The Big Ten Title Game: 12 Hours in Indianapolis

At first, I wasn’t even gonna go to Indy. When my roommate suggested we try and get tickets to drive down for the Big Ten championship game, and that they were only $40, I thought “that’s kind of a lot, no?” By the time Sunday night rolled around and I was unsuccessful in getting a ticket, I was more than fine with accepting my fate of watching from a comfortable living room. Then, somehow, my other roommate found a way into the Badgers’ mysterious ticket website 10 minutes later and grabbed me one. The road trip was on. As we tried to cram five guys into a Honda Fit on Saturday morning (tip: they do not fit), I asked myself, “is this game really worth $40, gas money, and 11 hours of leg and back pain?”

As it turns out, the answer was “yes.” Hell yes.

Indianapolis has one of those prototypical clean-and-pleasant-mid-size-American-city-downtown areas: basketball arena, football stadium, convention center, wide avenues, a hub of restaurants, shops and bars, etc. It was impossible to get a real feel for the local scene, however, because downtown was literally crawling with thousands of fans from out of state. Early in the afternoon, there was a steady flow across every street near the stadium of people in red and green, coming in and out of every place of business. It was much like the scene on the drive down at every single “oasis” on I-90 or off-road gas station in Indiana: Wisconsin and Michigan State football fans as far as the eye could see. Any doubts I had about the atmosphere of this matchup in a neutral city quickly dissipated; there was a real buzz of anticipation in the air (or wherever those buzzes are generally located).

Clearly, Indianapolis recognized that an influx of some 70,000 people (official attendance: 64, 152) was an event to embrace. There were banners welcoming Big Ten fans all over, and plenty of fan “events.” At the convention center, each team had their own little gathering area for fans. The Wisconsin area was actually quite large, but I say little because the scene inside consisted solely of places to buy beer and stadium food, tables to stand an drink at, and a DJ nodding to himself as he played loud dance jams to a largely unaffected middle-aged (and up) crowd. The highlight of course was seeing Barry Alvarez himself striding down the convention center hallway with a small entourage in tow, his head and red blazer shining brilliantly.

Outside the convention center, there was a street closed off with tents and fences, dedicated to a similar pastime as the fan centers’: standing, eating and drinking. Another thing that now became obvious was that this gameday was going to be alcohol-fueled just like any normal home game, thank you very much. The one thing Indianapolis was not capable of planning for, apparently, was being able to accommodate all these thousands of fans in the downtown sports bars and restaurants. With the Wisconsin-Marquette basketball matchup about to begin, plus nearly every fan looking for somewhere to eat and relax before the game, anything even resembling a place to sit with a television and food became filled to the brim. We called up four different places designated as “Badgers sports bars” for the game, and two-and-a-half hours was the average wait time. In the end, we settled for a nearly three hour wait and the 40 TV’s at Buffalo Wild Wings.

Inside, the atmosphere that was palpable in the convention center and the downtown streets was now even more punctuated. As Tyrone Mathieu led LSU back against Georgia and an inept Badgers offense slowly lost to Marquette, chants, cheers and jeers erupted from the sizable B-Dubs crowd. It was basically a stadium atmosphere, complete with a 10 minute line for the bathroom. As impressed as I would later become with MSU, I must admit that my only personal interaction with one of their fans consisted of a forty-year-old out-of-shape bald man trying to goad a table of college students by making fun of their gym habits and generally being as douchey as possible. Luckily, he failed in getting one of us to take the bait and start a fight, and we escaped back into downtown Indy to get to the game.

By now it was dark, and the scene was akin to some sort of bizarro Times Square: inebriated hordes of red and green chanting and shouting, and swarming through bars, restaurants, hotels, and decoratively lit streets. Of course, there were plenty of normal families quietly making their way to the stadium, but it was a full-on celebratory event atmosphere–something was going to happen tonight, clearly. If anyone could have predicted what actually did wind up happening, they must have felt it at the heart of that crowd heading towards the gates of Lucas Oil Stadium.