Indiana football took a sharp turn on the first day of December with the ouster of head coach Kevin Wilson. A week earlier, the team was celebrating after qualifying for back-to-back bowl trips for the first time in a quarter century and a promising future with Wilson signed on to a long contract extension less than a year earlier.
The Hoosiers immediately announced that defensive coordinator Tom Allen would take over as the team’s new coach. Allen had helped reconstruct a defense in 2016 that had been lacking for most of Wilson’s tenure in Bloomington. After a couple years of coming up just short of major upsets or breakthroughs beyond the middle-of-the-pack .