There's no doubt IU football has made improvements, but it's hard to make gains in college football's toughest division.
He likes using them for context, to better understand a task or obstacle. And he’s not oblivious to the numbers that make his job one of the toughest in Power Five college football.
Indiana resides in the old-money half of the most lopsided division-structured conference in college football. As Allen seeks to build the Hoosiers into a more consistently competitive program, one capable of regular bowl appearances and greater stature within the league, how can he hope to navigate the four-pillared obstacle of the Big Ten East?
“I think it puts pressure on everybody else to rise up,” Allen said. “We may never have all that they have. But I don’t care what anybody says, we still, when it’s time to play, we’ve got to beat those guys.
The Big Ten aimed for competitive balance when it first broke the league into divisions for football, in 2010.
It split its traditional powers between the “Legends” and “Leaders” divisions, and immediately ran into criticism.
Fans decried the splitting up of longtime rivals like Michigan and Ohio State, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and Northwestern and Illinois. The conference had eschewed the geographic structure favored by peers in the SEC and Pac-12, and took flak for it.
So, when Rutgers and Maryland joined in 2014, the league reorganized again, emphasizing geography to pair up its rivals — and spawning the Big Ten East.
This season, Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan State and Michigan debuted at Nos. 5, 10, 11 and 14 in The Associated Press Top 25. In the coaches poll, those same schools fell Nos. 3, 9, 12 and 14.
They’re all in the East.
In 28 of the past 34 seasons, at least one of those four programs has at least shared the Big Ten title. The Big Ten East has won the past five conference championship games.
Michigan State is an outlier among the big four only in that it hasn’t enjoyed the historical success of Michigan, Ohio State or Penn State. But the Spartans have won a Big Ten championship game and advanced to the College Football Playoff under Mark Dantonio, and should be among the conference frontrunners this year.
Consistency reflected by that 28-of-34 number, and by an even deeper dive.
Of the 11 times the Big Ten title has been shared since 1984, at least two of those four teams were among the shared champions five times.
Wisconsin won the first two Big Ten championship games, after the conference added one in 2011. Since then, in the last five years, the game has gone to Michigan State, Ohio State or Penn State.
By comparison, over the same span, a team in what is now the SEC West — generally regarded as the better of that conference’s two divisions for the last decade — has won 18 of 34 conference titles.
It’s an imperfect comparison, because the SEC has decided its conference champion via title game since 1992. But even with Alabama’s recent dominance, and a run of eight-straight winners from the West from 2009-16, it’s still much more even.
That’s the mountain IU must climb.
According to a mix of conference media, recruiting analysts, college football experts and former players interviewed for this story, the best answer is patience, and investment.
Patience in giving a head coach time to settle, install a system, recruit talent and then develop it.
Investment in football facilities, coaching staff and infrastructure from the athletic administration, to close the gap between Indiana and the top of the conference.
Glass handed Wilson a seven-year contract when he hired the former Oklahoma offensive coordinator, and a six-year extension after IU’s Pinstripe Bowl appearance.
When he replaced Wilson with Allen a year later, in 2016, he penned Allen to a six-year contract that runs through 2022.
And Indiana’s TV revenue-related financial windfall has helped address both large and small concerns over investment.
>> Closed in both ends of Memorial Stadium, dedicating the space created to an academic center, new football offices and meeting rooms, a dramatically upscaled weight room, better dining facilities, better training and rehabilitation facilities, and broader options for athlete welfare.
>> Invested significantly more in assistants’ salaries, a priority mentioned by multiple sources interviewed for this story. According to annual NCAA financial reports, Indiana reported $2,789,060 in assistant coaches’ salaries paid for by the department in 2012. By 2017, that number had increased to $4,100,339 for the same nine positions.
>> Committed to a multimillion-dollar renovation of the football locker room and team facilities, spearheaded by a $2 million gift from former Hoosier Terry Tallen. That renovation is expected to be completed by the start of next season.
>> Laid an artificial turf field on the outdoor football practice area, for better year-round use.
>> Increased overall football spending to such a degree that, according to those same reports, the department invested almost $10 million more in football-specific operating expenses in 2017, compared to 2012.
It hasn’t closed the gap entirely, perhaps not even significantly. One of the undercurrent themes of this entire conversation is that nothing will close the gap all by itself, and the same TV revenue that has allowed Indiana to expand its commitment to football has allowed its peers to do the same.
But a program that used to house its weight room in the basement of Assembly Hall has still come a long way in a short time.
Infrastructure and vision can impact recruiting as much as history, even recent history. But experts in that field warned programs like Indiana still need to be creative in how they target players.
One of the most consistently frustrating themes of the last five to six seasons for Indiana fans has been the competitiveness of games against those aforementioned Big Ten East powers, and yet IU’s eventual fade at game’s end.
The most straightforward explanation for why Indiana hasn’t been able to close that last gap is depth.
Better programs recruit more top-line talent, thereby building higher-quality depth that allows them to rotate players more often, keeping their stars fresh deeper into games. In simpler terms, when Indiana falters in the fourth quarter against Ohio State, there’s a good chance its starters have played an extra quarter’s worth of snaps, compared to the Buckeyes.
How can IU trim the margins in recruiting?
It certainly starts with those two keys: 1.) patience, to allow a head coach time to recruit players to his system and develop them, and 2.) investment, to make the program a more appealing destination.
But it also requires Indiana to be clever — in which players they target, why, how they recruit them, and how they develop them once they’re signed.
Allen Trieu, another recruiting expert for 247Sports who focuses heavily on the Midwest, used Michigan State as an example.
The Spartans under Mark Dantonio have become one of the Big Ten’s most consistent programs in the past decade. But that consistency hasn’t always been built on elite-level recruiting success.
Five times since 2008, Michigan State has landed a class ranked in the 247Sports top 30, but only one of those classes was top-20, and none were top-15. In that same stretch, the Spartans have won nine or more games seven times, 11 or more games five times, won their division three times and played in both the Rose Bowl and the College Football Playoff.
Indiana has had some success recruiting under-the-radar players, and the kinds of multi-sport athletes Wiltfong said often thrive in college football.
Jason Spriggs was a tight end and defensive end in high school but became an All-American tackle in college. Tevin Coleman had offers from several Big Ten schools to play defensive back, before turning in a 2,000-yard season as a running back at IU. Chris Covington was a high school safety who actually played some quarterback in Bloomington before moving permanently to linebacker, where he was picked by Dallas in this year’s NFL draft.
The key for Indiana is finding those players consistently, landing them and then developing them.
That makes staffing investment paramount, to give Allen a dynamic group of assistants on the recruiting trail. Mike Hart flipped running back Stevie Scott from Rutgers last winter. Nick Sheridan staved off competition from Florida State for Michael Penix. Mark Hagen has helped Indiana lock up talented in-state prospects across several recruiting cycles.
And like Spriggs, Coleman and Cobbs, both Wiltfong and Trieu said there’s great value in targeting players with the flexibility to develop at multiple positions in college, because of their size and athleticism. If you are going to reach, reach for a player that gives you options down the road.
Early returns for Allen have been encouraging. Indiana finished the 2018 cycle with the No. 49 class in the country, and the No. 10 class in the Big Ten, improvements of 13 spots and three spots, respectively, over the previous year.
Perhaps tellingly, that class was also ahead of only Rutgers in the Big Ten East.
In the end, there’s only so much nipping and tucking to be done.
Indiana can be more intelligent with its resources, more clever with its recruitment, more innovative with its player development. But nothing can make 5-7 into 7-5 except execution and focus and a strong fourth quarter, something Allen knows too well.
It’s easy to disconnect Saturday afternoons from every other part of IU’s football program, but Indiana has to understand that it all fits together. Moreover, the only way to break the wheel of frustration the program has turned on for most of the past 20 years is to make that fitting seamless.
Allen was part of a staff that pushed back against similar circumstances at Ole Miss, fighting uphill against Alabama, Auburn, LSU and Johnny Manziel-led Texas A&M in the SEC West. Delany made it clear at Big Ten media days the conference has no plans to ease Allen’s task now with further realignment.
And it’s Allen — the “numbers guy” who doesn’t hide from the size of his challenge but instead uses it as motivation because really, what else should he do? — who Lewis sees as perhaps the biggest key to all of it working, if it has a chance of working at all.