MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — Don Fischer never saw this coming.
The play-by-play voice of Indiana basketball and football was behind the microphone a half-century ago when the Hoosiers — the basketball Hoosiers, coached by Bob Knight — won the 1976 national title with a perfect 32-0 record.
And Monday, he was set to describe for listeners how the Hoosiers' football team was trying to match that feat of becoming an undefeated national champion. Indiana
was taking on Miami at Hard Rock Stadium for the College Football Playoff national championship, with the Hoosiers bidding to become the first 16-0 team in major college football since Yale in 1894.
“From my perspective as a broadcaster, that’s the ultimate — to be a part of something, a national champion,” Fischer said in the Hoosiers' radio booth a couple of hours before kickoff Monday. “And now I’ve got a chance to do the same thing in football. I mean, it’s a special night for me.”
Fischer has seen some things in his time as the voice of Indiana football. Most of those things were, well, bad.
There was a stretch of 24 seasons during which the Hoosiers managed exactly one winning record — and that was just a 7-6 mark in 2007. There was an 0-11 year. There was an 83-20 loss at Wisconsin. There was a 62-0 loss at Iowa. There was a 28-game losing streak against ranked opponents.
“I've seen a lot of bad football,” Fischer said.
Then came Curt Cignetti, who entered Monday night 26-2 in his two seasons at Indiana.
Fischer got introduced to Cignetti during the coach's infamous “Purdue sucks ... so does Michigan and Ohio State! Go IU!” speech that he gave during an Indiana-Maryland basketball game. Fischer's broadcast aired Cignetti's remarks live from midcourt during a timeout.
“I just started laughing," Fischer said. “Nobody’s ever said that in Indiana before, you know? And I said, ‘This is something different.’ So, from that point forward, I was intrigued by the guy.”
Cignetti, for his part, loves the Knight comparisons. Cignetti isn't afraid to say what's on his mind, with little concern for repercussions. Knight was the same way. They aren't carbon copies — to the best of all knowledge, Cignetti has not thrown a chair across a field — but it's easy to see parallels.
Also, they both win.
“I was a big Bob Knight fan as a little kid,” Cignetti said. “I liked sort of the shenanigans and the faces at the press conferences and throwing the chair across the court. I thought that was pretty cool. And the guy I bought my house from was a big friend of Bob Knight, actually.”
Fischer started going to Cignetti's practices shortly after the new coach came to Indiana, to watch what makes him tick. He saw Cignetti was spending as much time, if not more, coaching his assistants than he did coaching players. He was the CEO, which is what he learned in four years working under Nick Saban at Alabama.
Fischer would get asked how he thought Cignetti would do. He predicted Cignetti would win big.
“I knew he was going to win. I could tell,” Fischer said. “You can tell if you’ve been around long enough that the coach has got it or if he doesn’t got it. I could after watching those practices in the spring that he had it.”
And after more than 2,000 games, his voice echoing across the state of Indiana, Fischer had a chance at reliving those perfect memories of 1976.
“How do you get to this place in two years' time and get to the playoff both years and get to the national championship game in the second year?” Fischer said. “It's a miracle.”
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AP National Writer Eddie Pells contributed to this report.
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