On Indiana football, its various demons and what’s new.
Indiana has its fair share of demons as a program. Blown leads, would-be upsets and the sort of nightmare plays that end up on those “College football YOU JUST LOST THE GAME! plays” YouTube videos that show up in your recommendations after you search up highlights of a 63-10 win over a top-10 team (something everyone encounters, no?)
If Curt Cignetti’s tenure has been free of those demons, they reared their heads on Saturday.
One particular demon resides right there at Kinnick. A long time ago (four years) in a season just like this (2021) the Hoosiers of yesteryear also found themselves saddled with the privilege/burden of carrying expectations into Iowa City. They even had a nice little number next to their name.
And, well, that was a different kind of nightmare that pulled you in and dashed your hopes immediately. This? Oh, this was something else entirely. Almost crueler. A slow burn as it sunk in that perhaps these Hoosiers weren’t quite all they’d been billed to be.
Indiana was getting Iowa’d up and down the field from the time of that first touchdown to the second. This one truly had everything. A porous offensive front? Check. An Iowa quarterback finding a receiver exactly where everyone on the field knew he was gonna be on every third down? You know it. Officiating issues? Absolutely. An interception at what felt like the worst possible time? Come on.
When all hope seemed lost and Iowa looked ready to kick what would surely be the game-winning field goal? WHIFF. Out to the left.
Indiana is no stranger to chances. It’s even more familiar with taking those chances and lighting them up with a blowtorch. But here with what felt like all of Iowa City bearing down on them and a staff that’d taken this program as close to the mountaintop as it’d ever gotten? Maybe now, this time, was different.
The flirtations with disaster didn’t end before this final drive. Mendoza sailed a pass out to the right that could’ve put the Hoosiers in better position for a first down. A near-sack was instead ruled clear holding on Kaelon Black, backing the offense back up.
Then, it happened.
Elijah Sarratt ran a slant the same way he always does, getting leverage on his man and securing the ball right over the middle. Then said man caught nothing but the bottom of Sarratt’s shoes as the latter turned upfield, nobody standing between him and the endzone.
It was like watching the Hines Ward hurtling down the field as it collapsed around him in the Dark Knight Rises. Only instead of a gridiron falling apart it was every preconceived notion of what this kind of game usually means for Indiana football.
The ensuing Hawkeyes drive stalled at midfield on a failed fourth down conversion. Mendoza booking it toward the endzone to run down the clock on fourth down, getting safety’d in the process, made this game end with the especially weird score of Indiana 20, Iowa 15.
That score shouldn’t happen in 2025. It belongs in some long-forgotten record book in the Big Ten’s headquarters above Michigan’s 38-0 win over the Ann Arbor High School Janitorial Staff.
For all of this, the score, the Iowa of it all and just how painful it was to watch, I’d really like to say this was a delightful Big Ten vintage.
But it wasn’t. It was something new. Indiana won. Neat.
Category: General Sports
