Richard Johnson

Next time there's realignment, we're probably going to get left on the wrong side of the plexiglass unless we start taking football seriously.

Getting there at that moment, by the way, as the playoff is going into 12-team mode, so last year's team got the momentum boost, the publicity, the fundraising boost that comes with making the playoff.

You get there at the time that the Big Ten East falls apart, which made last year a little bit easier as well because of the realignment of the Big Ten.

And you get the existence in college football at a time when eligibility rules are fake.

So Indiana had a very old team, which I'm not talking – to me, that's not talking shit.

I think that I've noticed that people tend to hear it that way.

I hear it that way whenever I say this about BYU, which has a bunch of its players having taken two years off before they got to school.

I mean, it also is just a fact.

It's just a fact.

I mean, so Indiana gets like, Indiana's first win of the season was in a courtroom three weeks before the season when Lewis Moore got, I think, a restraining order to the NCAA's eligibility rules, the safety, so he could play this year as a 24-year-old.

That's great.

I mean, he's not a quarterback, so I can support his eligibility crusade.

That's fine.

But it's just, you know, we get further away from 2020.

I'm sure there will still be 2020 college football players in the sport next year for some reason that I just cannot get behind, but...

All of these things were just an alignment of the stars for this Indiana season to look like this.

And so much of it was great process and planning.

So much of it was luck.

What it wasn't was buying, again, and I don't criticize this.

We didn't criticize it with Ohio State last year.