There something oddly familiar about this: A raw, rough-around-the-edges Bishop Luers football team makes an unexpected run to the Class 2A state championship game.
This scenario could easily be about this year’s Knights team, but it also has aspects of the 1999 team that started the program’s run of state success.
Since the 1999 Luers team went to the now-demolished RCA Dome and beat Danville 38-6 in the 2A title game, the Knights have been in the big game four times. A fifth will be today in The Dome’s successor, Lucas Oil Stadium.
Luers has been to the title game a state-record 12 times and has won it seven times. Before 1999, the program had six appearances and three titles.
The Knights’ team 10 years ago had a sophomore class known as the Great Eight, led by quarterback/coach’s son Kyle Lindsay and future NFL player Anthony Spencer.
“A lot of us coaches were talking before this season that this could be a lot like the ’99 team,” said Kyle Lindsay, now a Luers assistant coach. “There wasn’t a lot of experience coming back from the year before.”
The 1999 Knights had Spencer, a former Purdue standout who is a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, and started a stretch that sent them to four straight state championship games and titles in 1999, 2001 and 2002. They also won in 2007.
But Luers now might be even younger than Luers then.
“They were a little more ready than these sophomores,” Luers coach Matt Lindsay said of the 1999 group as opposed to the 2009 squad. “And this team has five freshmen who play a lot, and that’s really young.”
The present-day Knights returned only six starters and rode a bumpy regular-season path to a 4-5 conclusion. But they have shown their ability in facing 2A competition after going up against the 5A, 4A and 3A stalwarts in the conference.
“It was very typical,” Matt Lindsay said. “We would have some great nights. The night we beat up on Harding (a 14-8 win) was an up night, but then we get our butts kicked by Dwenger (62-0) and that was obviously a down night. But we have had ebbs and flows all year.
“We met Monday after Dwenger, and we didn’t watch the film. We told them we threw it away, and we just started over again. There would be a lot of times we could have folded. It would have been easy to fold down three scores to Cass (in the regional), but we found a way to win.”
Kyle Lindsay said there is a familiar vibe when comparing the two teams.
“We have improved defensively, and when we have had to make stops, we have,” he said about the 2009 team. “We had to make those kinds of stops during our run in 1999. There are a lot of similarities.”
Despite its obvious comparisons to the team a decade ago, this year’s Luers team can make its own mark in the prestigious history of the program.
“We have never won it coming into the tournament with a losing (regular-season) record,” Matt Lindsay said. “So we want to do that for the first time as well. Most of the time our championship teams have been, maybe not at the top of the conference but very respectable.”
