The Indiana Hoosiers take pride in their basketball. They don’t have a rich and lengthy history in college football. They have won the Big Ten championship exactly twice in more than 120 years of competitive football. That long run of futility at least makes it easier to identify the program’s greatest moment.
The 1945 Indiana team went unbeaten and tied once, finishing fourth in the final Associated Press Poll. However, the college football landscape created by World War II had something to do with that Indiana season, which was and is a historical outlier. Another reason that 1945 season isn’t discussed or remembered as widely as it could or should be is that 1945 was the last year in which the Rose Bowl did not have a Big Ten-Pac-12 (or as the conferences were known back then, the Western Conference and the Pacific Coast Conference) tie-in. USC played Alabama in the 1946 Rose Bowl following the 1945 season. Indiana was bitterly unlucky to not have the tie-in that season.
As it was, Indiana did not make the Rose Bowl. The Hoosiers still hadn’t played in the Granddaddy. Then came the 1967 season, in which the Hoosiers came out of nowhere and captured the Big Ten title. Their win over Purdue in the Old Oaken Bucket rivalry game clinched their Rose Bowl berth under coach John Pont. That was and is the greatest Big Ten football moment in Indiana Hoosier history. IU then played its first and only Rose Bowl against USC. The Trojans won the national title by beating the Hoosiers in the Arroyo Seco in the 1968 Rose Bowl.
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