Indiana State Football: The Tiny 2-9 Team Explaining the End of the World
Indiana State Football, or How a 2-9 Season Quietly Explains the Collapse of Western Civilization
By “Roving” Roisin MacAllister, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk
PARIS—On a drizzly November afternoon along the Seine, the bistros are abuzz with talk of pension strikes, Ukrainian grain corridors, and whether the Sycamores can finally break their 39-game road losing streak. No, of course they aren’t. But then again, neither is anyone in Beijing, Lagos, or Reykjavik. And that, dear reader, is precisely the point: Indiana State Football is the perfect black-hole metaphor for a planet that has perfected the art of screaming into the void while pretending someone, somewhere, is listening.
For the uninitiated, the Sycamores—named after a tree that drops its dignity each autumn—have spent the last decade perfecting the sort of sustained mediocrity that would make a mid-tier Balkan parliament blush. Their 2023 campaign ended 2-9, a record so symmetrical it could be used to calibrate Swiss watches. Head coach Curt Mallory now holds the dubious honor of presiding over the football equivalent of a Tarkovsky film: long, slow, beautifully shot, and absolutely no one scores.
Global significance? Glad you asked. In an era when the BRICS nations debate dedollarization and AI threatens to render half the workforce as obsolete as a Blockbuster membership, the existential shrug offered by Terre Haute becomes oddly clarifying. While COP28 delegates burn 400 private jets’ worth of carbon to discuss emissions caps, 7,000 hardy souls still shuffle into Memorial Stadium on Saturday afternoons to watch young men concuss themselves for an education they’ll be paying off until their hair gives up. If that isn’t a climate allegory, I’ll eat my press-badge lanyard—sustainably sourced, of course.
Consider the roster: 35% first-generation college students, 20% from Florida speed factories, 10% from Australia because punters grow on eucalyptus trees, and 100% convinced the portal will rescue them from this fly-over purgatory. The same centrifugal logic that siphons Ghanaian nurses to the NHS and Romanian welders to Qatar now redistributes 19-year-old safeties seeking NIL crumbs. The world’s talent carousel spins ever faster; Indiana State merely squeaks as it turns, like a shopping cart with one anarchist wheel.
Financially, the program burns $4 million a year—roughly the price of one medium-range Turkish drone or 17 seconds of a Goldman Sachs bailout. Boosters soothe themselves with the mantra that every dollar keeps rural Indiana from full meth-lab status, a claim economists call “not technically falsifiable.” Meanwhile, ESPN+ beams the games into 37 countries where viewers assume the Sycamore is some sort of novelty squirrel. Soft power, they call it. Soft everything, frankly.
Yet there remains a brutal honesty in the enterprise. Unlike FIFA’s cynical World Cup pageants or the geopolitical cosplay of the Olympics, FCS football offers no geopolitical fig leaf. Qatar buys Kylian Mbappé; Indiana State buys discount turf from a bankrupt baseball team. Both end in tears, but only one admits the budget up front. In that sense, the Sycamores are the last honest brokers in global sport: they lose transparently, cheaply, and without laundering anyone’s reputation—unless you count the local sheriff’s reelection campaign.
And so, as 2024 dawns and the transfer portal belches fresh disappointment, remember this: somewhere in the flat corn-swept grid of the Midwest, unpaid teenagers are running into each other at full speed to entertain people who will blame the refs, the economy, and eventually the Chinese, but never the systemic rot that keeps everyone locked in place. If you squint, you can see the entire 21st-century condition in a single third-and-long draw play—equal parts hope, delusion, and the faint smell of burning mulch.
In the end, Indiana State Football doesn’t matter. That’s why it matters. The planet keeps warming, the debts keep compounding, and still the Sycamores suit up every Saturday, convinced the next snap could turn it all around. Call it naïveté, call it faith, or call it the same stubborn refusal to read the room that keeps humanity staggering forward. Either way, kickoff is at 2 p.m. Bring a coat; the apocalypse is windy.
