Indiana redshirt quarterback Mike Penix was ruled out for the remainder of the 2019 season Tuesday evening, and while other teams in the Big Ten have floundered when their starting quarterbacks have gone down with injuries, Penix's injury doesn't mean the end to what has been a historic season for Indiana.
There have been a handful of Big Ten teams that have suffered from missing their starting quarterbacks for an extended period of time in 2019 – Nebraska, Northwestern, Maryland, Purdue and Rutgers. While none of those teams are loaded with talent, it’s difficult not to notice that each of them is scratching and clawing, trying to avoid the seventh loss.
Indiana, in a way, has also been one of those teams. Redshirt freshman quarterback Mike Penix has only started and finished two games this season, and he’s missed three games entirely, due to various injuries. The hope that he would find health, bring his big arm back to the pocket for the Hoosiers in 2019 and escalate the already historic season to new heights was a constant on a week-to-week basis.
The bridge between the last time Penix saw the field and the next time was redshirt junior quarterback Peyton Ramsey, who lost his starting job to the talented freshman just five days before the season and has spotted Penix with some of the best football of his Indiana career.
After Indiana announced Tuesday evening that, following a surgery Monday for a sternoclavicular joint injury to his non-throwing shoulder, Penix had been ruled out for the remainder of the season, the aspects of the Indiana offense that have made the Hoosiers so potent on that side of the ball will be put to the test unlike any adversity it’s faced thus far, as it enters the most difficult stretch of its schedule.
"We feel really bad for Mike," Indiana head coach Tom Allen said in the IU Athletics release. "He's worked extremely hard and had a great season. He'll recover from this and get bigger and stronger this offseason. Mike has a very bright future with the Hoosiers."
Penix was on track to be one of the brightest quarterback newcomers in the Big Ten and in the nation. His adjusted completion percentage reached as high as fourth in the nation, and his Pro Football Focus passing grade had placed him within the top-10 in the country before injuries knocked him out of the Maryland and Northwestern games and his snap count decreased. He ended the year with 1,394 passing yards, 10 passing touchdowns and four interceptions on a 69-percent completion rate – and a lot of “what ifs” surrounding the marriage of this Indiana team and a healthy Mike Penix.
Anxiety now surrounds his future, with the suspicion of continuous threats of injury, since this season ended with a rare shoulder injury and last season ended with an ACL injury.
But Ramsey has suppressed much of that anxiety in the short-term. While leading the Hoosiers to wins for most of the Maryland game and the entire historic win at Nebraska to clinch a bowl berth, Ramsey has posted similar stats to Penix this season, with 1,302 yards, nine touchdowns and three interceptions on a 72-percent completion rate through seven games.
His performances during the current four-game win streak have left behind the ghosts of the 51-10 blowout loss to Ohio State, and the growth he’s shown beneath offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Kalen DeBoer has blurred the boundaries a Peyton Ramsey-led offense had been limited to in seasons’ past.
With the new, more modern system that DeBoer has introduced to Bloomington in his first season, he’s found ways around weaknesses, like losing senior left tackle Coy Cronk, struggling to get the run game going and the shuffling between Penix and Ramsey on a week-to-week basis. His performance has Cronk optimistic, as the senior calls him a “rockstar,” he said Monday.
If Indiana is to continue its success during the first seven-win season since 2007 and get its first bowl victory since 1991, the Hoosiers will need to lean on DeBoer’s system, which has equipped Ramsey to have the most success he’s seen at Indiana going into games at Penn State, against Michigan and at a struggling Purdue team before being pitted against a tough non-conference opponent in the bowl.
----
• 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.
