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    • Tough IU football, physical win over Washington is a sign of a good team
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    Tough IU football, physical win over Washington is a sign of a good team

    Kathleen William Posted on

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    BLOOMINGTON – No one on a football field can sense the outcome of a game better than an offensive lineman. He is by nature the one who stands at the center of everything, staring the opponent face to face and tackling challenges to see if his opponent can overcome them. When they can't, he feels it first.

    Mike Katic stood on the parapet Saturday and watched as Indiana's high-powered offense ran Washington to the ground on the Memorial Stadium turf. For a whole host of reasons, the Hoosiers couldn't win this game explosively, so they decided to win it physically, and it turned out there was nothing Washington could do to stop them.

    “We're in the red zone and we're driving, and you could see the guys were just breaking down, man,” Katic said postgame Saturday after a 31-17 win. “We could sense that their will was being broken, and that’s when I think we’re at our most dominant.”

    Curt Cignetti used “gutty” to describe No. 13 IU's eighth win in as many tries, tying the program record for best start to a season. Only the 1967 team, which reached Indiana's only Rose Bowl, can rival Cignetti's first team as the noteworthiness of that season continues to grow.

    This was a win the hard way, and Indiana still looked good doing it.

    Saturday was beautiful everywhere except at times on the football field in Bloomington.

    Doyel: The perfect IU season has the perfect day, beats Washington with GameDay, Lee Corso is there

    One afternoon at the Chamber of Commerce, thousands of raucous fans turned out for IU's first-ever College GameDay visit, ESPN's flagship pregame show on Saturday morning. The Hoosiers (8-0, 5-0) honored beloved former coach Lee Corso, who has been a fixture on the GameDay set since the show began and led IU to its first-ever bowl victory in 1979.

    Coincidentally, that team — which beat BYU in the Holiday Bowl this year — had already scheduled a 45-year reunion for this weekend. Corso was allowed to ride to the GameDay set in a double-decker bus, a tribute to one of his most famous moves as Indiana coach.

    And then everyone sat down to witness a season that will one day require its own reunion, when hair is grayer and thinner and the years are not quite so kind.

    The only undefeated opponent in college football history is time, but these Hoosiers are becoming more and more timeless to their fans. Their win matches the best start in program history and puts them just one further ahead of the program's single-season record of nine. They're a true Big Ten and playoff contender who's doing things no one here has seen before, and they're far from done.

    “It’s unbelievable,” said Katic. “It’s just surreal, but we deserve this. We love it and we’ll keep going.”

    On Saturday, that required a level of toughness the Hoosiers hadn't shown this season.

    As expected, Kurtis Rourke's thumb injury forced him to take a break. Washington (4-4, 2-3) used the bye week to freshen up its coverage and completely surprise an Indiana offense that expected a lot of man-to-man but a lot of elbow room.

    Combine that with a backup quarterback starting for the first time in more than a year, and you get an Indiana offense that seemed out of sync for the first time this fall. The Hoosiers were outscored by their opponents for the first time this season, and their three three-pointers in the first half in 30 minutes were as many as in the previous two games combined.

    “We just couldn’t do it,” Cignetti said. “The quarterback has a few plays that he’s going to learn from. It wasn't like there was nothing there. They have changed their attitude towards us quite a bit. They've gone from being a man coverage team to a zone team, so at some point in the game you throw away almost 50% of the game plan and just start shooting them from the hip.”

    The more that game plan was tossed and scrapped, the more it had to focus on things that hadn't been particularly important to this offense before.

    The most explosive, highest-scoring team in the conference became a ground-and-pound team that challenged Washington physically where it couldn't by design. After spending a hesitant first half trying to enforce this change in coverage, they decided to abandon it and force Washington into submission. 19, 14 and 12 game drives did the trick.

    “Sometimes you just have to throw out that game plan and say, 'Okay, what works against this?'” Cignetti said. “The offense got the running game going, started eating up time and kept them off the field, and special teams with the big return did their part.”…”

    “This is a well-coordinated team with a lot of competitive nature, guys who really want to be good, have the right things and have found a way to win.”

    This path was unconventional for Cignetti's own methods. Justice Ellison's 29 runs were the most for any of his running backs in a single game since at least 2021, when Cignetti drafted James Madison from the FCS. If Ellison's 105-yard game on just nine carries last week against Nebraska exemplified the explosiveness of the IU offense against the Cornhuskers, his 29 for 123 (and a touchdown) on Saturday carried the banner of as physically dominant a victory as Indiana has ever had board has put up this season.

    “As a running back, you work so hard for these moments because you know that’s what the team needs,” Ellison said. “I've got to make plays and be able to take on that mentality of, 'I've got to get this first.' I still have four meters to go. I still have five meters to go.' I was constantly talking to myself.

    “Things like that really help this team improve the jersey.”

    At this point, the jersey might as well be, as Ellison calls it, in the thermosphere.

    None of this was expected outside of Indiana's North End Zone facility before the season began. The extent to which college football is still adjusting to the Hoosiers is reflected in their relatively modest showing in the polls for a team that was so dominant, with eight wins in eight games, that it didn't score a single point in the first quarter allowed and did not win a game with less than 14 points and not even a deficit for a single snapshot.

    Indiana did things differently on Saturday. It punished its opponent on the ground. It returned an interception for a touchdown to open the score and a long punt return to set up the touchdown that effectively ended the game.

    It won ugly — if you can call 31 points and a win by two touchdowns “ugly” — and made no apologies for it.

    “We gutted it,” Cignetti said. “We are 8-0 and it was a great team effort. I told the team after the game, 'Really good teams, championship teams, they find ways to win games.'”

    Indiana looked like this on Saturday.

    Listen to Mind Your Banners, our IU athletics podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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    Kathleen William
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