time in their new city. Finally, Indiana football provided some excitement, producing its best team since the Rose Bowl year of 1967