Galen Clavio walked into the student mailroom – back when student mailrooms were still a thing – and found an envelope stuffed in his mailbox. Inside were six tickets for each of that season’s Indiana University football games, free to him as a dorm resident because, to put it bluntly, no one was terribly interested in going to Hoosier football games, let alone paying for them.

It was 1997 and the Hoosiers were terrible. Not that being terrible was unusual. For the better part of its 138-year existence, Indiana football has excelled at being awful.

It owned the record for most losses in Division I history (713) and the worst winning percentage in Big Ten history (.421). Prior to last year, only 14 teams in school history had earned a trip to a bowl game and of the then-30 coaches to lead the program, only five left with winning records – just three since the turn of the 20th century and only one, Bo McMillan, since the end of World War II.

In 1976, Lee Corso, who coached the Hoosiers from 1973 to 1982, memorably stopped a game against Ohio State to snap a picture of his entire team under the scoreboard. The Hoosiers had just scored and led the Buckeyes 7-6 – the first lead Indiana held over Ohio State in a quarter century.

“I looked it up. Can you believe it? Twenty-five years! The goal of a lifetime,’’ Corso said after the game, explaining his rationale. Ohio State went on to win the game, 47-7.

Suffice to say, Indiana football was not an afterthought in the state. That would require it to be a thought in the first place.

“Being an Indiana football fan felt like being in a very small club that no one wanted to join,’’ Clavio, who is now the associate dean for undergraduate education at the IU Media School and director of the university’s sports media program, told CNN Sports.

This is basketball country, a reality proudly declared at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame – “in 49 other states, it’s just basketball, but this is Indiana,’’ – which is located in New Castle, home also to the largest high school gym in the world (capacity 9,325) and the Steve Alford All-American Inn, where a gigantic sneaker sits out front of the hotel