Indiana football steps into the spotlight, and Tom Allen thinks you’ll like what you see

BLOOMINGTON — New Indiana head coach Tom Allen’s office overlooks the entirety of Memorial Stadium. It’s a steep bowl of 52,000 seats and climbing, with an end zone renovation due to be complete in 2018.

You know what? It’s pretty nice. And unless you’re from Indiana, you probably didn’t know that Indiana football has like, nice stuff. And then you feel bad for admitting that.

“Yeah, it’s OK. We get that a lot. When people come, it’s always, ‘Wow!’ It’s different than what they expected,” Allen said.

“Recruits come and they see the weight room, the stadium, then the campus and the town, and they’re blown away. But they show up with a perception that this is a basketball school and football’s not a high priority. Let’s just call it what it is; that’s the perception. I’ve been down in the South for the last 10 years. I get it.”

There’s no argument: It’s Ohio State in Bloomington, on a Thursday night at 8 p.m. ET, with multi-channel ESPN coverage and a GameDay visit.

Oh, and it’s against former head coach Kevin Wilson, who battled with IU administrators and boosters for years before he was let go in December in favor of Allen, the defensive coordinator. Now Wilson is the offensive coordinator for Ohio State, meaning IU’s been watching film of its own offense.

“Hey, if you’re going to play or coach against a close friend, you want to beat them. But it’s not negative emotion,” Allen said. “Because you have to understand, Ohio State is Ohio State whether Kevin Wilson is there or not. It’s Ohio State.”

He’s embraced the Thursday night attention, even scheduling the Hoosier spring game for a Thursday 140 days earlier. And he’s balancing a “dream job” scenario with the way it came about.

“It was a really hard day. I really hurt for Kevin. I hated it. And he and I are talking during the day, throughout everything. He called to apologize for putting me through all this. I don’t want to say too much because it’s between us, but his whole thing was, ‘When I knew I wasn’t going to be there and we agreed to part ways, I told them you need to hire Tom.’ And whether or not they’d made up their mind at that point, I’m not sure, but he’s telling them, ‘Tom’s the guy.’ And he said he was sorry for putting me through all this.

“It’s a tough situation. He and I have talked, continued to talk. There’s no ill feelings on my part or his part. I was as shocked as anybody.”

When he spoke to SB Nation during spring practice, he’d been watching his players post the line of the Ohio State game on social media (it opened at -20 OSU and now sits at -21.5).

“And that ticks us off. Ticks me off. That’s the perception. But have a lot to do. We haven’t done nothing here in a long time.”

Allen’s been using the “50-26-10 Challenge” in team and staff meetings: 50 years since Indiana played in a Rose Bowl, 26 years since the Hoosiers won a bowl, and 10 since IU finished with a winning record. It came close under Wilson, twice finishing at 6-6, then losing bowls.

Except Indiana could actually be pretty good in 2017, thanks to the nation’s most underrated defense.

Allen arrived in Bloomington as coordinator in 2016 after a stint at USF under WIllie Taggart and time on Hugh Freeze’s Ole Miss staff as linebackers and special teams coach. The New Castle, Indiana, native (“Thirty-two aunts and uncles, my dad’s the oldest of 10, mom’s second youngest of eight. Coach Wilson joked, when he hired me, we’d already increased ticket sales.”) wanted to be at IU. As a former high school coach in Indianapolis, he believed in Indiana talent in a way that others in the industry didn’t.

Allen believed. Indiana’s defense didn’t.

“I started interviewing every player. We talked about everything in the program. Ultimately, everything came back to trust. No trust in themselves, no trust in the scheme, no trust in each other.”

While IU’s offense was setting records and scoring 40-plus points, the defense was collapsing with regularity. So with Wilson’s permission, Allen moved workout schedules and practices to accommodate unit-building exercises and boiled his defense down to creating turnovers.

“Nope. Can’t use that word,” Allen said.

“Not turnovers, takeaways.”

OK ...

“If you say that word around our players, you have to do 25 push-ups. There’s a difference. A takeaway is an act of aggression. It’s pure mindset. It’s why we log strip attempts, even in practice.”

This is typical rhetoric of defensive coaches, but Allen’s found something that works: In his first game as DC in 2016, a 34-13 win over FIU, the Hoosiers’ defense outscored FIU’s offense, 16-13, with two interceptions returned for touchdowns and a safety.

In a 6-7 campaign, Indiana’s defense became one of the most improved in all of college football. The Hoosiers went from allowing 37.6 points per game and 6.38 yards per play to 27.2 and 5.09. The Hoosiers were 13th in opponent third down conversions and dropped touchdowns allowed by 25, jumping to 38th in turnovers ... er, takeaways.

Wilson might be gone, but Indiana still wants to go fast on offense.

“I believe in high tempo on offense. Because it’s the one thing that’s hard on us. It’s the one thing we can’t handle sometimes. But when you go fast and we can’t get our feet set, it doesn’t matter if you’re good.”

Wilson’s offense was one of the fastest in football (76.1 plays per game in 2016), and while Mike DeBord will install a system unique from Wilson’s, Allen wants to keep on the gas.

“At Ole Miss, I saw us beat Alabama when we had no business beating Alabama. Of all the games I’ve ever coached in, that was the most amazing I’ve ever been a part of. I was standing there thinking, ‘We have no business beating them.’ I saw us beat LSU when we had no business beating LSU, because of tempo.

“I’ve seen it at small college, mid-major, and SEC. It works at every level. Run them ragged.

“To me, it’s a matter of knowing who you are. Like the tempo because it matches our defense. You can’t be a bend-don’t-break defense with a tempo offense. Those two won’t work. The head coach, if he’s an offense guy, will strangle you.”

Except, of course, that Allen’s the head coach now. And no coach in his right mind would tamper too much with an attack that’s yielded 30-plus points five times in a season.

“In a perfect world, we all want a ball-control offense. But who can do that? Who can really do that? Controlling the clock is hard to do, but I’ve been places where we were never just physically better than everyone else. We had to find a niche.”

Allen is Indiana’s head coach because he might be solving one of the game’s toughest riddles — how to complement a tempo offense with defense — and because he’s bold of everything “nice” about Indiana, a football school.