Column: Teams of old beginning to reappear

As the press room was reduced to a palpable silence, he briskly walked to the lectern where he placed his weary hands, with the emotion of a soul-crushing loss painted on his face.

IU Coach Kevin Wilson appeared visibly defeated, a rarity for a man so persistently confident.

Wilson and his Hoosiers had entered Saturday’s contest with dreams of playing in the famed Rose Bowl for the first time since 1968, which injected the IU program with a positivity not felt in decades.

Yet in a span of three hours, those dreams were stomped on and crushed like a cigarette butt under the shoe of a smoker.

And as those dreams were eradicated, nightmares of IU squads of old crept into the conscience of Hoosier Nation. The IU team that was so thoroughly trounced by Wisconsin wasn’t the one fans had seen defeat Illinois and Iowa in consecutive weeks. It was a grotesque amalgam of former IU Coach Bill Lynch’s teams that were so often overmatched by their conference opponents.

The most cogent example of IU’s fall from grace was a sequence late in the first half.

With the Hoosiers trailing, 17-7, and less than one minute remaining until halftime, Wisconsin possessed the ball with the intention of draining the clock. On a simple handoff to James White, the IU defense completely tore at the seams, as White darted 69 yards for a touchdown that put the Badgers ahead, 24-7.

“That was one of those plays where I thought we took some bad angles,” Wilson said.

That lack of proper execution was the lethal injection to IU’s hopes of defeating Wisconsin. And if the Hoosiers don’t win their final two contests — road dates against Penn State and Purdue loom large — their dreams of becoming bowl eligible will also die.

The 62-14 loss to Wisconsin, the eighth consecutive defeat at the hands of the Badgers in many years, should cause Hoosier fans’ consternation concerning the big picture view of the program.

The disparaging losses that have come in droves during the past decade haven’t necessarily been a matter of poor schematics. Rather, they’ve been an indication that IU doesn’t possess the defensive talent to compete with the Big Ten Conference’s elite programs.

“I’m not saying we stepped backward, but you cannot let a football team run the ball down your throat,” Wilson said. “In the Big Ten, there are some teams that are, historically, known to do that.”

“If we keep building our program to be competitive and win these types of games, we have to stand out there and match that,” Wilson said.

Wilson knows that his defense remains in its infant stages of development, and that it will continue to be the Achilles heel of a program that has seemed primed to snap the shackles of mediocrity.

The 564 rushing yards allowed will be a continual reminder of all the work remaining to be accomplished under Wilson’s watch. So will the 48-point loss.

It’s a harrowing reality that senior center Will Matte succinctly described minutes after the conclusion of Saturday’s contest.

“We didn’t execute,” Matte said. “We didn’t do what we needed to do.”

­— ckillore@indiana.edu