With all of the blowout wins over the course of the last two seasons, it’s easy to forget just how much we’ve been made to sweat out. A six-point National Championship win or beating Ohio State by just three points in the Big Ten Championship last year, to name a few.
But there have also been much, much less glamorous games along the way. Beating Iowa by five points last year, a five point win over Michigan in 2024, or letting Northwestern hang around in the weird lakefront game that season. The spectacular
nature of the final moments of the game overshadows the fact that Indiana almost lost to a 3-6 Penn State team last year.
I bring this up to remind myself as much as anyone else that dominating every facet of every football game is impossible and that even the recurring issues may not be cause for concern at this point in the season.
In my postgame column, I complained about Josh Hoover’s accuracy issues, but he has yet to throw an interception through four games this year, which was the main concern entering the season. Outside of missing a few throws, he’s played well enough to keep Indiana perfect.
The other big concern for me was the secondary’s performance, but Aidan Chiles and Northwestern presented a unique challenge that Indiana won’t see again. Chiles currently leads the conference in average time to throw on his dropbacks, and he’s also top ten in the Big Ten in terms of avoiding sacks on when pressured. That means a disproportionate amount of time in coverage for the backs without the bailouts they can count on from the line.
That isn’t to say that these things will not reappear at inopportune times for Indiana, but that the Northwestern game – being the only real test of the year so far – may not be indicative of what this team is capable of.
Normally this column is reserved for discussing things that need to be addressed for Indiana to do well, which usually means on field play, but the noise around this team is reaching levels that Curt Cignetti’s prior teams did not face.
After Friday’s win, the first question Josh Hoover got was whether he felt the massive spotlight on him as Fernando Mendoza’s replacement. Lee Beebe Jr., who had a career day stepping in for the injured Turbo Richard, was asked about the pressure he felt now as the apparent lone back.
At the end of the day, there’s a difference in maintaining a high standard for a program and holding a particular team to an impossible standard based on past success. Indiana basketball fans and media have notoriously done the latter for decades now to obviously bad results.
The Wildcats have a tough schedule that may prevent Friday’s win from aging well in the big picture, but that was a scrappy roster with a lot of coaching talent on the sidelines, including Chip Kelly, who has given Bryant Haines fits in the past.
For now, we need to let this team write its own narratives and make its own mistakes. If not for the regularity with which Mendoza willed Indiana to victory, Hoover’s game-winning rushing touchdown would have been the kind of early season positive sign that showed a quarterback willing to battle until the final whistle.
Let’s appreciate the win for what it was alongside the fact that it’s now simply the standard that our quarterbacks will put us in positions to win Big Ten games in the fourth quarter. It was not always like that.
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