With the departure of junior running back Stevie Scott III, Indiana will have a new feature running back heading into the spring.
The problem is no one knows who it is going to be.
The Hoosiers will bring back Sampson James, Tim Baldwin and David Ellis, all of whom carried the football at various points for Indiana during the 2020 season.
However, those pieces didn't produce much as the season progressed. Baldwin had 141 yards on 22 carries during the season, of which 106 came against the Terrapins, and James finished the year with 96 yards on 32 carries in six games. As for Ellis, he played in five games and accounted for 61 yards on 16 carries.
Against Ole Miss in the Outback Bowl, Indiana didn't look to utilize a rushing attack against the SEC's worst defense against the run until late in the contest.
Regardless of who the featured back is or how many backs Indiana decides to rotate in and out of the action, the running attack has to improve next season. A total of 3.1 yards per carry is not going to get it down, and this team is going to have to be able to line up and run the football to control the clock and tempo of the game, something offensive coordinator Nick Sheridan harped on many times during the season.
For an offense whose coaches claimed it wanted to not be one dimensional and use the running game to control clock, the Hoosiers failed miserably in this category. In eight games, the Hoosiers rushed for 869 yards on 278 carries and found the end zone 12 times. Furthermore, on the season, Indiana finished the year 12th in the Big Ten out of 14 teams in rushing offense, averaging 108.7 yards.
Only one time this season did Indiana put together something that resembled a strong running attack and that was against Maryland, as the Hoosiers went for 234 yards on the ground.
Indiana's running backs room is a talented and deep one, which also includes 2019 Indiana Mr. Football Charlie Spegal, who did not see the field in 2020, as well as incoming freshmen Trenten Howland and David Holloman.
However, the departure of Scott, who has entered his name into the NFL Draft, will leave quite a hole in the rushing attack for the Hoosiers. Scott accounted for 561 yards and 10 touchdowns, including two in the Outback Bowl out of the wildcat position. Scott finished the season on the Second Team All-Big Ten Team and closes out his Indiana career fourth in program history with 30 rushing touchdowns, fifth with 32 total TDs, seventh with 562 attempts, ninth with 2,543 rushing yards and tied for 10th with nine 100-yard games. Scott joined running back Anthony Thompson (1986-89) and quarterback Antwaan Randle El (1998-2001) as the only Hoosiers to score at least 10 rushing touchdowns in three-straight seasons.
Fixing the running game and finding a premier back is a goal of Tom Allen's this offseason.
“We have to find ways to run the football better. I am not going to be too specific about what that is going to look like. I just see us expanding ourselves schematically and doing more things in the run game, being more multiple in the run game, and being able to have multiple types of abilities to attack certain points on the line of scrimmage and how we set those up as well," Allen said. "So, we are going to have an extensive study of that this offseason, and that is going to be huge for our offensive staff and for our program, is to run the football better."
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