Indiana football’s season opener against North Texas is not going to be judged by the scoreboard alone.
A win is expected. ESPN Sportsbook has the Hoosiers as 40.5-point favorites for Saturday’s noon kickoff at Merchants Bank Field at Memorial Stadium. For Curt Cignetti’s team, success means looking every bit like a program built to defend a national championship.
That starts with handling a North Texas roster that has been turned over almost completely. Former head coach Eric Morris departed for Oklahoma State University in the offseason and took 19 players with him, including star redshirt sophomore quarterback Drew Mestemaker and sophomore running back Caleb Hawkins. Mestemaker led the country with 4,379 passing yards, while Hawkins topped the nation with 25 rushing touchdowns.
Even with all that change, the Mean Green are not walking into Bloomington as a tune-up opponent. They return only 44 players from last year’s 12-2 team and added 52 through the portal, and now they’re led by head coach Neal Brown.
Brown spent 2019-2024 at West Virginia University, finishing 37-35, and before that went 35-16 at Troy University. One of his biggest wins came on Sept. 30, 2017, when Troy knocked off then-No.
25 Louisiana State University 24-21 in Tiger Stadium.
Cignetti said the Hoosiers can’t afford to treat this like a slow warmup.
“Neal Brown is a good football coach,” Cignetti said in a press conference Monday. “He’s accustomed to a setting like this; he beat LSU when he was at Troy a while back. So, we got to go get ready.”
The other big test is the one Indiana failed to pass cleanly in last year’s opener. Against Old Dominion, the Hoosiers won 27-14 but gave up 218 rushing yards. That game featured a 75-yard touchdown run on the opening play and another 78-yard scoring burst later in the fourth quarter, both by then-Monarchs redshirt sophomore quarterback Colton Joseph on the same run-pass-option concept.
Indiana’s defense settled down after that, eventually holding opponents to 77.2 rushing yards per game the rest of the season. But North Texas brings its own run-game problems. The Mean Green added fifth-year dual-threat quarterback Tayven Jackson, who previously played for Indiana and spent last season at the University of Central Florida, along with senior running back Jahiem White.
White was a Freshman All-American in 2023 at West Virginia. The following season, he ran for 845 yards and seven touchdowns on 149 carries. In 2025, a knee injury after two games ended his year.
Cignetti knows exactly what kind of threat that creates.
“He (Tayven) can run, he’s a good athlete,” Cignetti said Monday. “Jaheim White, in particular, he was injured, and missed some of last season, but he’s really fast and elusive. Great in space.”
For Indiana, success does not have to mean a shutout of the run game. It means not letting Jackson and White turn routine plays into the kind of explosives that burned the Hoosiers a year ago.
The final piece is discipline. Indiana’s opener last season included six red-zone trips, but only two touchdowns.
The Hoosiers also settled for two field goals and turned it over on downs twice. They still finished the season with the eighth-highest redzone percentage in the nation, but Saturday is a fresh test.
There are also questions around Texas Christian University transfer redshirt senior quarterback Josh Hoover, who has thrown 33 interceptions across three full seasons. He’ll have room to settle into offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan’s system, and Cignetti said he expects the same kind of steady standard he’s pushed since arriving in Bloomington.
Like Kurtis Rourke and Fernando Mendoza before him, Hoover could need time to find his footing in the first game of the year. But Cignetti’s message hasn’t changed.
“I want us to play to a standard, play in, play out, from the first to the last play,” Cignetti said in a press conference Monday. “I want us to feel good about our performance walking off the field ... I’d like to see us play a nice, clean game.”
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