The short version out of Friday night: No. 5 Indiana beat Northwestern 29-23, and the Turbo Richard injury is the part of that sentence people will still be talking about Monday. Indiana's starting running back left in the first half with a right lower-leg injury and did not return. No designation beyond that has come down yet, and I am not going to pretend I know more than what the reporting says.
Here is what the box tells you without anybody spinning it. Richard was gone before halftime, and Indiana still had to finish a one-score football game against a Northwestern team that would not go away. Six points. On the road-tested Friday night stage, with a top-five ranking sitting on the desk and a backfield suddenly one man short. That is a team winning ugly, and winning ugly in late September is still winning.
Lower-leg is the vaguest phrase in football. It covers a rolled ankle that costs a guy a series of warmups and it covers the kind of thing that ends a fall. Until someone in Bloomington puts a word in front of it, the honest read is that Indiana's staff knows and the rest of us are reading body language on the sideline. That is where this sits.
checked the almanac: this program spent most of its life as a place where one bad Saturday broke the whole season. the 1967 rose bowl team was the high-water mark for decades, and indiana didn't get back to that neighborhood until recently. depth like this used to be a fantasy in bloomington.
That is the real story of the last couple of years in Bloomington, honestly. Indiana got good enough that an injury to a starting back is a problem to solve, not a season to mourn. The recruiting and portal work built a two-deep, and Friday night is exactly the sort of game that tells you whether that two-deep is real or just a depth chart printed in nice fonts.
What I am watching next is simple: the first official word on Richard's status, and how the workload gets divided when Indiana takes the field again. Snap distribution tells you more than a press conference ever will.
