The Fans Get a Monument, Too

On September 4, Keurig Dr Pepper unveiled what it calls the first Dr Pepper Fan Wall of Fame at 124 East Kirkwood Avenue in Bloomington, an interactive mural celebrating the supporters who followed Indiana through a 16-0 2025 season that ended with the program's first College Football Playoff national championship. The installation, created by South Bend artist Nate Baranowski in collaboration with art agency Muros, uses an optical illusion that allows visitors to step into the image and appear to be crowned the No. 1 fan. Former Indiana quarterback Trent Green helped unveil the mural, and Dr Pepper says it intends to repeat the Fan Wall of Fame concept annually in the hometown of the national champion.

The marketing idea is easy to understand. College football has spent decades insisting that supporters are not merely customers but participants in a larger civic and emotional project. Fans are told that they create home-field advantage, preserve traditions, sustain rivalries, travel with the team and remain loyal through the seasons when there is nothing to celebrate. The language of belonging is central to the sport. What is unusual about the Fan Wall of Fame is that a brand has taken that familiar rhetoric and made it physical. Instead of simply thanking fans in an advertisement, Dr Pepper has put their role into the landscape of the championship city.

Bloomington already offers a useful comparison. Before Indiana opened its 2026 football season, the university announced that new permanent College Football Playoff championship signage would be unveiled inside Memorial Stadium to commemorate the title. That is institutional memory in its most traditional form: the program marks its accomplishment in the building where the team plays. The Fan Wall sits somewhere different. It is on Kirkwood Avenue, the heavily traveled corridor between downtown Bloomington and the Indiana University campus, on the side of Alumni Hall. The team gets its championship marker in the stadium. The supporters get a public-facing image in the city they move through every day.

That distinction matters because sports mythology is partly a contest over where memory is allowed to live. Stadium banners tell the official story of accomplishment, but fan culture usually develops in bars, sidewalks, parking lots, living rooms, message boards and family rituals that may never enter the institutional archive. A championship season becomes important because both systems operate at once. The athletic department records the score and raises the banner; supporters remember where they watched, whom they hugged, what they wore and which road trip seemed unreasonable until the team kept winning. The Fan Wall attempts to bridge those two kinds of memory by taking the less formal culture of fandom and giving it the visual grammar of a monument.

The local response captured by the Indiana Daily Student reinforces that idea. Baranowski told the student newspaper that one of his goals was to show fans across generations, and the mural itself depicts supporters celebrating around the national championship trophy. The interactive design asks visitors to stand in a specific place so that the image appears to crown them. That choice turns the wall from a picture of fandom into a small ritual of fandom. The spectator does not merely look at the monument; the spectator completes it by stepping inside the composition.

For Dr Pepper, the move is also the logical extension of a college-football marketing strategy that has spent years treating the fan as the central character. The brand's long-running Fansville campaign built an entire fictional town around the rituals, anxieties and absurdities of college football supporters rather than around the athletes alone. Dr Pepper has also maintained a long relationship with the College Football Playoff, including sponsorship of the playoff and its national championship trophy, while its tuition giveaway has become a recurring part of championship-week spectacle. The Fan Wall takes that positioning outside the television campaign and into a real college town. The fictional Fansville becomes, in a limited but revealing way, physical infrastructure.

That makes the installation a branding story as much as a sports story. The most valuable sponsorships are rarely the ones that simply place a logo near something people care about. They try to attach the brand to the ritual itself. A beverage company can buy advertising during a game, but the association lasts only as long as the commercial break unless the brand finds a place inside the emotional structure surrounding the sport. By commissioning a monument to supporters, Dr Pepper is not merely saying that it likes college football. It is making a claim about what college football means and positioning itself as one of the organizations authorized to recognize the people who make that meaning.

There is an obvious commercial calculation in that generosity. The wall is branded. The unveiling included free Dr Pepper and limited-edition merchandise. The annual plan ensures that each championship creates another opportunity for the company to enter a new community with a locally tailored installation. Even the language of recognition can become an advertising asset when a corporation funds the recognition. A fan who poses inside the mural and shares the photograph is simultaneously commemorating a championship, performing personal allegiance and distributing a branded image. The monument becomes content without ceasing to be a monument.

That does not automatically make the gesture cynical. Commercial sponsorship has been woven into American sports for so long that separating authentic ritual from sponsored ritual is often impossible. Fans can know perfectly well that a brand paid for an experience and still enjoy the experience. A mural can function as marketing and public art at the same time. A branded photograph can still become a family photograph. If someone returns to Kirkwood years later and remembers the impossible championship season because of a picture taken beneath the painted crown, the emotional meaning will not necessarily disappear because Dr Pepper's name is attached to it.

The more interesting question is what happens when brands move from sponsoring the celebration to helping define who belongs inside it. Dr Pepper's premise is that the championship story is incomplete without supporters, which is difficult to argue against in a sport whose scale depends so heavily on communal identity. Indiana Athletics made a similar point during the spring when it sent the championship trophies on a statewide tour, explicitly crediting Hoosier fans who had traveled in large numbers and helped turn neutral-site postseason games into environments that felt closer to home games. The university was already telling supporters they were part of the run. Dr Pepper has given that claim a wall.

The 2025 Indiana season is particularly well suited to that treatment because the championship altered the meaning of the program almost overnight. Indiana Athletics describes it as the first national title in program history, the conclusion of an undefeated 16-0 season, and one of the greatest campaigns the school has ever experienced. Success at that scale does not merely add a trophy. It reorganizes memory. Years that once functioned as reference points become part of a before-and-after structure, and supporters who experienced the change acquire their own role as witnesses to the moment when a program's expectations were rewritten.

Monuments are one way societies decide which witnesses count. They take something temporary and insist that it deserves a physical afterlife. Sports has traditionally reserved that treatment for athletes, coaches and institutional achievements because those are the easiest elements to name and record. Fans are more difficult to represent because there are too many of them, their contribution is diffuse, and no statistic can establish exactly how much their presence changed an outcome. Dr Pepper solves that problem symbolically rather than literally. The wall does not attempt to identify every person who attended a game. It creates an empty place inside the mythology and allows any supporter to step into it.

That mechanism also explains why the idea is repeatable. Dr Pepper does not need the next champion to have Indiana's specific history. Every college football title produces a hometown full of people who believe that their rituals, noise, travel, anxiety and loyalty were part of the season. The annual Fan Wall can therefore migrate from campus community to campus community while preserving the same basic proposition: the championship belongs to the team, but the story of the championship belongs to more people than the roster.

There is a larger change in sports marketing visible here. For years, sponsorship often meant putting a corporate name beside an event. Increasingly, brands want to design the experience around the event, create the ritual that fans perform, or manufacture the artifact that survives afterward. That is a more ambitious form of cultural participation because it asks the sponsor to do something beyond borrowing attention. The brand tries to become one of the institutions that organizes memory.

The risk is that corporate memory can become too neat. Fandom is valuable partly because it is unruly, irrational and self-created. The best traditions rarely begin because a marketing department has identified a strategic engagement opportunity. They survive because people repeat them until nobody remembers exactly when the repetition became a tradition. Dr Pepper's challenge, if the Fan Wall becomes an annual program, will be to keep the installations specific enough to the championship communities that they feel discovered rather than imposed. A monument to fans only works if the fans recognize themselves in it.

In Bloomington, the first attempt has a strong premise. Indiana's football championship already has its institutional markers, its trophy, its record book and its new stadium signage. Now there is another object on Kirkwood Avenue asking a different group to step into the frame. The wall cannot prove that the fans caused a national championship, and it does not need to. Its function is cultural rather than statistical. It gives supporters a place inside the story that everyone in town is going to be telling for a very long time.

That may be the most revealing part of Dr Pepper's experiment. The company has recognized that fandom is no longer merely an audience segment to advertise toward. In modern sports, fandom is itself part of the product, part of the spectacle and part of the historical record. 

Once a sponsor begins building monuments to it, the relationship moves one step further. The fan is no longer only the person looking at the championship banner. 

The fan has entered the monument, and the brand has helped decide where the monument stands.

Installation notes