John Mellencamp supported Indiana football long before their recent championship rise, donating funds during “the down years.” In return, the school built an exclusive shack on top of the stadium just for him.
Not that Mellencamp always minded. What he got in exchange for his support was not a championship run but a curious sort of VIP treatment. He had started going to Hoosiers games as a kid, when he lived in Bloomington and his brother was enrolled at the university, and in the years since had come to appreciate a perk of the sparsely populated contests: He was able to indulge his cigarette habit in the mostly empty stands.
In recent years, the school gifted the Rock and Roll Hall-of-Famer a wooden shack affixed to the top of the stadium. There, Mellencamp—a self-described “anti-social guy”—could take in a game exactly the way he wanted to.
