Indiana Alumni Magazine
Back Home Again
Terry Hoeppner, a tried-and-true fan of IU, sought the challenge of becoming the Hoosiers' new football coach
By Bob Hammel
Terry Hoeppner’s football future was a paved road, remarkably smooth and free of curves for a college football coach. At 57, he was rooted in as the head man at one of the most prestigious and legendary mid-level Division I schools, Miami University in Ohio. He knew his recruiting area, and recruits there knew him. There was no need for him to leave, no need at all to take a career risk. But needs and dreams are two different things. Hoeppner got a chance he had always hoped for, and he snapped it up, then hit the ground sprinting as the new head football coach at Indiana, where there were skeptics and doubters but a core of fans as tried-and-true — sorely tried and Job-like true — as the greatest powers in the college football world can claim. And Terry Hoeppner, in his own way, was one of them.
among your most treasured two-word phrases is the declaration of gloom, “darkest day” ...
If your favorite two-number sequence is 19-14 ...
If you know that in Indiana football history (unlike the mind-muddling that would accompany similar declarations at, say, Michigan or Ohio State) it is crystal-clear what year you’re talking about when you refer to THE unbeaten team or THE Rose Bowl team ...
If you remember that Bo McMillin was the national Coach of the Year when Indiana went undefeated in 1945. And that John Pont was the national Coach of the Year when the Hoosiers won their last piece of a Big Ten football championship in ’67 by upsetting No. 4-ranked Purdue, 19-14, to earn the school’s first Rose Bowl invitation ...
If you remember that John Isenbarger, BS’70, was supposed to run from punt formation the first time he did it, and pulled it off, against Iowa in 1967, and the further context that led up to the “Punt, John, Punt” headline on Dan Jenkins’ Sports Illustrated piece on those ’67 Hoosiers ...
If you remember how winds shifted at about the precise time the teams did, to keep a hard November rain angling into Michigan faces in both the third and fourth quarters when Indiana beat the Wolverines in 1987, 14-10 ...
If you know that the 31-10 victory at Columbus (the one Buckeye coach Earle Bruce called Ohio State football’s “darkest day”) and the win over Michigan at Memorial Stadium came 14 days apart, and represent the only time in Indiana’s 120 football seasons the Hoosiers beat both teams in the same year ...
And that there was an 18-17 victory at Minnesota squeezed in between those two wins, played on a Friday night, because the World Series opened in the same building the next night ...
you have trouble deciding which to rank higher in your personal order of delicious 92-yard TD memories, Earl Faison’s (BS’63) rumbling, never-stumbling return of a punt he blocked for all the points in a 6-0 victory over Michigan State in 1958, or Marv Woodson’s (’64) interception return for the winning, streak-ending touchdown in a 12-7 victory at Purdue in 1962 ...
If maybe you want to factor in somewhere among those treasured spectacular runs George Taliaferro’s (BS’51) 36-yard punt return, not even for a touchdown but loaded with memories, against Pittsburgh in 1947 ...
If you know that the 13-7 Hoosier victory at Michigan that opened THE unbeaten season in ’45 followed a 20-0 IU win there in 1944 ...
If you remember (you get points even if you’ve just read about it and retained it in your memories) that in the extremely rare-for-its-time 20-20 1936 shootout between passers Vernon Huffman and Cecil Isbell, the halftime score was 0-0 ...
If you remember that the scores of the Indiana victories that were bookends to 36 years of football subservience to Ohio State were 32-10 (1951, in Woody Hayes’ first Big Ten game) and 31-10 (1987, the year Woody died) ...
you remember the rookie season (1976) that started for Mike Harkrader, BS’81, with fourth-team status and ended with his being the first Big Ten freshman to gain 1,000 yards — and didn’t end until he broke his second leg late in the first half of a 20-14 win at Purdue, after he kept playing with a fracture of his other leg ...
If you remember that Harkrader’s emergence came in Game 3 that year, a 20-14 win at Washington over future NFL great Warren Moon, when guard Russ Compton said of the hitherto 0-2 Hoosiers’ offensive line, “I knew we were making holes; we just had to find a back small enough to fit ’em.” ...
If you remember the “instant-replay” touchdown runs of Bobby Pernell, ’74, (77 yards, called back for a penalty) and Ricky Thompson (82 yards, the next play after Pernell’s run) in the wild 40-36 IU opening victory over Baylor in 1968 ...
If you remember with smiles Anthony Thompson’s (BGS’02) 377-yard day at Wisconsin and his NCAA-record accumulation of touchdowns and his two years as a consensus All-American and closest run ever by a Hoosier at the Heisman Trophy ...
And you count among your never-will-forget’s both Pete Pihos, BS’47, for a million reasons, and Antwaan Randle El, BS’01, for just as many ... And Joe Norman, BS’82, for a courageous 1978 interpretation of linebacking at Purdue that would have scored high in gymnastics judging.
all or even many of those apply to you, keep your head up high, as you always have, exempted with honor from the common charge that Indiana has no football fan base, no core of loyalists. You who have steadfastly stayed through it all up to now, you were the 20,000 or whatever was the accurate number of fannies in the stands at too many Hoosier home games last year and too often in the past, as in 2004 when the official Hoosier average attendance of 28,377 was third-lowest among all major-conference football schools. There should be some embarrassment in that average, that topped only Duke and Temple, but you, of that 28,377, don’t need to blush when Indiana’s football non-support is ridiculed.
And you, of all people, don’t need to be awakened to the fact that there is a new day dawning in Indiana football. Neither does Terry Hoeppner, the cause of optimism that is surging where there has been precious little evidence of, or reason for it, of late.
Maybe you, of longtime Indiana University football loyalty, got your first surprise from new coach Hoeppner when you learned that his linkage with Indiana football is almost as long-standing as yours.
“I remember the last time Indiana went to the Rose Bowl — I remember ‘Punt, John, Punt,’” Hoeppner said the day he arrived as IU’s new coach. “I followed Indiana through the years. I’ve been to many games in this stadium.”
Hoeppner didn’t go to IU, but the man who turned 58 in August grew up a Hoosier fan in his playing days at Woodlan High School, on Fort Wayne’s eastern edge. When he played at Franklin (Ind.) College, when he coached at high schools in South Carolina and northeastern Indiana, then assisted in college at Franklin and finally Miami, he always stayed aware of Indiana football, and more. He and wife Jane, also a native Hoosier, often came to the IU campus.
“We’ve been to many 500s — Little and the main, the big one in Indianapolis,” Hoeppner said that day of introduction. “For us, this is truly a dream come true.”
He — maybe only he among coaches of his standing in the college game — never lost a feeling that, for him, IU’s football coaching position was a dream job. “There is one job that I would leave Miami for,” he said. “And it’s right here. In this stage of my life, it was a golden opportunity.”
Hoeppner coached 19 years, the last six as head coach, at one of college football’s special coaching positions: at Miami, the “Cradle of Coaches,” the school that alumni never call Miami of Ohio but Miami University, as far as they feel a need to go to distinguish it from the other Miami — the University of — in Florida.
The only Big Ten football team to put up a season rivaling IU’s 1967 Cinderella team: Northwestern, which was as downgraded as the ’67 Hoosiers when its 1995 season began but went 10-1 and crashed the Rose Bowl.
Hoeppner knows all about that team, too. “Who was the ‘1’?” he asks. It was, obviously, Miami — in the season’s second game, after the Wildcats had won at Notre Dame and opened a 28-7 lead over the RedHawks, who came back to win 30-28 on a last-second field goal. Hoeppner was the defensive coordinator under Randy Walker then.
When Northwestern’s Gary Barnett (he remembers that ’95 game, too: it’s Chapter 3, titled “Miami Vise,” in his book chronicling the season, High Hopes), left to go to the University of Colorado, Walker succeeded him at Northwestern, and Hoeppner moved up to head coach. In the first game for both, Miami again beat the Wildcats.
The two won’t meet again for a while, not before 2007. There’s a two-year gap in their Big Ten schedules. But Walker, a Miami captain on a team Bill Mallory coached, will be watching. “I’m excited for Terry,” he says. “We’ve remained very close friends after working together for nine years. He’ll do a great job at Indiana.”
The man who hired Hoeppner at Miami, Joel Maturi, now Minnesota’s A.D., thinks so, too. “He is a great fit at Indiana,” Maturi says. “In Terry, Indiana has a coach of unbelievable integrity, character, and charisma.”
Hoeppner’s head coaching years at Miami included the school’s most recent association with football fame: as the football program that turned out quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, whose first grand impression of Hoeppner was that he not only was the first college coach to offer him a scholarship but also about the first to be able to spell and pronounce his name correctly. A fellow with a name like Hoeppner no doubt learned long ago the irritations of misspelled or mispronounced names.
All the football world knew both the spelling and pronunciation by the time Roethlisberger completed the best rookie season by an NFL quarterback in 20 years and led his Steelers team, the one that had Randle El as a primary passing target, to the best regular-season record in the league.
When he heard of Hoeppner’s new job, Roethlisberger called his former coach “an inspiration, a second father to me. I love him to death. He’s a wise man who made a wise decision. Going home has to be a good feeling. Indiana’s players are getting a great coach and a great mentor. The players are going to love him. He’s a players’ coach.”
Roethlisberger was a name Hoeppner dropped unashamedly often once he hit the recruiting road running as Indiana’s new coach.
That was in December. It happened without wild promises or beguiling salesmanship from Athletics Director Rick Greenspan and, ultimately, IU President Adam Herbert.
Hoeppner never let his hopes be known publicly, but as soon as there was an opening — with Gerry DiNardo’s firing after the 2004 season — Hoeppner became Hope-ner.
He wanted the job, the one that prevailing wisdom in his sport considered a coaching graveyard.
“They didn’t have to ask me twice,” he said. “I am not going to worry about what we didn’t do in the past. I believe in enthusiasm... I love going out and selling the message that we’ve got here. Indiana University is a great university, and Indiana football needs to do our part and be an integral part of this great, great university.”
Chances are, if a pre-selection vote had been taken among those terribly, terribly tried-and-true IU football loyalists, Hoeppner probably would have been the one on most of their “hope” lists. Because he was a native Hoosier. And because of where he’s coming from. At Indiana, Miami has taken on a meaning even more special than at other college football centers.
The “Cradle” at Oxford, Ohio, started John Pont on his way to Bloomington. Pont was the supreme optimist of his day, the one who left a prestigious job at Yale for Indiana. Remembered is the time at a Pasadena press conference in the days before the New Year’s Day 1968 game when Pont was insisting that the school’s run of unsuccessful years was part of the appeal to him when he made the change, and something he used as a plus, not a minus, in trying to win recruits. Pont’s pitch ran along the lines of “You can go to a Michigan or an Ohio State and try to be part of continuing something, or you can come to Indiana and be known forever for doing something that has never been done.”
It was a pitch that won over and then came true for Harry Gonso, BS’70, JD’73, John Isenbarger, and Jade Butcher, BS’72, the young Pont-recruited offensive nucleus of THE Indiana Rose Bowl team.
But, when he talked about it at Pasadena, Pont was challenged by a newsman: “How can you sell something that negative-based?”
Pont’s smiling answer: “They sell life insurance every day.”
At Miami, Pont’s first captain was end Bill Mallory. Pont took Indiana to its first bowl. Mallory took IU to its last six bowls, raising a football phoenix from the 0-11 ashes of his first Hoosier season.
Five years after Pont’s Rose Bowl season, he was under such heavy fan and trustee pressure that a move to Northwestern looked better to him. Three years after Mallory’s last bowl trip, his sixth in eight years, he was fired in mid-season.
Their job-costing fault was circumstances that brought IU football back to its own long-term levels. Each paid for having changed expectations.
Mallory’s last bowl trip was to the Independence Bowl at Shreveport, La., where Hoosier fans — “loyalists” — were openly muttering things like, “If this is the best bowl we can go to, I’d rather not go to a bowl.”
Four years later, Notre Dame was playing in that bowl, and 12 years later those “loyalists,” who have had their druthers realized, look at the Independence — any bowl — as a dream place to be in December or January, before the spoilage of consistent bowl trips that somehow became not good enough, even in Bloomington.
That history is why, if there is a pressure associated with Indiana football’s future right now, it is not so much on Hoeppner or that core that has ridden it out through it all, but the 30,000 who once combined with them to fill Memorial Stadium and gradually disappeared. It was that shrinking fan base that had a big part in making Indiana’s 1994 team one of the few in recent Big Ten history to have a winning record (6-5) but fail to receive a bowl bid.
Hoeppner’s Miami teams went 48-24. His last game as RedHawk coach was, coincidentally, in the Independence Bowl at Shreveport, IU’s last bowl site.
It’s a match-up that seemed fated, that day in December when Hoeppner first put on an IU cap and — with some of his newly inherited players watching from the back of the room — made them a guarantee: “With the foundation that you guys have created here, we are going to build a championship team.”
Suicide talk for a new coach?
“If you play in the Big Ten and you don’t aspire to go to the Rose Bowl, and you don’t set that out as a goal, then you are really cheating yourselves. So, that’s going to be our goal: to play in the Rose Bowl ... to take Indiana back to the Rose Bowl.
“IU is an opportunity that I always said, in the back of my mind, ‘Someday ...’
“Well, that someday is now.” 
Bob Hammel is retired as sports editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times. He has written several books on Indiana University athletics.