In a country amok with the tailgates, stadiums, dramatics, camaraderie and goose bumps — not to mention the beverages — of college football, it follows that many thrill-seeking teens would rank the big football experience near the top of their college-choice priorities. It’s practically a trend among those who cross regions into, or who hail from, the hot-blooded Southeast.
In a country amok with the tailgates, stadiums, dramatics, camaraderie and goose bumps — not to mention the beverages — of college football, it follows that many thrill-seeking teens would rank the big football experience near the top of their college-choice priorities. It’s practically a trend among those who cross regions into, or who hail from, the hot-blooded Southeast.
That makes one ongoing case of big football quite the rare bird. It involves the latter-year undergraduates — and a graduate student here and there — who chose a certain school knowing the idea of getting some big football mixed in with their college years was far-fetched to the zone of absurd, more non-thought than afterthought. Yet somehow they reside both in the pretty college town they craved and amid the kind of buzzy air available only from a stark-raving football powerhouse. They’re astounded. They’re exhilarated. Hell, they sound a little bit confused.
“I mean, I honestly, I feel like I won the lottery,” said Francisco Caceres, a 21-year-old senior at Indiana University.
When Caceres left his Ohio hometown to follow his mother’s example of attending Indiana, he understood from childhood that nobody before 2024 ever chose the school with any hope of any big football. “Like nothing you could have legitimately dreamed of,” he said, noting it as “never, like, a remote consideration.” At Indiana, a sellout was when Ohio State would come to town and its populous fans would come with it. At Indiana, people valued the tailgates over the games. At Indiana, a seat on the football front row for a student leader such as Caceres seemed a sort of penance to get to that prized wintertime basketball front row. As he arrived for his freshman year, “I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll go to the football games, and I’ll tailgate for the football games, and …’”
And he trailed off there because at Indiana, in 2018, while 14, he joined his parents for a Purdue game and might encapsulate the entire Indiana football non-experience when he says: “I think we won. I don’t know.”
I think we won. I don’t know.
They didn’t, quite, but whatever.
Forever until lately, this program that began in 1887 led the country in number of times having gone out on a Saturday (or other day) and having lost. It led or co-led for most losses ever until two Friday nights ago, when Northwestern pipped it with a fourth loss this season to reach 716 while Indiana’s total hasn’t budged from 715. In the three seasons between 2021 and 2023, Indiana went 3-24 in the Big Ten, and, per custom, hardly anybody noticed. In 2024 and 2025, since Coach Curt Cignetti arrived from an ascendant James Madison to provide one of the better coaching jobs of the past 156 years, Indiana has gone 15-1 in the Big Ten with a smooth slew of multifaceted quality, and even those noticing from way up close can feel the surreal.
“It is very strange,” said Dalton James, a sports editor at the Indiana Daily Student and an Indiana senior. He once covered the 3-9 Hoosiers of 2023, and he grappled with an ancient sportswriter struggle: how to describe each game when each game felt the same. Now this program with the same name has spent two autumns beating Michigan, beating Washington and Nebraska, winning at Iowa, Oregon and Penn State, annihilating a top-10 Illinois while the men’s basketball program he always watched with his parents in their small town west of Indianapolis has a puny 2-2 record in March Madness games this decade. “It’s just so weird,” he said, “because I expected the complete opposite.”
It’s so weird that past generations might have shuddered at a quotation from Caceres, the president of the Student Athletic Board: “It’s weird that people aren’t ready for basketball season yet because they’re talking about football.” He said an unexpected cheer swelled during a women’s basketball game last week. Why? Indiana had just retained its once-unforeseeable No. 2 foothold in the College Football Playoff rankings.
In so very many years before, things droned on as rather tepid and beige. “I guess when I was there, they were okay-ish,” said Brett Pistotnik, a 2018 graduate who strayed all the way from Los Angeles, then later coined quite an apt term there with okay-ish. If somebody in the stands bellowed, “We’re a football school,” they meant it “in kind of a sarcastic manner,” Pistotnik said. A steadfast Hoosiers basketball fan might adopt some appealing football team that turned up on TV as a young James did with Baker Mayfield and Oklahoma, never once imagining Indiana would surpass Oklahoma for even a while. Caceres remembers getting excited when Indiana made the Foster Farms Bowl. Pistotnik said a 7-5 or 9-3 coach would have been swell, but this? Caceres tells the story of how his mother took his father to his first tailgate, and at some point his father said, “‘Aren’t we supposed to go in?’ And nobody had even gotten tickets. They were just tailgating.” Now, as Pistotnik tries to sort out his budget relative to the pretty dent of trips to playoff games, he says at one point, “It’s shocking.”
A college town long since awake has awakened more. Cooper Johnsen, the Indiana fourth-year men’s soccer goalkeeper and the president of the student-athlete advisory committee, arrived to “a phenomenal sports culture” — eight NCAA men’s soccer titles and nine runner-up appearances, for one thing — adorned with an extra layer of “very pleasant surprise.” James says: “There’s just a certain buzz in the air that was never there. The tailgating lots are completely packed. There’s students waiting outside to get into the games earlier, when nobody had to get there early before.” Parking the car outside the stadium has gotten less lickety-split. “And the traffic is just substantially worse, I feel like,” he said, eventually concluding: “People just want to be in Bloomington.”
Discussions in classes clear into November, he said, brimmed with talk of Fernando Mendoza’s great drive and Omar Cooper Jr.’s greater catch that pulled out a storybook win at Penn State. First-year graduate student Colby Cox, who never followed sports until following this team, said of game days, “You can barely get through Kirkwood”Avenue, the main beehive of bars. And as Caceres drove back from Indianapolis last Saturday, then got out of his car, then refreshed the phone screen to learn what had happened: “I could hear it before it loaded up on my phone. I could hear all the bars, like, screaming.”
That kind of sound, of course, has lured people to the Southeast and the SEC for a good while now. Schools such as Tennessee have noted upticks in application totals after events such as the Volunteers’ 52-49 upset of Alabama in 2022 because who wouldn’t want to go join a mass field-storming? Such spikes in interest in a school have a really old nickname, “The Flutie Effect,” which stemmed from Doug Flutie’s desperate pass to Gerard Phelan in Miami in 1984 — it should be “The Phelan Effect,” given the degree of difficulty — and its effect on interest in Boston College.
“I just wanted the culture of football,” said Madigan O’Neil, a 25-year-old high school teacher who ventured afar from New Jersey for college. “They didn’t have to be good at football at the moment,” she said. “I also toured Auburn, and they suck.” That should provide a hint at which school she chose, and she said of Alabama: “I mean, it was so much fun. To win a national championship [in 2020, while she was there] is one thing, but every Saturday, it was just fun and happy. I wish I could go back to a Saturday in college and feel how I used to feel” from 7 a.m. on. “I would wake up thinking this was going to be the best day ever, every Saturday.”
She might have summarized the whole durable appeal of one of the world’s most eccentric sports when she said, “Everyone was so alive.”
At her last Auburn game in school, she wept.
When Riley Lusetich, nowadays 29, barreled out of his native Los Angeles all the way to Mississippi for a tour way back when, the admissions officer led him through the tailgating Taj Mahal known as the Grove. “She said, ‘This will be the best part of your Saturdays, and remember, we might lose the football game, but we will not lose the party.’”
You get the four-year window you get with your college teams, and Lusetich got two opening seasons of beating Alabama and quite a bit of winning otherwise, including Oct. 4, 2014, when, well: “I was never a kid who liked to climb fences,” he said, but after the 23-17 upset of the Crimson Tide, “I was giving out shots on the field to fans and players.”
He proceeded from that field to Oxford Square, where he paid $80 to get into Funkys bar, merely to see Katy Perry crowd-surf into a raft of college students.
Among the reasons to choose a college, that’s one.
An Alabama sophomore of the moment hails from Ohio. She narrowed her choices to Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina, all football hotbeds. She’s Mariana Caceres, and she sees a trend around her “among Midwestern and northern high school students,” aiming to the southeast. “I’d say honestly it’s an overwhelming sense of community,” she said, “just strangers on the street yelling, ‘Roll Tide,’ high-fives all around, [conversations] next to anyone at the game.” A serious, serious fan who followed the Crimson Tide to its bummer at Florida State this year, she unspools a little zinger, maybe even aimed toward somebody to her north: “I know at the end of the day, an IU football game [with 53,524 official capacity] is nothing like an Alabama football game [with 100,077].”
She’s the younger sister of Francisco Caceres, and for years now, the two competitive siblings have kidded their mother, Indiana graduate and fan Tracey, about which side she might back if Indiana ever played Alabama. “And [Tracey] said so many times, ‘That’s never going to happen,’” Francisco said.
Uh-oh. At least she can take solace in that, somehow, against all precedent, both of her children live in settings where everyone is so alive.
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