An early bye week means Indiana won't see the field this weekend against an opponent, but the Hoosiers will still be getting their fill of football.

Indiana head coach Kevin Wilson scheduled his team to be off up until today but will get his players back on the field tomorrow to continue through the weekend as if it was a normal week.

"I want to get them back next weekend and on Friday and Saturday be thinking football instead of off time," Wilson said. "Sometimes when you come off the open dates you're a little sluggish. We've had a lot with a Thursday night game and then nine days until the second game and now two weeks until (the third against Wake Forest).

"After this, it's 10 games straight."

The early bye week isn't exactly ideal for Wilson's team, but there isn't anything he could have done to change it. Instead, he's embraced it as a chance to separate the season into two chunks.

The first two games against Florida International and Ball State, both wins, were almost an extension of training camp. Wilson wanted both contests out of fall camp to be used as a springboard into the bye week, where they would briefly refresh before starting a nearly two-month campaign through the Big Ten.

The focus up until this point has been preparing for the upcoming 10-game stretch, Wilson said.

So far, he's been pleased.

"We thought we had time to keep evolving," Wilson said. "We needed to be good enough to win. We needed to have enough offense and defense to win. We needed to attack and be aggressive enough to win, but we also felt because of the Thursday night (and Saturday afternoon), we had like four weeks to keep growing. We had three, four weeks of preseason and now three, four weeks with the Thursday night and the open date early to keep coming (together) as a team. That was our thought."

In a perfect world, Wilson said the Hoosiers would have a bye week somewhere between weeks four and seven. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't able to put input into the schedule.

So he'll make do with what he has. And when IU does return to the field, he'll hope his experiment of planning around the early time off pays dividends.

“A lot of teams come out of an open date and play poorly,’’ he said. “We’re trying a different schedule this week. We’re not going to play a game next Saturday, but we’re going to come out and run around. We’ve got to play a little football Saturday, got to keep our kids in football mode and keep that schedule moving.’’