Winning in a coach’s first season is hard. Winning at Indiana is hard.
But don’t tell that to Curt Cignetti, whose first year in Bloomington has brought the 2024 season’s most dramatic college football turnaround.
The Hoosiers have gone from 9-27 in Tom Allen’s last three seasons to 7-0 in Cignetti’s inaugural year. The Hoosiers have not trailed for a second, one of just two FBS teams (along with Army) that can say that.
Now ESPN’s College GameDay comes to town for a game against Washington this weekend. A hand injury to quarterback Kurtis Rourke is a damper, maybe a big one. But the team says it expects Rourke back this season, and Indiana’s performance has been so well rounded that it would be premature to write off a strong finish even if Rourke took a long time to get back.
Indiana does too many things well.
Increasingly, the computers are believers. Opta Analyst’s TRACR model projects Indiana to finish with 11.0 wins – tied with Oregon for the most in the Big Ten. An 11-1 record would unquestionably land the Hoosiers in the College Football Playoff, while even a 10-2 record would put them right in the thick of committee consideration.
IU’s 29.6 TRACR ranks second in the Big Ten, behind Ohio State (33.2) but ahead of Penn State (24.8) and Oregon (22.7) at the top of the conference. So for now, Indiana’s visit to Ohio State on Nov. 23 shapes up as one of the games of the year.
How have the Hoosiers done it? The short story is that they have gone from being bad at pretty much everything to good at pretty much everything. The longer story, with color provided by Opta data, is a more varied look at how Cignetti has gotten his train moving so rapidly.
An Offensive Transformation
The final Indiana offense under Allen was a disaster. Allen, a defensive coach by trade, had success earlier in his tenure when he hired good offensive assistants. (His best pickup was a former lower-level coach named Kalen DeBoer who has since gone on to some prominence.)
But last year’s unit was bad enough (75th nationally in offensive TRACR) that Allen fired coordinator Walt Bell during the season before getting the ax himself. Indiana’s offense did nothing well. Defenses packed the box (a 50.6% bad box rate, fifth highest in the power conferences) to force quarterback Brendan Sorsby to beat them, and Sorsby rarely did.
This year’s offense, under Cignetti and his JMU coordinator Mike Shanahan, has been a revelation. Indiana leads the power conferences in success rate (52.9%), coming in sixth in that statistic on run plays and far-and-away No. 1 when passing. The offense is an almost perfect picture of run/pass balance (throwing the ball 49.3% of the time) and is quite a bit of fun to watch.
Shanahan loves to utilize pre-snap motion to garble the defense, and Rourke prefers to throw in large bills: Indiana’s average target depth is 10.2 yards downfield, second deepest in the Big Ten.
Rourke isn’t a running quarterback, and Shanahan has not asked the Ohio transfer to become one. Instead, he’s leaned into Rourke’s ability to drive the ball with his arm. As a matter of throwing good passes well down the field, there’s been no QB in the country on Rourke’s level this season:
The transfer portal has helped in other areas too. Most notable is Rourke’s group of targets. No. 1 receiver Elijah Sarratt and tight end Zach Horton came with Cignetti and Shanahan from JMU. Supporting wideout Myles Price came from Texas Tech, and another, Miles Cross, came from Ohio with Rourke.
Indiana’s offense has looked unusually cohesive for a unit that was tossed together via the transfer portal more or less on the fly, and the existing relationships around the lineup must have lots to do with that. The Hoosiers rank second in the Big Ten in passing TRACR (32.8).
Rourke and one of his existing receivers had experience together. Cignetti, Shanahan, and a key wideout and tight end were a package deal. Indiana is a newly assembled team, but it’s comprised of existing factions.
While the JMU contingent has helped on offense, it’s been even more critical on defense.
A James Madison Defense
In 2023, Indiana’s defense’s stunk. The Hoosiers allowed 5.8 yards per play (87th in FBS) and rated poorly in nearly any defensive number someone could look up (87th nationally in defensive TRACR).
A defense that did not stink in 2023 was Cignetti’s at James Madison. The Dukes spent most of the season undefeated and had an elite Group of Five defense – 28th in the nation in defensive TRACR. JMU allowed an even 5 yards per play (16th in FBS) and led the non-power conferences with a 30.8% success rate allowed.
Cignetti decided to get lots of players from his good defense and use them to fix the bad defense at Indiana. Amazingly, the strategy worked! Among JMU transfers on the IU defense:
- Defensive tackles James Carpenter and Tyrique Tucker have been key as part of a rotation of anchors in the middle of the line. Carpenter has been the team’s most frequently used defensive tackle, while Tucker’s 15.4% pressure rate and 12.2% run disruption rate have made him arguably Indiana’s most disruptive tackle in a five-man rotation.
- Inside linebackers Aiden Fisher and Jalin Walker are the team’s leading tacklers, with versatile contributions as run defenders, pass rushers, and coverage players. The two ex-Dukes are responsible for 28 of the 40 run stuffs credited to Indiana linebackers.
- Edge rusher Mikail Kamara leads the team’s regulars in pressure rate (19.7%) and sacks (6.0, while no one else has more than 3.0).
- Cornerback D’Angelo Ponds has five passes defensed and has held up very well while facing the most targets in the IU secondary. His 37.8% burn rate allowed is 10th in the Big Ten among the dozens of corners to face 15 or more targets.
The guy leading this unit, defensive coordinator Bryant Haines, also came from JMU.
This analysis isn’t meant to undersell the schematic and player development changes Indiana has made. But so much of Indiana’s defensive growth really has just come down to the revolutionary strategy of “bringing good players from a good team over to a bad team.”
The Hoosiers have generated a 41.4% pressure rate on opposing QBs (five percentage points better than the Power Four average) despite blitzing a less-than-average 24.8% of the time. Last year, Indiana had a below-average pressure rate (30.8%) despite blitzing 32.9% of the time.
Sometimes, it really does pay to just go get good players. Cignetti brought them with him. This has generally sucked for James Madison but has been extremely good for Indiana.
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