During his visit to Hoosier Gym, Bill Simmons had some pointed criticisms of fictional Coach Dale.

On the day his beloved Patriots were to play in Super Bowl XLVI, Bill Simmons made a pilgrimage to Hoosier Gym in Knightstown, Indiana, where they filmed Hoosiers. The trip was an attempt to bring luck and victory to the New England Patriots. It did not.

With respect to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and every other place in America that considers itself a “basketball city,” nowhere does the game matter as much as it does in Indiana. Spend a single January day in the state and it won’t take long to realize that watching or playing basketball is the pastime of choice for a majority of Hoosiers, even more so than auto racing, drinking heavily, complaining about the weather, or wondering why they still live in Indiana. This is why 13 of the 14 largest high school gyms in the country are in Indiana. This is why some of the state’s biggest heroes are Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, Bob Knight, and Josh McRoberts’s knee-high socks. This is why the best sports movie ever made is entitled Hoosiers and not New Yorkers or Whatever the Hell People From Illinois Call Themselves. Simply put, Hoosiers spend so much time obsessing over basketball because the only entertainment alternatives in a state full of corn are to tip over cows or run a meth lab.

Let me take you, for a brief moment, back to March 21, 2002. It was a Thursday, and the Duke Blue Devils were the defending national champions. That team featured the likes of Jason Williams, Carlos Boozer, Mike Dunleavy, and Chris Duhon. They'd lost Shane Battier from the championship team, but it hardly seemed to matter. The only team that could possibly stand in the way of a repeat was the hated Maryland Terrapins, advancing on the other side of the bracket behind the inexorable brilliance of Juan Dixon.

En route to a certain rematch, Duke met the 5-seed Indiana Hoosiers in the Sweet 16 at Rupp Arena in Kentucky. The Blue Devils quickly rolled out to a 17-point lead, and it looked like victory was inevitable. Then things got weird. Indiana grabbed rebound after rebound, and they started getting to the line. Duke went cold. Jared Jeffries, who would finish with 24 points and 15 rebounds, went hot. The Hoosiers racked up the offensive boards, finishing with 20 (and an incredible 60.6 percent offensive rebounding rate, meaning they rebounded more of their missed shots than Duke did by a healthy margin).

While the rest of the country watched the Packers choke in the NFL playoffs Sunday and made Discount Double Check jokes that quickly became more annoying than the commercials themselves, most college basketball fans in the heartland of America devoted at least half of their attention to the Ohio State-Indiana rematch. Two weeks earlier, largely because Ohio State’s three best players battled foul trouble all game, the Hoosiers upset the Buckeyes in Bloomington and sent a message to the rest of the country: Their win over Kentucky wasn’t a fluke. Thanks to upset losses by both teams earlier in the week, the rematch didn’t have quite the luster leading up to it that it would’ve otherwise had, but it was still a significant game. One team was going to get back on the winning track, while the other was going to fall behind in the race for the Big Ten title. In the end, Ohio State smothered Indiana defensively and cruised to a 17-point, 80-63 win over the Hoosiers on the back of Lenzelle Smith Jr.’s offensive explosion. We’re still two months away from the NCAA tournament, and this was only one game, but let’s overanalyze it anyway.

Last year, the Indiana Hoosiers finished 12-20. It was Tom Crean’s third season as coach, and those 12 wins were the most for the Hoosiers during his tenure. Crean needs the team to improve this year; he could lose his job if they don’t. So far, he's getting that. Indiana is 11-0 and the only team to have beaten third-ranked Kentucky. As the Hoosiers prepare for the beginning of the conference play, they’re a top-20 team with a chance of challenging Ohio State for the Big Ten crown.