Almost two years ago, beginning on Aug. 1, 2023, a multipart series spotlighting small-high school and small-college football in Indiana ran in this space. It was a significant departure from what this blog usually presented over the years, which has been a chronicling of my various photographic shoots and pursuits.
What made the misdeed so frustrating to me was the “perfect storm” that led to it in the first place. It was the unfortunate result of a statewide institution — the Indiana Football Hall of Fame — that did not abide the trust it had been accorded by members of the news media, who then compounded the misdeed by neglecting their professional duty to double-check facts.
In summer 2018, news media reports started circulating stories about how Franklin College’s then-head football coach, Mike Leonard, was close to equaling and passing Red Faught’s school record for total wins as football coach, and that Leonard would likely pass Faught’s total sometime that season. The stories cited Faught’s total career wins as 120, and once the first story broke citing that number, other print and broadcast media picked up the story and repeated the 120 wins total as fact.
The problem was ... 120 was not Faught’s final wins total. I worked in the newspaper business for 37+ years, and while going to journalism classes in college, nothing was more ingrained in us students than the importance of accuracy and how double-checking facts was a critical step in ensuring accuracy.
Through most of my years in the business, the majority of which (33+) were spent in the newsroom of The Indianapolis Star, we had a decent-sized staff that included several layers of editing, fact-checking and back-stopping in its news production. That isn’t the case today.
In 2025, newsrooms across the globe — if they are still in operation (and many smaller dailies have been bought out and/or folded) — have slashed staff and now rely on a razor-thin number of people to crank out much thinner newspapers in favor of “online content.” There aren’t multiple layers of editing anymore.
Back to my perfect storm case ... I came upon the Faught career wins snafu in mid-2022 while working on the On Hoosier Gridirons small-high school and small-college football series project. I needed to get my hands on a precise number of career coaching wins, losses and ties for Faught in his time as head coach at Franklin College. I went first to his Wikipedia entry, hoping to find that information there. When Wikipedia said his record was 155 wins, 146 losses and 6 ties, my eyes bugged out.
I immediately remembered that Mike Leonard had left the school in 2019 with a wins total in the 120s (it turned out to be 129). I also remembered the media coverage of Leonard’s alleged passing of Faught’s wins total the previous year. I knew something was amiss. I hunted around for whatever more authoritative documentation I could find on Faught’s final record at Franklin College.
One of the next documents I encountered in my search was a Faught biography at the Indiana Digital Library, which states that Faught finished his time at Franklin with a record of 160-139-6. I now had a third different Franklin College wins number for the coach.
I started searching on newspapers.com and came across those newspaper stories by The Indianapolis Star and Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal quoting the 120 wins number leading up to Leonard’s 2018 season as head coach, so I figured I would have to find out where they got that number from.
It didn’t take me long. A Google search came next, and I found the 120 number cited in the Faught member biography page of the Indiana Football Hall of Fame website, where at the time it said Faught’s career coaching record was 120-99-4.
I resumed my Google search and could find no other “authoritative” resource using the same record as displayed by the Indiana Football Hall of Fame. So I was pretty sure where the progenitors of the 2018 Mike Leonard publicity got their “data” from. My eventual research would determine that the IFHOF was wrong on all three counts for Faught — wins, losses and ties. And it was significantly wrong. The Wikipedia entry was in error, too, but at least it came much closer to the truth than the IFHOF.
I returned to newspaper.com and dug back to late 1988, when Faught was ending his Franklin coaching career. I began to collect and copy stories repeating the 160-139-6 number I had seen at the Indiana Digital Library. At that point, I decided to contact Ryan Thomas, an assistant athletic director at Franklin College who at the time also was serving as sports information director. I asked him if he knew that the school had a significant accuracy problem on its hands regarding Red Faught’s coaching record.
I told Thomas of my findings regarding the conflicting numbers for Faught’s coaching record, and while he politely thanked me, he said the college had no authoritative record available to verify Faught’s official final coaching record and that until it had more authoritative information, it would continue to recognize Mike Leonard as the all-time wins leader.
He explained that all of the school’s official athletic teams’ records and data vanished upon the death of longtime sports information director Kevin Elixman in July 2015. No archival records could be found in Elixman's office nor, apparently, on his office computer for any and all sports at the school, he said. Elixman had held the SID job for 25 years.
One of the tasks Thomas told me he faced was to somehow re-create as much of those missing records as he could, although he was at a loss as to exactly how he was going to be able to do it or when he would hopefully finish.
Sympathizing with his plight, I told him I would spend a few hours at newspapers.com going back to 1957 and hopefully piece together a chart from scratch, logging each of Faught’s wins, losses and ties in every season to ascertain his full record. I told Thomas I would let him know my findings.
It took me quite a few hours over one day and part of the next to assemble the chart, and when I finished, I came up with a final record of 159-140-6. Yes, it bothered me at the time that my wins and losses numbers were one off from the prevailing data I was encountering in my research (160-139), but I had nothing to explain it except that either those people had miscounted or somehow the outcome of one game in all those seasons had been reversed. (The latter would prove to be prophetic, but more on that later.)
I reported these finding to Thomas and sent him a copy of my hard-copy tallies as well as a PDF/Word document onto which I had composed a more readable year-by-year chart. On the far right side of the chart, I included the name of the source publication I used, the publication date and the page number from which I derived my information for each game over those 32 seasons.
For the record, the former Franklin Evening Star was my source for almost all of the results through 1963; the Johnson County Daily Journal was the source for almost all the results thereafter, through 1988.
I also sent Thomas copies of the newspaper clippings I collected in my research citing the 160 wins total (including the Daily Journal’s front-page obituary for Faught in September 2005. That 2005 obituary included a sidebar with the 160-139-6 record.)
Another of those clippings, a Nov. 11, 1988, column by notable Indianapolis News Sports Editor Wayne Fuson, contained a sidebar season-by-season chart very similar to the one I had just compiled from scratch. Fuson’s chart also tallied 160-139-6. His chart and mine agree in every season except 1961, when his chart states that the team won 4 and lost 5; my findings were that the Grizzlies won only 3 games that year and lost 6.
Because of how troubled I was about that conflict with the 1961 season, I even went back to the Evening Star archives for 1961 and double-checked my data. I again came up with a 3-6 season record. (More on this later.)
I decided it was time to talk to someone at the Indiana Football Hall of Fame to see if they could enlighten me as to how there was such a significant discrepancy with its data on Faught. I reached out to Matt Fisher, who at the time — this was still mid-2022 — was listed as a member of the IFHOF Board of Trustees. He also was a science teacher at Richmond High School. (He no longer appears to be on the board.)
Fisher returned my call, and when I explained to him why I had contacted him, he didn’t take long to surmise that the 120-99-4 record at Faught’s IFHOF member biographical page probably was the coach’s record at the time Faught was inducted into the Hall which was June 27, 1981. (Faught would coach for seven more seasons, amassing 40 more wins, 40 more losses and two more ties before calling it a career at Franklin.)
Fisher further surmised that Faught’s coaching record did not get updated when the Hall went to carry over the coach’s biographical info onto his member web page when the IFHOF went online. Fisher explained that the Hall is thin-staffed and doesn’t have the manpower to stay on top of such things as updating member biographical information. In most cases, it’s not an issue because most inductees usually don’t enter the Hall until their careers are over. But there have been exceptions, and Faught was one of those.
I got the full June 27, 1981, induction date initially from the IFHOF, which had that information on its bio page for Faught at the time I talked to Fisher. I also confirmed it from newspaper clippings. I made a screen grab photo of Faught’s complete IFHOF bio page to have on hand for comparison if any changes were later made.
Fisher divulged one other shocking (at least to me) bit of information during our conversation. He said the IFHOF had closed and sold its physical building in Richmond during the COVID pandemic and that it was now operating as an online-only entity.
Not long after I talked to Fisher, I sent him a copy of the same news clipping documentation and the Word/PDF chart showing Faught’s real year-by-year record while at Franklin College that I had sent to Ryan Thomas. (Note: A few weeks later, someone did get into Faught’s IFHOF biographical page and removed the date of Faught’s induction ??? ... but left the bad coaching record numbers intact!)
Unfortunately, the IFHOF member biographies snafu doesn’t stop with Red Faught. The On Hoosier Gridirons project I was working on involved two other Indiana Football Hall of Fame coach inductees who were still active at the time, Bud Wright of Sheridan and Mike Gillin, currently of Mooresville. Wright was inducted in 2002 and Gillin in 2014. I checked their wins, losses and ties in their IFHOF biographies, and sure enough, their numbers were outdated, too.
Interestingly, someone did go back into Wright's bio sometime after 2011 and note that he became Indiana's all-time winningest football coach that year with Sheridan’s victory that season over Lapel High School. And in Gillin’s case, his IFHOF bio has him still coaching at Indian Creek High School, which he had left in 2014. He took over the head coaching job at Mooresville High School in 2017.
But that all changed in early December 2024, when Franklin College announced that Mike Leonard would return to the school and coach the football team again, beginning with the 2025 season. Of course, local news media reported the news that Leonard was returning to coach, still describing Leonard as the winningest football coach in Franklin College history … because no public correction had been made even though the college had been aware of the error for two and a half years.
I wrote by email to the reporter who wrote that breaking news story for The Indianapolis Star and told him about my findings. I also sent him authoritative documentation similar to what I had sent Ryan Thomas and Matt Fisher. He kindly acknowledged my alert and thanked me. He said he’d spread the word to the rest of The Star sports staff.
When I told him that when I was still at the newspaper, we would have published a correction — even if it involved fixing an error four years after the fact. That way, our library would be able to attach the correction and a warning to archived stories containing the error so that reporters and editors coming across erroneous clippings while doing research in the future would be alerted to the errors and not repeat them.
The reporter responded as I had expected. He said staff reductions at the state’s largest newspaper had even reached the valued librarians and that there was no longer a library staff to do such things.
I also relayed the same information and documentation by email to the reporter who wrote the story about Leonard’s return for the Johnson County Daily Journal. I received no acknowledgment or response. So I wrote to that reporter’s sports editor, Ryan O’Leary, who did acknowledge and thanked me. He also said that Franklin College’s Ryan Thomas had contacted him after seeing the reporter’s story mentioning Leonard as the school’s winningest coach. O’Leary said Thomas passed along the news that Faught was still the top dog.
O’Leary was kind enough to share with me the identity of the individual who started the media stir in 2018, and in deference to his act of kindness (that mystery — about who started it all — had bothered me since I first came across the problem in 2022), I’m not going to embarrass that individual publicly by divulging the name here.
O’Leary did tell me he felt that his paper should do something to publicly acknowledge the original faux pas, agreeing that readers deserve to understand what is going on now that Leonard was returning. He said he would address it in a column that weekend. I no longer live in Indiana, so I didn’t know if he followed through on that promise. I hunted around for it but had no luck.
Two weeks later, I still couldn’t find any evidence online that the Daily Journal had addressed the issue, so I wrote again to O’Leary to inquire if he’d mentioned the snafu in a column, and if so, when.
His response: “I did not. Leaving it alone for the moment at the request of Ryan Thomas. I revised all our most recent online stories and will make sure all future references are correct. At some point I’ll find a proper way to address it without humiliating anyone.”“We are currently working with our website company to investigate the possibility of using AI (artificial intelligence) to keep track of wins and losses, championships, etc. We have over 900 inducted into the hall, and we try our best to stay “up to date.”
The response was signed by Scott Bovenkerk, who identified himself as the coordinator of the IFCA-Hall of Fame. This was the first I’d learned that the coaches association had taken over responsibility for the IFHOF. Matt Fisher had not mentioned that to me in 2022.
