Indiana’s passing game has hit a rough patch, but the bigger picture around college football makes one thing pretty clear: the Hoosiers are hardly the only team asking questions at quarterback.
Over the last three games, Indiana hasn’t had a passing completion percentage of 60% or better. Each of those games came down to the final minutes, and one of them, against Ohio State, ended in a loss. That simply isn’t the level Indiana expected after the early standard was set for offenses under Curt Cigneti and Mike Shanahan.
Josh Hoover has taken plenty of the heat, and he hasn’t been helped by what’s around him. He’s been dealing with an arm injury since the latter half of the Ohio State game, and that showed up the next week against Michigan when he completed just eight of 18 throws.
He also attempted only one pass in the second half. Indiana’s run game hasn’t exactly made life easier for the passing attack, either.
Still, no matter where the blame lands, too many throws are falling incomplete. The simple truth is that the quarterback play hasn’t been good enough.
But that’s not just an Indiana problem.
Across the sport, the pool of truly high-end passers is thinner than usual right now. Miami’s Darian Mensah, Ole Miss’ Trinidad Chambliss and Notre Dame’s CJ Carr stand near the top, and after that the conversation opens up fast. Oregon’s Dante Moore and Ohio State’s Julian Sayin are both out injured, though both had already shown some inconsistency before getting hurt.
The transfer portal was supposed to bring instant answers in a lot of places. Sometimes it has.
Indiana’s own Fernando Mendoza is the clearest example, winning the Heisman Trophy and a national championship in his lone season with the program. But this year, the portal has been much less of a sure thing.
LSU’s Sam Leavitt, the 247Sports’ No. 1-ranked quarterback in this past offseason’s transfer portal, has thrown eight interceptions in eight games for the Tigers. Oklahoma State’s Drew Mestemaker, who followed Cowboys head coach Eric Morris from North Texas, has delivered uneven results as well, especially in a season-opening loss to Tulsa.
Dylan Raiola, who didn’t expect to start at Oregon this season, ended up in that role anyway and has only one passing touchdown in three full games as a starter. Mensah has been the outlier, piling up 22 touchdown passes against just one interception for No.
1 Miami.
Those quarterbacks were listed in order of their 247Sports ranking from last offseason, and Hoover was right behind Mensah.
That context matters for Indiana. The Hoosiers were not working from a perfect menu of options.
Leavitt may have been available, but Indiana chose Hoover. Leavitt has already thrown eight interceptions, while Hoover just threw his first last Saturday and added one more passing touchdown, with the possibility of more if he’d been healthy enough to do more against Michigan.
Mestemaker was tied to Morris. Raiola hasn’t exactly lit it up at Nebraska.
Mensah, meanwhile, didn’t even become available until the final day of the portal window after originally pledging to stay at Duke.
There were other portal names in play, but it’s hard to argue Indiana would have clearly landed a better quarterback than Hoover this offseason. And taken on its own, Hoover hasn’t been meaningfully worse than most of the quarterbacks being discussed around the country, whether they arrived through the portal or developed in-house.
That’s the reality of the transfer market: there are good options, but very few guarantees. It’s also why Cignetti keeps pointing to high school recruiting and development as the program’s long-term plan. In his view, it’s better to build a quarterback up over time than to inherit a player with most of his career already written.
So no, Hoover hasn’t been good enough lately. No, this isn’t all on him. And no, there’s no promise that another quarterback would have solved everything.
The portal worked for Indiana with Kurtis Rourke in 2024 and Fernando Mendoza in 2025. It also worked pretty well in 2026 with Hoover, who is still playing better than several of his peers.
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