BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Welcome to the live blog for Indiana’s opening game of the season against Florida International. Kickoff is at 7 p.m. ET.

Game two of the Curt Cignetti features a dreaded FBS vs. FCS contest. Fans of the FBS schools really don’t like these games and I don’t blame them. The only skin in the game is getting a win towards bowl eligibility.

We’ll see what we see from Indiana tonight. I expect a relatively vanilla approach. Cignetti won’t want to put too much on film for UCLA to see for the Big Ten opener next Saturday.

Pregame – Indiana injuries today submitted to the Big Ten for the availability report, all players listed as out: WR Donaven McCulley, CB Jah Jah Boyd, WR E.J. Williams Jr. and TE Brody Kosin. Nothing unexpected and it’s good that RB Kaelon Black is absent from the list.

• Students are starting to fill in a bit now as the pre-game clock hits the 15-minute mark. You can see a large throng of students walking down 17th Street from the press box. Kind of what you’d expect. We’ll see how the rest of the stadium fills out.

• I’ve been to Western Illinois for football many times. Hanson Field is a very quaint stadium. Sort of inside a natural bowl of sorts. It has a good atmosphere. Difficult place to drive to from any direction other than due north, though. Macomb, Ill. is a nice town, but you bank a lot of two-lane highway time to get there.

• Security is very optimistically placed at the top of the student section on the east side of the stadium. With 23 minutes to kickoff? Still plenty of student seats available below the tunnels. The rest of the stadium? Wide open spaces. Not a surprise to me … but I’m not the one who pointed out the habits of the crowd either.

• Fashion report. Indiana in its same default red jerseys, white paints with the regular IU helmet. Western Illinois appears to be in all white.

• It’s overcast at Memorial Stadium with a steady breeze coming from the north. Temperatures have been dropping all day and it should be cool for the majority of the game.

• The two-hour acid test of driving into the parking lot to gauge the crowd? It’s unscientific, but let’s just say I parked about as close to the stadium as my Gate 11 pass allowed me to. Tailgaters were around, but thin on the ground. Now, it’s a Friday game versus a Saturday game and that makes a huge difference, but I just hope Curt Cignetti has appropriately calibrated his expectations of what the crowd will be. It’s just not going to happen in the span of a game or two to change habits that have been ingrained in Indiana football fans for generations.

• Other Big Ten games this weekend: Northwestern hosts Duke at 9 p.m. ET tonight. I happened to be in Chicago earlier this week, and while I was there, I checked out Northwestern’s temporary stadium on Lake Michigan. Interesting joint.

On Saturday, the big game is No. 3 Texas at No. 10 Michigan and there is one Big Ten conference game as Maryland hosts Michigan State. Other games: Bowling Green at No. 8 Penn State; Rhode Island at Minnesota; Akron at Rutgers; Iowa State at No. 21 Iowa; South Dakota at Wisconsin; Eastern Michigan at Washington; No. 19 Kansas at Illinois; Colorado at Nebraska; Western Michigan at No. 2 Ohio State; Boise State at Oregon and Utah State at No. 13 USC.

For anyone following basketball over the last year, the name Caitlin Clark is among the most recognizable across the sport.

Since staking her claim as one of the greatest women’s college basketball players of all time as part of the Iowa Hawkeyes, Clark was selected by the Indiana Fever as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft. Since joining the roster, she’s not only performed as one of the league’s best rookies but an All-Star level player.

It’s not often NBA and WNBA teams draw comparisons between each other, but when a talent like Clark emerges, those comparisons have started to come through more often.

During Indiana’s win over the Dallas Wings, commentator and Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman compared it and Clark to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

“I believe they’re going to win a championship somewhere in the near future,” Lieberman said. “They’re young, they’re the second-youngest team in the WNBA. They remind me a little bit of the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are the second-youngest team in the NBA.”

Although the Thunder don’t currently have a rookie reaching that status, the comparison does make some sense. Both are two of the youngest teams in their individual leagues, both have found success over the last year. Oklahoma City jumped from the Play-In Tournament to the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference, while the Fever have jumped to the No. 6 seed in the league after a 1-8 start.

The catalysts to Oklahoma City’s massive shift were the trio of MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, ROTY contender Chet Holmgren and the ever-improving Jalen Williams. Ironically, Indiana’s All-Star duo of Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell paired with Clark make for a similar enough trio.

It’s a bit of a stretch to compare both the Thunder and Fever at the same level for the current season considering their difference in seeding, but claiming they could both win a championship in the next few years is not out of the question. Each team has a young roster, high potential and a franchise cornerstone good enough to lead them to the mountaintop, it just make take them different lengths to get there.

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On a recent episode of the Come And Talk 2 Me podcast, former Indiana Pacers guards Reggie Miller and Mark Jackson discussed some of their experiences together with the Pacers franchise.

Jackson and Miller shared a backcourt in Indianapolis from 1995-2000. They teamed up on some of the best Pacers teams ever — they were one game from the NBA Finals in 1998 and made it in 2000.

Their coach in the 1998-2000 seasons was Larry Bird, the legendary player who turned into a coach, then an executive. Bird won coach of the year in 1998 and was largely successful guiding the Pacers with his unique style.

Miller and Jackson recalled a game in which the two had a memorable interaction with Bird. “We were in the layup line, and Reg and I, as captains of the team, we had to go back and talk to Larry Bird before the game,” Jackson began. He couldn’t remember what they needed to bother the coach about, but the two jogged off the court and into the back of the arena.

From there, Miller took over the story. “Jack and I, we go back to the locker room and we’re like, ‘where’s coach Bird?’. The pair was told that their coach was in his office, so they went to check and he wasn’t there. Slick Leonard, a former coach for the Pacers who was a broadcaster at the time, suggested to the players that Bird might be in the area where the showers are.

“We head back to the shower because we had to ask him this question,” Miller continued. “Before we got out there, go around the corner. Larry Legend is sitting in a chair, he’s got a pack of Newports. He’s just smoking away.”

“What do you guys need?” Bird said, per Miller’s recollection.

The two former players never explained where the story went from there, only saying that the sight affected their play that night in the game. Neither Jackson or Miller ever brought it up to Bird. The entire podcast episode can be found here, with this story coming late in the episode.