BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — In Tom Allen’s mind, the payoff of more than a decade of persistent investment in the once seemingly hopeless cause of Indiana football could be explained in one play.

The ascendant Hoosiers were clinging to a 38-31 lead on the road against Nebraska Saturday in front of a Memorial Stadium crowd of more than 89,000 fans desperate to see the Cornhuskers return to relevance. The Huskers were marching, having started their drive on their own 7-yard line with 6:36 remaining and advanced to the Indiana 34 with 3:28 still to go. Nebraska faced fourth-and-5 and needed the conversion to keep the drive moving, but Indiana fans had seen such circumstances end in gut-wrenching form for them before.

Not this time. The Hoosiers brought pressure on Nebraska backup quarterback Noah Vedral, who escaped rushes from Indiana linebackers Cam Jones and Micah McFadden only to have his sideline pass to tight end Jack Stoll broken up by IU cornerback Tiawan Mullen. The Hoosiers’ offense took over and picked up three first downs to put away the victory, improving to 6-2 to reach bowl eligibility for the first time since 2016.

It was the first time they had picked up the six wins necessary to reach a bowl game by the end of October since 1993, a fact that is particularly liberating for Indiana considering that it has gone into the season-ending Old Oaken Bucket rivalry game with Purdue with a bowl game on the line in each of the last four seasons and lost the last two.

“When you win that snap, you probably just won the game,” said Allen, the Hoosiers’ third-year coach. “That’s what we did. Well, we’ve had a lot of times in the past where that fourth-and-5 gets converted. And they go in and they score. Then you go to overtime and you lose in overtime, or double overtime, or whatever. Last-second field goal. This or that. Or our offense comes out and has a chance to close it out and we don’t get a first down, gotta punt it back to them, and something negative happens.”

Becoming the team that can make that play, though, requires more than just guessing right on a play call. The Hoosiers have been the team finding creative and increasingly excruciating ways not to make that play for most of their 132-year history as a football program, and even at times when they’ve guessed right, things have gone very wrong.

No team in the Football Bowl Subdivision has suffered more defeats than Indiana’s 681. The Hoosiers have reached a total of 11 bowl games in their existence, reaching the postseason just three times since 1993 in an era when everyone with even a .500 record gets a bowl bid. They have won just three of those bowl games, the last in the 1991 Copper Bowl. The Hoosiers haven’t won nine games in a season since they reached the Rose Bowl in 1967. They have managed eight wins in a season just four times in the 51 seasons since and haven’t done so since that 1993 team that lost in the Independence Bowl.

But this Indiana team has a chance to win seven games if it can beat Northwestern at home on Saturday night. With games still to play at Penn State and Purdue, and against Michigan at home, Indiana can hit that eight-win mark and possibly even go beyond it. The Hoosiers have been aided by a soft non-conference schedule and the fact that the bottom of the Big Ten East is as dilapidated as its top is dominant. But most Indiana teams haven’t dominated lesser opponents like this one has, and haven’t been nearly as sturdy in clutch situations.

Finally creating a team with that kind of mettle required a lot of investment into a number of areas.

“People are starting to see in our performance what we have been building over time,” Allen said. “It’s learning how to win, and it’s a process you go through. It’s depth. It’s belief. It’s recruiting. It’s player development. It’s your schemes that you have that give guys a chance. All of those things mix in together that create a different outcome. The question is always, hey, what do you have to do to create the breakthrough, or to get to that next step? Because you’ve been so close for so long. I think all of that is being manifested in how our guys have played and it’s a great feeling to see it.”

The building began long before Allen was named head coach.

Fred Glass took over as Indiana’s athletic director on Jan. 1, 2009 after a career in law and politics, having served as chief of staff to former Indiana Governor Evan Bayh and on the committee that helped bring the Super Bowl in Indianapolis in 2012.

Glass himself had graduated from Indiana in 1981 and inherited a football program that wasn’t in much better shape than it was when he graduated. The Hoosiers were still reeling from the loss of coach Terry Hoeppner, an Indiana native who was hired in 2005 after a 13-win season at Miami (Ohio), but died of brain cancer in 2007. Indiana went to a bowl game that year under interim coach Bill Lynch and made him the permanent head coach, but followed that up with a 3-9 season the next year.

Glass noticed at the time that the football facilities, and Memorial Stadium in particular, hadn’t changed much in 28 years.

“Memorial Stadium didn’t look a whole hell of a lot different than when I’d left as a senior in 1981,” Glass said. “Unfortunately, that replicated itself throughout the department, but football is a key program and there just hadn’t been anything. There were two concrete grandstands facing each other, and it looked very MAC-like. No criticism of the MAC, but it’s not the Big Ten. That was quaint. I liked the hills, I rolled down them when I was a kid. But in the Big Ten, it was a joke.”

Plans had been made under Glass’s predecessor Rick Greenspan to close in the north end zone of the stadium with a building that would include everything from a weight room, locker room and team conference rooms at the ground level to administrative offices and a banquet hall higher up. That building was under construction when Glass took over and finished in his first year at a cost of about $38 million, the largest chunk of a $55 million project that also included the basketball practice facility Cook Hall.

But Glass believed there was still a lot to be done to get up anywhere near par with the rest of the Big Ten. Though Indiana has always put basketball first, the money that came into athletic department coffers through the Big Ten Network gave Indiana the financial leeway to take some chances on football. And there was nothing else in the program that had greater potential for bringing in more income.

“There’s not a lot more seats to sell in Assembly Hall,” Glass said. “There’s no inventory. We’re not going to dramatically increase how much money we make off of basketball. Football on the other hand, is inventory I got. If I was able to sell out every home game, we’d add like $10 million more to the bottom line. The fixed costs are all the same. On a $110 million budget, $10 million moves the dial. Not only to help football, but to help basketball, the whole rest of the department. Football is important because it has a disproportionate place in American higher education, perception of institutions and all that, but what did Willie Sutton say? ‘Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is.’ Why did we focus on football? Because that’s where the money is.”

So Glass kept looking for areas to invest, even as the Hoosiers kept narrowly missing out on bowl games for most of his first decade in office. Before the 2018 season, Indiana closed in the south end zone of Memorial Stadium with even more facilities at a total cost of about $53 million, then this offseason added the Terry Tallen Indiana Football complex, which includes a new locker room and team lounge that cost around $10 million.

The investment has gone beyond major capital projects. According to Department of Education data, Indiana’s annual operating budget for football has steadily increased from $8.5 million in 2003 to $12.8 million in 2009 to $24.4 million in 2017, the most recent DOE data available. That doesn’t put Indiana anywhere near the powerhouses in its division — Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State all spend well over $40 million per year — but it does put it on par with its conference peers. Illinois spent $22.2 million on football in 2017 while Purdue spent $27.2 million. Maryland spent $19.9 million and Rutgers spent $25.9 million. Revenues have also jumped — again, thanks in large part to Big Ten Network money — from $13.6 million in 2003 to $51.9 million in 2017.

“This place has changed a lot, especially in the last 10-15 years,” said defensive line coach Mark Hagen, who went to four bowl games as an Indiana linebacker from 1987-91. “But from when I was a player, this place has really changed a lot. The facility investment is a big piece of it.”

The investment in personnel hasn’t been anywhere near as expensive, but it’s been arguably more important.

A native Hoosier, Allen has taken Indiana football to the next step. (Tommy Gilligan/USA Today Sports)

Of all of Glass’ investments, none of them currently comes at more of a bargain price than Allen himself. He’s the lowest-paid head coach in the Big Ten at $1.8 million per year, which is actually less than what former Indiana offensive coordinator Seth Littrell makes at North Texas.

The price can be partially explained by the circumstances of his hiring. The 49-year-old Allen was named head coach on Dec. 1, 2016 just after the end of that regular season but before the Hoosiers’ appearance in the Foster Farms Bowl.

Allen had been hired before that season as IU’s defensive coordinator, and had just finished his second season as a coordinator at any FBS school. But Glass put him in charge after head coach Kevin Wilson resigned, Glass said, because Wilson and Glass had irreconcilable differences about the way the program should be led. Glass had twice used external firms to conduct reviews of the program, with at least one of them raising concerns about the way Wilson treated injured players.

The end of Wilson’s tenure was a disappointment for Glass, because he’d invested much in him and seen some return on that decision. Wilson’s first contract of $1.3 million per year was more than double what his predecessor Bill Lynch made. He got an extension that bumped it up to $2.5 million after taking the Hoosiers to the Pinstripe Bowl in 2015, their first appearance since 2007.

Glass knew fans would consider it the cheap and easy way out if he hired Allen to replace Wilson instead of handling a national search. But he’d already decided that even if Wilson had left on his own terms, Allen would have been his man because of the turnaround he led in 2016 on a defense that had been near the bottom of the Big Ten for years.

“He turned around the culture of the defense and really the culture of the whole team,” Glass said. “I decided early that Tom was my guy. I saw that in him. I think it takes a special kind of person to win at Indiana. I think he’s that person. He’s charismatic like Hep. He’s lockdown, X-and-O, lunchpail like Bill Mallory. He’s smart like John Pont. He’s enthusiastic like Lee Corso. He’s like this amalgamation of some of the best qualities of our most successful coaches.”

Some of Allen’s qualities might be considered hokey if he didn’t display them with so much sincerity and passion, which probably derives from his background. The New Castle, Ind., native was a high school coach from 1992-2006 when he was the head coach at Indianapolis powerhouse Ben Davis. Only then did he even get into college coaching, and he didn’t get a job at an FBS school until Hugh Freeze hired him at Arkansas State in 2011.

But his early experiences instilled in Allen the importance of togetherness on a roster. He has posted signs in the locker room with the acronym LEO —which stands for “Love Each Other.”

“He lives LEO,” said Mark Deal, IU’s assistant athletic director for alumni relations and a center on the 1979 Indiana team that won the Holiday Bowl. “It isn’t a slogan. It isn’t a catchy thing. That’s Tom.”

Glass has plans on a contract extension that would pay Allen better, but in the interim, he’s focused on making sure Allen has everything he wants, especially when it comes to player development staff. Strength and conditioning coach David Ballou was given a raise from $215,000 to $400,000 this offseason, which should make him one of the top five most high-paid strength coaches in the Big Ten and one of the top 20 nationally. Dr. Matt Rhea, the Hoosiers’ athletic performance coach focusing on speed training, had his pay more than doubled to $375,000. Both men received offseason interest from other schools and NFL teams.

The most substantial personnel investment came this offseason. Offensive coordinator Mike DeBord retired, and Glass encouraged Allen to look outside for his replacement, and to trust that he could pay whatever it would take to get his man. Allen focused on Kalen DeBoer, who had engineered offensive turnarounds at Fresno State and Eastern Michigan after winning three NAIA national titles at the University of Sioux Falls (S.D.). The Hoosiers managed to lure him away from Fresno State and made him the third-highest paid offensive coordinator in the Big Ten at $800,000 per year, the most money Indiana has ever paid an assistant football coach.

“Fred said, ‘Whatever you need to get the guy you want, within reason,'” Allen said. “In today’s market, it is, what it is. It’s a lot of money, but it’s proven to be a right decision. We weren’t going to pry him away from where he was without that kind of money.”

The money itself was important to DeBoer, but what was more important was the message. Indiana football was bought all the way in.

“It wasn’t just the investment they had in myself, but the investment they had in other people,” DeBoer said. “Finding ways to keep people around. There are some great people that I know have had opportunities over the years. You could see that there was commitment.”

The investments paid off in recruiting first, which has, in turn, trickled down into everything else. With shiny new facilities and an energetic coaching staff, the Hoosiers recruited classes in 2018 and 2019 classes that were ranked No. 50 and No. 36 nationally, putting them 10th and eighth in the Big Ten per 247Sports. Those are modest rankings or worse for powerhouse programs, but at Indiana, those are two of the highest-rated classes in the recruiting service era.

Of the 115 players on the Indiana roster, 85 are either freshmen or sophomores in terms of eligibility. That includes 11 players listed as starters on offense and defense, with two of those being starting quarterback Michael Penix and star running back Stevie Scott. The young players not only have talent, but they also haven’t been worn down by the years of losing as so many other Indiana players have.

“These young guys, they have no clue about that,” fifth-year senior wide receiver Nick Westbrook said. “It helps to spread that contagious energy that, you know what? This is a new Indiana. This is a whole new wave. Everyone’s really gone along with that.”

The young players have faith in their bodies improved by the strength and conditioning staff, and they have faith in schemes on both sides of the ball. Allen promoted linebackers coach Kane Wommack to defensive coordinator this season after calling the defensive plays himself in his first two seasons, but the Hoosiers still use the 4-2-5 scheme that brought the Indiana defense from the basement of the Big Ten to the middle of the pack. Indiana ranks eighth in both scoring and total defense in 2019, after finishing 14th in both categories in 2015, the season before Allen’s arrival.

Penix has been really good for Indiana in his first season as the starter. (Trevor Ruszkowski/USA Today Sports)

And DeBoer has turned the Hoosiers into one of the Big Ten’s most prolific offenses, even as he’s had to shuffle quarterbacks. Penix is still the nominal starter, but he’s been in and out with injuries, putting the ball often in the hands of redshirt junior Peyton Ramsey, the starter the last two seasons.

When he’s been healthy, Penix has been extremely effective, throwing for 1,232 yards and 10 touchdowns in five games. Ramsey has played more and been even more accurate, completing 72 percent of his passes for 1,194 yards and eight touchdowns. Catching passes from both has helped junior slot receiver Whop Philyor take the Big Ten lead in both receptions (57) and yards (737).

Ramsey said the explosiveness has a lot to do with the change in scheme.

“He does a really good job of just spacing the field with different formations,” Ramsey said. “Different looks. Just getting guys in good matchups. Getting Whop, Nick, Ty (Fryflogle), getting those guys the opportunity for one-on-one matchups. And then running the ball too, spreading the field and letting Stevie go to work in there. He’s a good teacher of the quarterback, letting guys know where the ball is supposed to go.”

Said Glass: “On those Saturdays when the offense is really clicking and he’s calling plays, I look out there and think, ‘That’s the best money I ever spent.”

The investment in Wommack was also critical because it allows Allen to spend more time meeting with players than he ever has, and keeping the rest of the program running the way he wants to without having to come up with a defensive game plan every week.

“There’s more good players than have been here in a long time and not everyone gets to play,” Hagen said. “So you might have a talented guy that’s not getting to play as much and he can have those one-on-one meetings and encourage those guys. It’s given him so many of those opportunities to have those one-on-ones. It allows him to step back and be a fully rounded head coach.”

The Hoosiers headed into this season with just about everything Allen wanted in place — talent, depth, player development and scheme. All they needed was belief, which he believed could only come by actually proving they could win in a tough situation.

They failed at Michigan State in late September, allowing the Spartans to drive 72 yards on just five plays for a go-ahead field goal after tying the game with two minutes to go. But then at Maryland, they caused two turnovers in the final five minutes to win a game they’d led by just three points heading into the fourth quarter. That gave them the experience to draw on when they had to come up with a stop late against Nebraska.

“It is so huge when those things happen,” Allen said. “Because now they’ve lived it. It’s not me talking about it. If we execute this, we can make these things happen. It’s ‘Be the reason why.’ They were the reason why in that game. And that to me is a powerful, powerful thing.”

Powerful enough to finally, after all these years, bring some return on investment to Indiana.

(Top photo: Steven Branscombe/Getty Images)