INDIANAPOLIS — IU Indy played its 30th basketball game of the season Thursday night. The other 29 never felt quite like this. There’s no place like home court for a bunch of guys who, 100 hours earlier, were standing on the side of a road watching their team bus explode.
Coaches talk of narrow escapes, which usually mean making late free throws. The IU Indy Jaguars know something a little different about narrow escapes. Picture this as a college memory for future reunions: You’re riding home from a loss at Northern Kentucky on a Sunday afternoon, and suddenly, there’s a blowout, and the bus pulls off the road. Then there’s smoke, and then there’s fire. The coaches tell everyone to abandon ship and leave personal items behind, and then someone notices the fire is near the gas tank, so everyone starts moving further and further away as the flames get worse. Then comes the boom, when the windows and part of the roof blow out, and the team bus is sitting by I-275 in southeastern Indiana, looking like Robert De Niro’s car bomb scene in the movie Casino.
Final casualty count: Laptops, cell phones, shoes, jerseys, basketballs, books, video screens, headphones, practice gear, jewelry . . . nearly $100,000 worth of stuff in all, according to the athletic director. But not one injury, not a dent in anyone’s physical fender, primarily because of quick crisis management by the coaches, who ensured the traveling party got out while the getting was good.
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So, yeah, playing a basketball game felt pretty swell Thursday night, even if IU Indy lost to Horizon League leader Robert Morris, 82-68.
“It’s almost kind of like a rebirth,” head coach Paul Corsaro said. “It put a lot of things in perspective. We lost a game. We lost a lot of personal items. But those things can be replaced; people can’t.”
Athletic director Luke Bosso seconded that, having spent the previous three days in a frantic effort to replace all that went up in smoke. “I’ve never looked more forward to a basketball game, and I’ve never looked more forward to playing the No. 1 team in the league. Today was nice to have a little bit of normalcy.”
I can’t thank everyone enough for coming tonight. The week has been a blur and it was great to get back to basketball. Thank you to the Pacers, IMCU, and RJE for purchasing group tickets. Because of all of them and you we sold every ticket in the Jungle.
Thank you! pic.twitter.com/hd6G9quqkO
— Luke Bosso (@boss2356) February 28, 2025
To revisit a week that could have turned out so differently . . .
It is Sunday afternoon, and IU Indy has just taken a tough 71-67 loss at Northern Kentucky. Paul Corsaro kisses his wife, puts their one-year-old son in his car seat and waves them on their way for the return home. Then he climbs aboard the team bus and takes his customary seat up front on the right. It shouldn’t take long to get back to Indianapolis. Maybe two hours, interstate nearly all the way. Piece of cake.
About 30 minutes out, Corsaro is finishing off his post-game meal and starting to do a deep dive into the game just completed. “I had my burrito in my left hand, and I was glancing at the box score in my right hand,” he recalled. Then comes a loud thud. Maybe it’s a blown tire. Maybe a pothole. The driver quickly pulls the bus out of the active lanes. Assistant coach Keith Oddo hops off the bus to have a look.
“The door opens, and I can smell burnt rubber,” Corsaro said. “As he gets out there, I just hear him yelling everybody off the bus now! And someone grab the fire extinguisher.”
Oddo has spotted fire that had even begun to impact some of the grass. Smoke is starting to leak into the bus. As the two dozen or so passengers scamper off and move away, the driver goes to work on the fire with the extinguisher and everyone assumes that will be that. Except it isn’t. Corsaro sees only growing flames engulfing a good part of the bus and not far from the gas tank.
He’s sure of one thing. The Jaguars need to be going that way. The opposite direction. Make it a fast break.
“I made the decision at that point everyone needs to get as far away from this bus as possible. Someone said, ‘Coach, what about our stuff?’ I said, ‘Guys, I don’t think we have enough time; let’s go.’ “
They take off jogging . . . away . . . away . . . away. After about 10 minutes, they hear something like an explosion. There goes the windows, the rest of the tires, the roof. But the Jaguars are out of harm’s way.
“It never turned into something like, we almost didn’t make it,” Corsaro said, “because we made sound decisions.”
Unlike some of his players, Corsaro does have his phone. The first call is to Bosso, who’s somewhere on the same road, returning to Indianapolis with friends and donors. “He was probably thinking, ‘Why is Paul calling me after a heartbreaking loss?’ ” Corsaro said.
Correct. When an AD hears from a coach after a game, it usually means unhappiness over a referee’s call or two. “The first thing I thought about was he hadn’t complained about the officials during the game,” Bosso said. No, it wasn’t that. “When I picked up the phone, the first thing I heard him doing was yelling at someone to get off the bus. That’s when I knew something was not right here. Turned out the bus driver was trying to get his phone and Paul was telling him to get off the bus.”
Message from the IU Indy Athletics Department… pic.twitter.com/ekuZICDXSP
— IU Indy Jaguars (@iuindy_jaguars) February 23, 2025
Corsaro next calls his wife, who’s in the middle of her return drive. She offers to come back, but he tells her to continue home, everybody is okay, and he’ll be there eventually. Parents had to be informed, of course. The Indiana State Police contacts a nearby school district and borrows a school bus to get the Jaguars to a pizza place. There, they wait for the charter company to find a replacement bus. They had been due to get home at around 5 p.m. It is after 9:30 p.m.
Bosso has worked the phone calling university officials and anyone else he thought needed to be informed. His first impression is that it has been a mostly contained incident. Then he sees the first pictures of the scene coming over his phone. There is a smoking hulk where his team has been sitting. “That’s when the magnitude kind of hit me, we got really lucky,” he said.
He is there to greet the team when they arrive. One of the first things he notices is that Corsaro’s hands still smell of smoke.
“On the way home I’m getting contacted by it seems like everyone in the country because it had gone viral,” Corsaro said. “Then when I got home I see my wife and my one-year-old, then I finally got a chance to breathe and I’m really looking at the pictures and realize the magnitude of what happened and what could have been. That’s when it really, really hit me in terms of how scary it has been.”
IU Indy’s long ride home is finally over.
It has been a tad chaotic since. Monday was a regularly scheduled day off, and the IU Indy team surely needed it. Bosso, Corsaro and other staff members were coping with the aftermath. Contact sports apparel companies and insurance companies, and make sure the guys are doing okay. IU Indy had no shortage of offers to help. Indiana University called. So did Purdue and Butler. The athletic director at Northern Kentucky checked in several times. Bosso said he heard from virtually every state. Whenever local people asked what they could do to help, Bosso told them to buy tickets for the next game to support the team. The Indiana Pacers purchased a bunch. The Jaguars were only 100 seats short of a sellout by Thursday, and though many buyers didn’t actually come to the game, they had paid their money to help the cause.
“Since (Sunday) it’s been more humbling because of the outreach and support,” Corsaro said. “It’s been really, really cool to see that people care.”
Corsaro was talking with one of his assistants Monday night, discussing what to do about the next day. All the practice gear had been left on the bus, and the department didn’t have a lot of inventory because the school had changed its name from IUPUI to IU Indy this year, and most of the old things had been discarded. The assistant said they might actually have to go shirts and skins on Tuesday, just like practice back in elementary school.
“As much as it would have been a great story to do shirts and skins,” Corsaro said. “I was like, ‘guys, there’s got to still be some IUPUI stuff laying around here somewhere, let’s scour everywhere for it.’ “
They found a stash. Meanwhile, Adidas rushed replacement shoes. By Tuesday, it was time to prepare to play basketball again rather than talk about a fire. They needed to return to their comfort zone. Corsaro said one of his players lost $5,000 worth of personal items. “Sometimes you get late in the year, and it’s kind of the monotony invading your practice,” Corsaro said. “But on Tuesday, it was like everybody couldn’t wait to be at practice.”
By Thursday, it was time to play. Robert Morris had arrived with a 22-8 record and a six-game winning streak. IU Indy kept it close much of the way but could not stop the Colonials from clinching the Horizon League title. “It’s been an emotional week for our basketball team and I think that took a toll on us,” Corsaro said afterward. “We were tired. Our guys have been through a lot, but we continued to fight. That’s what I’m most proud of.”
IU Indy is now 9-21, and while that might not sound great, it marks an upward trend for Corsaro in the first season. The Jaguars had averaged just under six wins in the past five years.
Besides, they won the biggest contest of the week. They beat a bus fire. And it has not just been luck, but a coaching staff in command of a situation that no one could have seen coming.
“It’s how Paul runs everything. See the problem, adjust to the problem, and go,” Bosso said. “We may be the fastest team in the country right now if they can all get off a 54-passenger bus.”
Thank you so much to everyone who has reached out about yesterday’s bus fire that occurred as our men’s basketball team returned to Indy from a road game.
As you can imagine, it was a sobering and scary moment for our team, coaches and staff.
The important part is no one was…
— Luke Bosso (@boss2356) February 24, 2025
When Corsaro looks at his Jaguars, he doesn’t see a 9-21 team but one very blessed.
“It could have been way worse. A few lapses in judgment, a little bit more serious of a mechanical issue, and we might not be here,” he said hours before facing Robert Morris. “We get to play a game tonight; we get to play the No. 1 team in the league, we get to play at home, the weather is starting to turn, and we’re right around the corner from March. It’s the best time of year.
“That’s what it’s all about. We’re still here.”
