Notre Dame football will always be on national TV in America and most people don't like it. You either hate em or love em. Without sounding like an obvious homer (South Bend is upstate, my parents are from Elkhart County), they ring true excellence academically... less than a handful of BCS schools can claim that (Stanford, Duke... UCLA?). Their definition of a student-athlete is so far beyond any BigTen or SEC school it hurts (Northwestern? Vandy?). They refuse to join a conference in football, so now you hate them more. Those cocky bastards. Then they got Bellicheat's former protègè and he eats a lot. A lot. And they haven't won a bowl game for a decade and a half. Nevermind that they were Vegas' underdog in 7 of those 9 matchups dating all the way to their back to back Cotton Bowl wins in '93/'94 . The Cotton Bowl, the 5th member of the BCS Series, which is IU football's next step, after they install new turf of course. And get a real Head Coach. Chances that will happen with a lame duck Athletic Director? I've seen a lot of chaos since being 22-4 and whipping Purdont, well actually since I was a rioting student the week Kent Harvey's arm was grabbed by Knight. Before then, being a Hoosier fan was like being a Pacers fan. Nowadays being a Pacers fan is the more humbling than Notre Dame's current plight. This was my team growing up... Reggie Miller posters wall to wall... wearing the shorts and jerseys to school... waiting for autographs after games. Today tickets are basically free and management has turned over for the first time in 24 years. I'm 26. I cannot recall the Hoosiers winning it all in '87 or the Irish doing so in '88 but I do remember the Reds sweep of Oakland in '90. Then there was a huge gap til 2007, when Colts clinched their first in Indy. But that made it even moreso rewarding as a fan, or fanatic in my case. A team that was 10 years removed from 1-15 turned into 3 straight years of being undefeated in November... Colts are synonymous with AFC SOUTH CHAMP, literally, they're the sole owner of such a title. Holy shit I can't wait to see Lucas Oil.
In the bustling Nickel Plate District of Fishers, Indiana, Tracy Gritters can recall a time when things looked very different. “It was a two-lane road 17 years ago,” she said of the property around her boutique store, Gallery 116 , where she has sold locally made goods since 2002. “We were worried about Target coming to town.” The retail giant eventually did — it's located about an 11-minute walk from her store — but the city's expansion hasn’t been the scenario she feared. Fishers, which was named MONEY's Best Place to Live in 2017 , officially upgraded from a town to a city and swore in its first mayor on January 1, 2015. Mayor Scott Faddness is still in office, and in the years since his inauguration, the city itself has been transformed. The newly developed downtown area became the Nickel Plate District , now home to an outdoor amphitheatre, plenty of retail stores and restaurants, a brewery, luxury apartments, and a high-speed internet coworking sp