Indiana recruited two of the best recruiting classes in school history in 2018 and 2019, and a large portion of both classes have already become key contributors to an Indiana team that is on a historical path this year.
With that youth and talent comes .a delicate situation on defense that has manifested growing pains for the Hoosiers in most competitive games this season.
Indiana is going bowling. That statement has been worked into existence, along with the history that came along with Saturday’s win at Nebraska, in just the third season into Tom Allen’s tenure as head coach.
Differing from most head coaches in Indiana’s past, though, Allen inherited a program that was trending in the right direction. Part of that was what gave Allen the confidence to brand his first season as the “breakthrough” season.
While that breakthrough didn’t come, Allen immediately signed the best-ever Indiana recruiting class after his first full recruiting cycle in 2018 and then topped that mark with the 2019 class. Initially placing the classes into a bin Allen labeled “depth,” there was thought that the older, more experienced players – some lasting veterans of the Kevin Wilson Era – would continue to anchor the team in 2019, but the talent of the younger classes is shining through more than anticipated.
Those new faces have played key roles in getting the Hoosiers to their earliest sixth win since 1993, and for the players, that comes as no surprise when considering the standards they ambitiously entered the season with.
“We’ve always set a standard, and our standard is even bigger than this,” sophomore linebacker Micah McFadden said. “Like coach said, winning six games is our bare minimum. We’re ready to go into that seven-, eight-, nine-win season, 10-win season. That’s what we came here to do.”
McFadden, from the 2018 class, is one of eight starters that hail from the last two classes, and of the 42 total Hoosiers to record a snap against Nebraska in Saturday’s 38-31 win in Lincoln, 20 of them were from those classes. True freshman left tackle Matt Bedford played all 75 snaps – as did the other four offensive linemen – on offense, and McFadden led the defense with 56.
The classes include players like sophomore running back Stevie Scott, who already has a 1,000-yard season, freshman cornerback Tiawan Mullen, who smothered No. 1 Michigan State receiver Darrell Stewart Jr. in week five, and starters like Devon Matthews, Demarcus Elliott, James Head, Jaylin Williams, Sean Wracher, Bedford and McFadden. Redshirt freshman quarterback Mike Penix is also from the 2018 class.
Some of the biggest plays of the season – a pick-six from Cam Jones against Connecticut, a forced fumble by Jamar Johnson against Nebraska, an interception to seal the game by Reese Taylor at Maryland – have come from this group of players too, and Penix has provided the program’s fanbase with the most hope of any player on the roster in 2019 – maybe since Tevin Coleman.
“We kind of look around and there’s a lot of young players on the field,” McFadden said. “It’s exciting to see us actually making plays and making a difference, making that first step. Six wins is really hard to get. People may not think it, but it’s really hard to get. We got there, but we’re definitely not finished.”
Most coaches in the IU staff have raved about the new-found depth on the roster, including cornerbacks coach Brandon Shelby, who said earlier this season that he hasn’t been able to rotate cornerbacks in his eight-year tenure in Bloomington until this season.
But with the talent paired with inexperience, there have been glaring growing pains in every competitive game. Defensive coordinator Kane Wommack, when speaking about his entire defense, said he wished the corps would have had better starts against Maryland and Nebraska on the road, starts that correlated with the strength of its preparation. Instead, Maryland was able to find big plays to keep pace with the IU offense, and Nebraska jumped to a 14-3 lead.
That’s a prime trait of a young defense, and most 2018 and 2019 contributors are on the defensive side of the ball.
“We have seen some of the inconsistencies of a young defense,” Wommack said. “When you put a lot of guys out there who are true freshmen, redshirt freshmen, sophomores – even redshirt sophomores that just haven’t played very much – you’re going to have some growing pains from that.”
Even McFadden, who leads the team in quarterback hurries, quarterback hits and pass pressures, is tied for the team lead with 38 tackles and is second on the team in tackles for loss, showed signs of youth with a poor tackling performance against Ball State to start the season.
As a whole, there were times early in the season when the defense struggled to communicate which play it was running, and against Michigan State and Nebraska, it allowed quick scores on long drives to end the first half. On the first drive against Maryland, three penalties gifted the Terps 40 yards, and one play resulted in a 30-yard boost to Nebraska on Saturday.
The symptoms of playing through growing pains haven’t dissipated, but they are being shored up considering the way both sides of the ball were exposed against Ohio State in week three.
Wommack said he hopes most of those mistakes will continue to disappear in future seasons. Right now, he said, the defensive staff needs to ensure each player is in the correct position for every play or else a play will most likely not be made. Wommack said he hopes once his younger players are older and they’ve been placed in the correct situations repeatedly, their intuition will take over those responsibilities.
“What does 2020 and 2021 look like? Pretty good, right?” Wommack said. “They’ve all learned things, they’ve gained experience. It makes a coordinator’s job easier when you feel like you don’t need to put them in the right call every single play because they’re just going to fix it. Right now, we don’t have much of that that goes on on the field, so we have to make sure we’re putting them in the right situations as much as we can, as often as we can, until they start to gain that base knowledge and defensive understanding.”
----
• 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.
