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SOUTH BEND – Never shy of a line, Curt Cignetti dropped one more Friday as he sat down to his final postgame news conference of the season.
“It’s hard to say goodbye to your kids,” Cignetti deadpanned, “because they just watched their dad get his ass kicked.”
This was Indiana’s brash, Spurrier-like head coach acting as a lightning rod for so much of what went wrong in the No. 8 Hoosiers’ 27-17 season-ending College Football Playoff first-round loss at No. 5 Notre Dame on Friday night.
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The sheer tonnage of confusion that would have met that sentence four months ago is rivaled only by the potential impact of this remarkable season on the trajectory of an IU football program desperately fighting to escape its ugly past. Whenever the dust settles on this frustrating end to an exhilarating fall, there will be plenty of time to pass around credit for a season that rises head and shoulders above the other 125 in program history.
For the time being, the Hoosiers (11-2) and their fans will have to lick their wounds and take their lumps, from a barking mob of college football fans sprinting to the nearest social media microphone to tell them why they didn’t belong here in the first place.
Listen to none of it.
If IU football takes nothing else from Friday night, let it be this: Don’t for one moment lose the steely confidence that set the stage for this most unexpected of seasons. Apologize for nothing. That’s Indiana football’s identity now. Embracing it will win you games.
College football will want the Hoosiers to atone for Friday night. For Kurtis Rourke’s modest performance in what mostly qualified as an offensive no-show. For the lack of a productive pass rush on a…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/iu-football-crashed-cfp-party-070611899.html
Author : IndyStar | The Indianapolis Star
Publish date : 2024-12-21 07:06:00
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