By MICHAEL MAROT

The Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana is winning and the rewards are rolling in.

The Hoosiers (5-1, 2-1) are off to their best start in 13 years, are getting Top 25 votes and are on the verge of becoming bowl eligible and producing their first nonlosing season since 1994.

Success has people talking big in Bloomington – just not in the Hoosiers’ locker room, where players and coaches continue to focus on football.

“It’s good for us as a program because we’re trying to put Indiana football back on the map where it needs to be,” receiver James Hardy said Tuesday. “It’s good to get the recognition, but at the same time we have to worry about the next game.”

For these Hoosiers, who are watching their image change almost by the day, it’s a new phenomenon.

Quarterback Kellen Lewis has been named the Big Ten offensive player of the week twice this season, kicker Austin Starr won the special teams weekly honor Monday, Hardy’s profile continues to rise and the Hoosiers defense still leads the nation in sacks.

Nationally, people are beginning to notice, too.

The Hoosiers contend they’ve achieved nothing yet, although that could change with a victory at Michigan State (4-2, 0-2) on Saturday.

One more win would assure the Hoosiers of at least a .500 record, make them bowl eligible for the first time since 1994 and just might end their Top 25 drought, which dates to Sept. 20, 1994. Indiana finished 29th in this week’s poll, right behind arch-rival Purdue.

Not bad for a team many expected to finish near the bottom of the Big Ten.

And while the Hoosiers never gave in to the negative thoughts of years past, they’ve also learned how to handle success.

“It’s a very workman-like team,” coach Bill Lynch said during his weekly news conference. “It’s a team you don’t have to motivate much to work hard, to practice hard. This team has a good way of getting ready for games, and I think we’ve learned over the last couple of weeks how to maintain it more for four quarters.”

Indiana has reached this point for another reason – winning the games it should.

It has beaten two Mid-American Conference teams, Akron and Western Michigan, and Indiana State, a Football Championship Subdivision school, in nonconference play and blew out Minnesota 40-20 on Saturday.

The Hoosiers also have demonstrated their resiliency first by rebounding from the emotional loss of late coach Terry Hoeppner, who died in June from complications of a brain tumor, and then by bouncing back from a home loss to Illinois with an impressive 38-20 upset at Iowa.

Lynch sees his team as a tough, confident bunch that rarely gets shaken, and players insist they’re delivering on the promise Hoeppner brought to the program in 2005.