Indiana is moving into Big Ten play with a sellout crowd, a quarterback under a microscope and a coach who isn’t interested in looking past Friday night.
Curt Cignetti used his Monday press conference to push a few clear messages before the No. 5 Hoosiers face Northwestern in primetime: stay in your seats, back Josh Hoover and don’t get ahead of the moment.
The crowd point came first. Cignetti acknowledged that Bloomington’s heat made it tough for fans to sit through Indiana’s first three home games against North Texas, Howard and Western Kentucky, especially once those games were in hand in the second half. That won’t be the case this week, with kickoff expected in the mid-60s and conditions forecast to feel like “a nice cool football kind of night in Bloomington.”
“We need to have a great crowd that stays the whole game,” Cignetti said near the end of his opening statement on Monday. “We played our three sauna games in the afternoon.
I can understand having to leave in the second half, particularly when the game is out of hand and it’s 152 on the turf. It’s hard to coach in these games, too.
“But this will be low 70 weather this week and it will be a nice cool football kind of night in Bloomington and we need to have a great crowd.”
Friday’s game is one of five home dates left for Indiana, and the stadium is sold out for the entire season.
Cignetti also made it clear he has no interest in joining the growing noise around Hoover, who has thrown for 649 yards and 10 touchdowns without an interception through three games. Hoover said after the Western Kentucky win that he left some throws out there and needed to be more accurate moving forward, but his coach spent Monday defending the tape and pushing back on what he called overblown criticism.
“I think there is too much scrutiny on Josh Hoover right now,” Cignetti said. “Unfair scrutiny.
After watching the game tape, he missed one throw. The one he missed to (Charlie) Becker, we did a bad job picking up the blitz at running back and he had a guy in his face.
One he overthrew early. Missed (Nick) Marsh.
“The one to the right, it was the third progression. Didn’t run a good route to the field.
Should have been open but wasn’t because of the route. Came back to No. 3, who didn’t run a great route either and the ball got overthrown.
“And the only other one would’ve been the one to Marsh maybe down the sideline, but really that read there should’ve taken him to the field, which was open. So we had to kind of hash that one out as a staff to make sure we were on the same page about what was going on. So, you know, I’m glad he’s our quarterback.”
Cignetti had already gone down that road once before, during his on-field interview with Peacock sideline reporter Caroline Pineda after the 38-0 win. When asked to evaluate Hoover, he pointed away from the quarterback chatter and toward the rest of the roster.
“Josh is going to be fine. All people want to talk about is Josh,” he said.
“You know what I mean? We have 21 other starters on the field and 104 other players.
Josh, I think, has thrown for more yards and more touchdown passes than anyone currently playing, right? I’m glad we got him.”
The attention is part of the deal for a quarterback at Indiana right now, especially with Hoover stepping into the role after Fernando Mendoza, the Heisman Trophy winner, and with the Hoosiers off to a 3-0 start that included a 145-16 edge over North Texas, Howard and Western Kentucky.
Still, Cignetti didn’t take the bait when the conversation turned to the bigger picture of what Big Ten games mean later in the season. He shut that down quickly and brought it back to Northwestern.
“We’re playing a really, really good football team,” Cignetti explained. “That’s my total focus.
I think there is too much focus on ‘we are this’ or ‘we are that’ and, ‘oh, compared to last year’. Well, last year at this time, where were we really, okay?
“I’m not thinking about down the road. I know who the next game is after this one and so on and so forth, but like everything is going into this one because this is a good football team.
We got to play really well. We got to have great balance on offense, between the run and the pass.”
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