Tom Allen is Hoosiers' permanent head football coach after Kevin Wilson's resignation

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Indiana native Tom Allen is the Hoosiers' head football coach. Permanently.

On the same day that Kevin Wilson resigned as Indiana's head coach, his first-year defensive coordinator was given not an interim tag but the permanent position of his successor.

Wilson resigned Thursday morning, Indiana athletics director Fred Glass telling reporters Thursday night that "philosophical differences" persisted between the two, leading to an agreement that a separation was best.

"My heart breaks for him," Allen said during Thursday night's press conference." I never expected for this to happen. However, he believed in me, and he gave me a charge when I came here: to be the head coach of the defense, to change the culture on that side of the ball. And that's what we did."

Allen was brought in last offseason to fix a defense that was trounced by almost every opposing offense in recent years under Wilson, and that's just what he did, engineering an exceptional transformation that saw Indiana rank in the middle of the pack in the Big Ten after coming in dead last a season ago.

This season, the Hoosiers allowed an average of 27.3 points a game and 372.6 total yards a game. Those numbers don't wow when compared with the best defenses in the country — several of which reside in the Big Ten — but it's a monumental improvement considering where this defense was a year ago.

Allen is a native of New Castle, Ind., and arrived in Bloomington after spending one year as the defensive coordinator at South Florida. Prior to that, he spent three seasons as the special teams coordinator at Ole Miss.

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