In a touch of irony, Penix’s finest performance in an Indiana uniform came the one time he faced Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan.
BLOOMINGTON – If you walked regularly among Indiana’s tailgating lots and fields last fall, you might have noticed a slight change in the scenery.
Backdropped against the customary blend of cream and crimson with a scattering of opponents’ colors, purple and gold steadily speckled in. The University of Washington — more specifically, Udub football — apparel dotted the landscape as the season wore on, and the Huskies climbed higher.
Two years after he’d left, Michael Penix still enjoyed his share of admirers and supporters in Bloomington, even as the legacy of his four years as a Hoosier settled uneasily into the pages of history.
Hoosier fans remember Penix fondly, and they should. What is possibly more difficult for them to grapple with is the period in time he, to them, embodies.
IU’s last bowl winners. A future NFL QB, an All-American RB and a relentless D.
It is not so much Penix’s Indiana legacy that is complex. He was a successful, often remarkable quarterback who helped anchor two of the best teams in program history, delivering some generationally signature moments along the way. And he might have delivered more, if healthier. By all accounts he conducted himself with nothing but credit to his program across his entire Indiana career.
What Penix represents through, to many IU fans, is layered. He is — both because of his time in Bloomington and his career since — at once the face of what was a remarkably successful period for this program of modest distinction, and yet also a time when it felt like Indiana football promised more than it delivered.
It was in part because of Michael Penix that IU football fans were allowed to genuinely dream for the first time in generations. And it was in part because of Michael Penix the grandest of those dreams were never fully realized.
In a touch of irony, Penix’s finest performance in an Indiana uniform came the one time he faced Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan.
On Nov. 7, 2020, the Wolverines came to Bloomington ranked No. 25, Indiana No. 13. The Hoosiers intended to wear special “Salute To Service” jerseys, but after Michigan expressed concerns the shade was too near the Wolverines’ customary road white, IU pivoted back to its standard crimson tops, then proceeded to bulldoze its visitor from the north.
Penix was outstanding: 30-of-50 passing, 342 yards, three touchdowns, no sacks, in a 38-21 win perhaps most famous for Tom Allen bloodying his face celebrating the game-sealing interception with Devon Matthews late in the fourth quarter.
Indiana ended that game on a punishing 10-play drive, each snap a downhill run into the teeth of a stunningly overmatched Michigan defense. It stood as the crowning moment of that season, and Allen’s four-year program build toward exactly those sorts of wins.
Penix, a Tampa kid who committed to Allen over an offer from in-state FSU, came to embody that era in IU football history in the same way Anthony Thompson did his, or Antwaan Randle El his. Penix’s presence outsized just the player. He became a talisman, representing something larger than himself.
And when he struggled and eventually suffered one final season-ending injury in the 2021 season that promised so much and delivered so little, Penix — through little fault of his own — came to eventually represent that something’s end.
The portal era complicates these conversations about legacy.
Penix spent most of the season battling for what might be the last-ever Pac-12 championship with a fellow transfer. He narrowly missed out winning the Heisman Trophy to a fellow transfer. The Texas team Washington beat Monday night was also quarterbacked by a fellow transfer.
Yet unlike the natural inclination for fans to appropriate the success of their favorite college players once they become professionals, history probably won’t cast transfers the same way. Penix will, someday, be a candidate for entry into the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta. And when he’s considered, it will be foremost as a Washington Husky.
In that way, he embodies one last thing — a new era in college sports, when we will have to get used to the idea of players exploring their greatness across multiple stops. College stars won’t be so uniformly identifiable by just one jersey any longer.
Still, Indiana fans hold onto Penix. Maybe it’s because they never got the sense of closure from celebrating his greatest achievements in person. He never appeared in a bowl game for the Hoosiers, and never took a snap against Purdue. His biggest wins came behind closed doors, during the exhilarating but undeniably disembodied 2020 season.
In some ways, those fans’ fascination rivals the longing that once existed in this town for Brad Stevens to occupy IU’s other hot seat across the parking lot. It never felt entirely fair on either man the extent to which Penix’s success in Seattle seemed to cast a shadow over the final two years of Allen’s tenure, but in some undeniable ways it did.
Penix never spoke ill of his time in Bloomington, though given his painful injury history as a Hoosier it’s understandable if he doesn’t revisit it very often either. And he will be more than welcome at bowl reunions in the coming years, IU sure to celebrate that 2019-20 run starting with the first decade five years from now.
So, when he takes the field Monday night, Penix will undoubtedly do so with a healthy pull from the lower Midwest. Fans here will be cheering for the No. 9 in Washington purple who used to be the No. 9 in Indiana crimson, wishing the best for a player they genuinely want to see succeed, all while wondering where exactly he fits in their own shared history.
Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.
2024-01-05 11:57:36
#Washington #Michael #Penix #curious #legacy #Indiana #football
