"First Dooooown Hooooosiers!"

I'd like to comment on something that has become (gasp) a football tradition for the fans at Indiana University. From an outside perspective, you might look in at an IU football game (since they ARE 3-0 for the first time in who knows when), see the students and a fair number of the alumni doing this:



And then you might say, "What the hell was that?!"

Well, let me describe all this to you, since I've been in the middle of it a few times. For some amount of time now (I can't really give you an exact timeframe...), IU's Marching Hundred has played a strain from the "National Emblem" march every time the Hoosiers picked up a first down. For the first couple of years I was there, nobody really seemed to know what to do with this song, probably because we weren't very adept at getting first downs back then. However, I believe some of the fans started noticing something that the Hundred's drum majors would do during the song, which was pump their fists out into the air, then point in the direction of the first down. People began to catch on and, lo and behold, Hoosier football fans suddenly have their own ridiculous thing that they get to do at games. As with all football traditions, it may look kinda stupid at first, but when 30,000 or 40,000 people are all doing it at the same time, it looks really cool.

Yesterday afternoon against the Zips from the University of Akron, the Hoosier fans got quite a few opportunities to break out their first down celebration, especially in the second half. If you take a gander back a couple of posts, I said that Akron would keep it interesting for a lot of the game, but the Hoosiers would pull away. After the first quarter, that seemed like a stupid statement on my part, but then someone in the Akron coaching staff read the blog and decided to follow what I said. With under ten minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, in fact, it was a four point game with the score reading 27-23. Then, Kellen Lewis took the game on his back and ran it all over the field.

Kellen Lewis was obviously the player of the game because of this stat: 199 yards. You might say, "199 yards, that doesn't seem like a lot for a quarterback," until you realize that those 199 yards were rushing yards. Coming into this season, many fans were drawing comparisons between Lewis and the last big-time Hoosiers QB, Antwaan Randle-El. On Saturday, Lewis showed us the reason for those comparisons, falling ten yards short of Randle-El's school record of rushing yards in a game. Not only did Lewis run the ball well, but he tossed some great passes (as he always does to a number of different receivers. In light of all of this, I'd like to postulate this little gem: Kellen Lewis will be in some Heisman Trophy discussions before he graduates from Indiana University.