IU football: 'The few and the proud' remain of once-celebrated 2013 class

BLOOMINGTON – An avid golfer, Kevin Wilson played a long game in the 2013 recruiting cycle, and it worked to perfection.

Presented with an uber-talented rising senior class in the Indianapolis area, the pressure was on IU’s second-year coach to keep prospects such as Darius Latham (North Central), David Kenney (Pike) and Antonio Allen (Ben Davis) close to home. It wouldn’t be easy — interest was high, and in fact, each of those three players initially committed somewhere else.

But Wilson was patient. He landed in-state commitments and let kids recruit each other.

“I think it started with (Fort Wayne Homestead wide receiver) Isaac Griffith and it just kind of trickled from there. I got here and then I started trying to recruit,” redshirt senior safety, and Brownsburg product, Chase Dutra said this week. “It was just recruiting on recruiting, recruiting other kids. We all kind of bought in and we just wanted to change it here.”

Wilson’s approach paid off in stages.

Allen flipped from Ole Miss to IU late in summer 2012. Kenney became a fixture in Bloomington that fall before decommitting from Iowa and pledging to stay home. Latham was the last to switch, from Wisconsin to Indiana in November of that same year.

In between, Wilson gained momentum across the board, landing out-of-state players such as four-star athlete Rashard Fant and three-star tight end Danny Friend. When the Hoosiers added a slew of talented late commitments from Georgia, Florida and New York, 2013 looked like the kind of transformative class upon which Wilson could build a bright future for IU football.

It didn’t unfold the way anyone expected.

What worked out

In the most basic terms, those 2013 signees achieved what they wanted to.

As a group, they ranked 42nd nationally and eighth in the Big Ten, according to the 247Sports Composite. Those were program bests at the time.

Players such as Allen, Latham and Marcus Oliver found playing time immediately, while others, such as Dutra and Fant, took a redshirt year.

In that first season the class was on campus, Indiana went 5-7, defeating Purdue and coming within a whisker of the program’s first bowl berth since 2007. The next year, Indiana won on the road at ranked Missouri, and might have bowled then, but for quarterback Nate Sudfeld’s injury.

The next two seasons ended with bowls, and the Hoosiers eventually won four-straight over Purdue. A win Saturday would make five consecutive in the rivalry series for the first time in program history.

“That would be nice, to be able to say that,” Fant said last week. “I don’t know how many people went five in a row. Me having that redshirt, I claim that one too. I had to be on scout team.”

Between the four Old Oaken Bucket victories and the two bowl appearances, this has been the most successful stretch IU football has enjoyed since Bill Mallory’s tenure, 1984–1996.

“I think that we have changed the foundation around here,” Dutra said after practice Tuesday. “(IU) coach (Tom) Allen is doing a great job of leading it, and I think the classes behind us, they see how we’ve set it, and I think we have changed the foundation around here, and changed the expectation of this program.”

‘The few and the proud’

It just hasn’t happened the way those players would have envisioned on signing day 2013. In truth, much of that heralded class wound up busting at IU.

Latham played three years before leaving for the NFL. He went undrafted, a nod to his untapped potential in college, but has since caught on with the Oakland Raiders, a nod to his undeniable talent.

Kenney collected nine tackles in seven games as a freshman, but left the program in August 2014. He landed at Illinois State but was dismissed after a little over a year.

Allen is awaiting trial in federal court after a series of arrests on drug- and weapons-related charges.

Coaches gushed about running back Laray Smith’s breakaway speed, but he wound up moving to corner and then transferring away.

Taj Williams and Maurice Swain looked like late coups, pulled from Tallahassee, Fla., and LaGrange, Ga., respectively. Both wound up at junior college. Williams now plays for TCU. Swain finished his career at Auburn last season.

Of the 22 players Indiana announced on signing day, 12 completed at least four years in Bloomington or exhausted their eligibility as two-year transfers. Some didn’t even make it to campus.

“We accomplished some things, but honestly, we probably underperformed,” Fant said. “We had all those guys, and a lot of them didn’t make it out. We always joke around, class of 2013, the few and the proud, because we’re definitely the few. There’s not that many.”

No regrets

There were unexpected successes, such as Oliver, who had only three offers out of Hamilton (Ohio) High School but held down IU’s middle linebacker job for four seasons. Nate Hoff was a late addition from a naval academy prep school who wound up anchoring some of the Hoosiers’ best defensive lines of the past 10 years. He has 5½ tackles for loss and two sacks this season.

And the group would be supplemented by a strong set of walk-ons, one-time Big Ten kicker of the year Griffin Oakes chief among them. 

But it speaks to the holes the 2013 class left behind that the 2014 class, which has produced several impact defenders, is stocked with fourth-year seniors.

Indiana could not afford to let the likes of Greg Gooch, Tony Fields or Simmie Cobbs redshirt. It needed them on the field right away.

“As much as the 2013 class was great and we didn’t have a whole lot of people in the end, the 2014 class was just as good,” Dutra said. “I bond well with my ’13 or ’14 guys. I kind of almost see it as, since there’s not that many of us, that we all mesh together as one class in a way, in the end.”

The 2014 class includes Gooch, Fields, Cobbs, Tegray Scales, Chris Covington, Robert McCray and Wes Martin. Cobbs and Martin are redshirt juniors, though Cobbs’ was not by choice, but because of injury.

Wilson probably did not get all he thought he could from his 2013 class, but between ’13 and ’14, Indiana managed to amass a generation of players more successful than any the program has seen in 20 years.

For 14 seniors, Saturday’s Old Oaken Bucket will be their last regular-season college game. Of those 14, eight are redshirt seniors. Of those eight, only four — Fant, Dutra, Hoff and Friend — remain from that initial class that dared IU football fans to dream bigger signing day dreams than they ever had before.

The few. And the proud.

“It’s a lot of things, a lot of what-ifs, what could have been,” Fant said. “But I’m proud to this day of the guys that stuck around for three, four, five years. It’s nice to see and hopefully we’ve made IU a nicer place.”

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

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INDIANA AT PURDUE

Kickoff: Noon, Saturday, Ross-Ade Stadium.

TV/Radio: ESPN2, WFNI-1070 AM.