Senior right tackle Coy Cronk left Saturday’s game after what looked like a gruesome, right leg injury against the University of Connecticut.
Cronk has been a starter for the Hoosiers throughout all four of his seasons with the program. He’s a team captain and a leader for the team who will be missed in the event of a season-ending injury. Head coach Tom Allen said after the game that it didn’t look good.
Indiana’s embarrassing loss to Ohio State left players’ heads hung and confidence shot. In the team’s final nonconference game against Connecticut on Saturday, there was an opportunity to straighten out the kinks on both offense and defense.
During the Hoosiers’ second possession, things seemed to be heading in the right direction as the offense was finally beginning to establish a rushing attack in the game against the Huskies. Sophomore running back Stevie Scott totaled six carries for 31 yards early in the first quarter.
Then senior left tackle Coy Cronk went down on the Memorial Stadium turf.
On Scott’s aforementioned sixth carry, Cronk was engaged in a block on the left side of the offensive line when an opposing defender was knocked down and rolled onto the back of his leg.
Just by gazing at his lower leg, it was clear Cronk’s day was over, and now Indiana fears for his season.
“It doesn't look good,” Indiana head coach Tom Allen said after the game. “We'll find out once we get all the information back, but yeah, it could be a tough one.”
With an aircast around his right leg, Cronk was carted into the locker room, but not before the entire Indiana team cleared the sideline to come onto the field in support of one of its team captains.
“It sucks because you know how much he loves this team and how much he’s put in to be a leader on this team,” fifth-year wide receiver Nick Westbrook said of Cronk. “It just really hurt, but at that point now we’re playing for him.”
It was at that moment that the team’s uncertainties from previous games appeared to vanish. Westbrook said the injury gave the team something to fight for. They wanted to win the game for their teammate.
The offense was efficient and the defense was tenacious. At one point, Indiana’s junior quarterback Peyton Ramsey had as many touchdowns as he did incompletions, while the defense allowed just 145 yards by the end of the game.
“Just his leadership, the kind of person he is,” Ramsey said. “I think it kind of spread throughout the whole team when we all saw him go off the field.”
Indiana proceeded to dominate Connecticut, earning 430 total yards on offense in a 38-3 victory. To compensate for the loss, sophomore tackle Caleb Jones went from his usual right tackle position to the left, replacing Cronk. Fifth-year senior DaVondre Love replaced Jones on the right side.
In the fourth quarter, true freshman Matthew Bedford — Cronk’s backup on the team’s depth chart — entered the game at left tackle and Jones flipped back to the right.
“Now he's obviously going to have to play,” Allen said of Bedford. “To me, the redshirt is gone. Because basically if Coy can't come back, the redshirt has got to be gone. To me that's the mindset I would have.”
Bedford is presumably going to be stepping into the role of starting left tackle in place of Cronk and he’ll step into gaping shoes that he’s expected to fill. Despite the loss, Indiana gave up just one sack during the game and rushed for 178 yards as a team.
Allen said that Cronk is a rarity for a Big Ten football team. He came into Indiana’s program as a true freshman and earned the right to start during his first year in Bloomington.
“Coy’s a leader. He’s a senior so anything he says, we listen to it 100 percent,” Scott said after the game. “We just went out there to play for him after that injury. It was sad seeing him go down, but we just got the job done and finished it for him.”
Now, Indiana enters the beginning of a long stretch of Big Ten conference matchups to finish the season. It’ll do so without one of its most experienced offensive linemen. Cronk has started in all 36 games that he has played with the program, missing just one game due to injury before this year.
The senior arrived at Indiana when Allen was hired. Since then, the two have developed a relationship as he’s grown into a leader on the team.
“Man, I love that kid,” Allen said. “He's just so tough and he's given so much to this place, so I hope it's not the end of the season. Bottom line is that we got a chance to play a couple other guys, and Matt Bedford got to play there in the fourth quarter, and you know, guys gotta step up. That's part of it.”
Everyone on the team knows about the physicality this sport, and rotational players need to be ready at a moments notice. The next man up for the Hoosiers is Bedford and he’ll have a gauntlet of Big Ten defensive talent awaiting him in every game for the rest of the season.
As for Cronk, he took to social media after the injury and said it was just a minor setback, surely to provide reassurance to his coaches and teammates. There’s a chance he is granted a medical redshirt for his injury, allowing him a fifth-season wearing crimson and cream.
For now, he’ll take on a leadership role from a position he’s never been in before: confined to watching on the sidelines.
----
• Talk about it inside The Hoops Forum or The Football Forum
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Follow us on Twitter: @IndianaRivals
• Like us on Facebook.
