Indiana is facing a wave of sports and true crime reckonings, from former Hoosiers quarterback Brendan Sorsby's betting scandal to fresh scrutiny on a 1960s cold case along the Ohio River. On Pardon My Take, host Big Cat highlighted Sorsby's gambling violations, noting that "Because he bet on his own team when he was at Indiana, uh, 40 times, I believe, was the, the number ti- number of bets that he put in." Meanwhile, comedian Matt Rife recounted a hostile reception from locals after he had to cancel a performance due to exhaustion. Speaking on This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, Rife shared that while recovering in the hospital, he was "getting, like, death threats, and people, like, in bars in Indiana being like, 'We hope Matt Rife fucking dies.'"
The state's geographic and historical borders are also drawing intense scrutiny in the true crime space. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley Flowers and Britt Prawat revisited the unsolved 1965 murder of civil rights pioneer Alberta O. Jones, focusing on the bridge connecting Kentucky to Indiana where Jones's purse was found. Prawat pointed out that "the purse is placed closer to the Indiana side," while Flowers noted the dark history of the area, stating, "Indiana had a resurgence of the KKK in the 1960s." Flowers explained that investigators even analyzed the Ohio River currents, which separate "Indiana from Kentucky," to see if her body could have floated across.
On a deeper historical note, author Kaitlin Curtice joined We Can Do Hard Things to reflect on the state's legacy of Indigenous displacement. Curtice detailed the Potawatomi tribe's forced removal in 1838, known as the Trail of Death, where a group was "forced to walk from Indiana to Kansas," at gunpoint. Whether looking at historical atrocities or modern-day sports scandals, podcasters are painting a complex, often grim picture of the Hoosier State.