Wolken Across America Stop 3: Indiana

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY Sports

USA TODAY Sports college football reporter Dan Wolken has loaded up the car and hit the road, where he'll check out more than a dozen college football camps over the next two weeks. Each day, he'll file a vignette about what he observed and detail the significant storylines heading into the season.

Next stop: Purdue

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – For a long time, the coolest thing about Indiana football – and if we're being honest, probably the only cool thing – was that its indoor practice field is named for John Mellencamp, who donated the lead gift for the project when it was constructed in 1996. Of course, a lot has changed in college football since then, and just having an indoor facility isn't so cool anymore – even one paid for by a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.

What's decidedly un-cool is making just one bowl game in the past 19 years, as is having more losses than any program in the history of the Football Bowl Subdivision, which Indiana "accomplished" last season.

So when there was finally a glimmer of good news last November, it was a big deal here. For a moment – a brief moment – Indiana actually controlled its own destiny in the Big Ten's "Leaders Division," mostly because Ohio State and Penn State were ineligible for the postseason and somebody had to win it. But then the Hoosiers absorbed a 62-14 loss at home to Wisconsin, and that was pretty much that. The season proceeded to end with a thud, as Indiana got pounded by Penn State and embarrassed in the second half against Purdue to finish 4-8.

"Our campus kind of made it a huge thing, and I think it kind of got in our heads," receiver Kofi Hughes said. "We had such a huge opportunity and all we were looking at was down the road and what could've been when really we should've focused just on Wisconsin. I think all the hype kind of got to the team. I was disappointed in the whole season to come so close, but fall so short."

The whole Rose Bowl thing was a little ridiculous in retrospect, and that may have more to do with the Hoosiers just running up against better football teams than any loss of focus. But as we circle back to Indiana, the stars may very well be aligned for a breakthrough. Winning a division or a Big Ten championship? That's a little ambitious. But making a bowl game? You could argue that it's not only realistic, but should be expected.

The Big Ten, after all, is still down. Indiana's schedule is favorable, with two nonconference games they should win, two they could win and three lower-tier conference opponents (Minnesota, Illinois and Purdue) all at home. But most of all, as head coach Kevin Wilson enters his third season, the Hoosiers are finally trending up.

Though last year "fizzled" at the end – Wilson's word – it looked like a real Big Ten team, giving Michigan State and Ohio State big scares. Now, with 19 starters back, coaching staff stability and a good recruiting class on campus, the big theme has been raising the level of physicality and getting better on defense, since Wilson's teams have always scored points.

"I do think we're hungry to try to prove we've made some strides," Wilson said. "The tell will be, if we're fortunate enough to have success, how do we handle that? I think we're pointing in the direction where we have a chance to have success, but you have to perform. And if we start having success on the scoreboard, do you still stay with that process? Because that's what the really good teams do."

The other piece of good news for Indiana football is that the aforementioned Mellencamp building is no longer the most impressive facility. The Hoosiers are still behind in some ways, but they're catching up. Wilson's staff budget, he said, has doubled. They've hired two additional strength coaches. The athletic building attached to the north end zone of the stadium was rebuilt a few years ago, including the massive bottom floor weight room that looks out onto the field.

"When I look at this now, what we've got going, we're really on track and doing the things we need to do to make it work," said Bill Mallory, the coach responsible for six of Indiana's nine all-time bowl appearances.

Now 78, Mallory still lives in Bloomington until each January when he goes to Florida. He still comes to practice quite a bit, which is especially nice because his son Doug Mallory is now the defensive coordinator. If you ask Bill Mallory where it all went wrong for Indiana, he'll point to 1994 when his team went 7-4 but didn't have the administration's support to go to a bowl game.

Two miserable years later, Mallory was fired and the program never got back on track.

"Every time I friggin' turned around, there was a new coach in here," Mallory said.

Wilson may be the guy to stop that cycle, and his story is one of the most unlikely in big-time coaching. The only child of an electrician father and a mother who worked in the high school cafeteria, Wilson grew up just a few steps away from the football stadium in tiny Maiden, North Carolina.

"He'd come down, a little snotty-ass brat, and hang around practice all the time," said Tom Brown, who coached there 39 years and still visits Wilson frequently. "He wasn't a great player, but he was a great student of the game. He was an outstanding young man. Good bus driver, too."

Bus driver? As it turns out, back in the 1970s students could drive school buses in North Carolina for extra money. Wilson did it and made $81 dollars a month.

Wilson badly wanted to go to North Carolina, so he walked on the football team. He eventually earned a scholarship and carved out a niche as a backup center. After his playing career, he stayed in Chapel Hill for three years as a graduate assistant but struggled to get any full-time coaching job. His first opportunity came under Bill Hayes at Winston-Salem State, a historically black college, where he was the only white member of the coaching staff – and he only got that job because a coach there had passed away.

"No matter how good you think you are, you don't have experience, so I just was having a hard time," Wilson said. "Looking back 25 years later, it was probably an unbelievable blessing because at a young age it got me in an environment where I had to learn how to have good relationships with players, parents, coaches. Not that I had bad ones, but it taught me how to get comfortable when you're not in your comfort zone."

Two years later, Wilson was convinced by his old basketball coach to take a high school head coaching job close to his hometown in Newton, N.C. Wilson didn't win a game that year, and he was afraid he might have killed his career.

The only thing that saved him was his relationship with Randy Walker, who had been an assistant at North Carolina and got the head coaching job at Miami (Ohio) in 1990.

"And Coach Walker almost didn't hire me because I was a high school coach," Wilson said. "He offered the job to someone else that didn't take it."

Wilson spent the next 12 years with Walker, who died of a heart attack in 2006. By then, Wilson had already left for Oklahoma to work with Bob Stoops and won the Broyles Award as the nation's top assistant in 2008.

By taking the Indiana job in 2011, Wilson put himself in position to either advance his career in a big way or probably be an assistant for the rest of his life. But if this is a coaching graveyard, it sure has a good soundtrack.

Though a lot of programs play music at the start of practice or for stretching, Indiana uses it the whole way – and Wilson picks the songs. Wednesday featured everything from Boston to Tupac, from Guns 'N Roses to Justin Timberlake, from Led Zeppelin to David Lee Murphy.

"You've got Michael Jackson, country, rap, techno," Hughes said. "We love it. You don't notice it all that much, but especially at the beginning of practice that's the best part because everyone is sort of dragging out here but it kind of gets you going a little bit."

And now it's time for Indiana to get going a little bit. Though the team lacks a standout star, there's a lot of experience, a good receiving corps and some nice young prospects on the defensive line that look like they could turn into legitimate Big Ten players.

"The best way for us to win is recruit better, develop them better and go out and perform," Wilson said. "Last year we got a little closer. There's better talent. everybody's back, everybody's stronger and we'll see if we can keep working and perform better."

Dan Wolken, a national college football reporter for USA TODAY Sports, is on Twitter @DanWolken.