BLOOMINGTON — Just another game.
That’s the message IU football coach Curt Cignetti delivered to his team for 12 straight weeks.
The stage is a little bit bigger this week as the Hoosiers (11-1) prepare to face Notre Dame (11-1) on Friday night in the first round of the College Football Playoff, but Cignetti isn’t veering from the philosophy that got them to the big dance.
“You prepare for this one like you prepare for all of them,” Cignetti said at the start of the week.
How IU football shocked way to CFP:Bombastic talk, player-only meetings, making history
Jump into a postseason edition of The Runout for what stood out during the week, players to watch, a prediction and more:
IU football vs Notre Dame: Channel, betting odds
- When: Friday, Dec. 20 at 8 p.m. ET
- Where: Notre Dame Stadium (77.622), South Bend, Indiana
- TV: ABC/ESPN
- Line: Notre Dame -7
- Series: Notre Dame leads 23-5-1
- Last meeting: Notre Dame def. Indiana, 49-27, on Sept. 7, 1991
IU football players to watch vs Notre Dame
Elijah Sarratt, WR: Can Indiana exploit the youth in Notre Dame’s secondary?
The Irish start a true freshman Leonard Moore and true sophomore Christian Gray at corner. They aren’t lacking size — Moore is 6-2 and Gray is 6-foot — but they only have 17 career starts between them.
Sarratt has been IU’s big-play threat throughout the year and is coming off one of the best games of his career. He had 165 receiving yards against Purdue, a new IU record in the Bucket Game.
He had an 84-yard receiving touchdown against the Boilermakers that highlighted his chemistry with Kurtis Rourke he said really improved in the back half of the season.
“It took a while to connect on some deep routes,” Sarratt said “Honestly, it was like the first deep route we connected on we were like, ‘Okay, this is how it’s supposed to be,’ and it clicked from there. Took a lot of reps after practice. We got work in after practice and those built in over time, and a lot of stuff starts to seed in, you know.”
That first one was a 71-yard touchdown in Week 2 against Western Illinois. Sarratt blew the top off the coverage on the play even though he collided with one of the Leathernecks’ linebackers coming off the line of scrimmage.
He’s caught 11 passes on 18 targets for 391 yards with five touchdowns on throws of 20 yards or more, according to Pro Football Focus. The 11 catches are tied for the 11th most among FBS receivers.
Notre Dame hasn’t given up many explosive passing plays this season — just 26 completions of 20-yard or more — but the secondary wasn’t tested much playing the likes of Navy (No. 132 ranked passing offense out of 134 FBS teams) and Army (No. 134).
Sarratt and IU’s other talented receivers will be a much bigger test for the Irish on Friday night.
Indiana’s linebackers Aiden Fisher and Jailin Walker: Indiana linebackers will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting in South Bend to slow down Notre Dame’s talented running backs Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price, who both averaged more than 7.0 yards per carry, and keep quarterback Riley Leonard in check.
Leonard, who averaged 10.3 carries per game, is the first true dual-threat quarterback IU has faced this season.
“We know the game is going to be put on us,” Walker said Tuesday night.
Walker, who had 72 tackles (35 solo) with nine tackles for loss, eight pass breakups and two interceptions, let slip IU defensive coordinator Bryant Haines installed some new tweaks to the defense for this week, including some looks where one of the linebackers would be tasked with spying on the quarterback.
While scheming up the right calls will be important, Fisher said players have to be mindful of their technique as well. Fisher earned FWAA first-team All-American honors this week with a team-high 108 tackles,
“You want to make sure you keep everybody in front of you,” Fisher said. “They do a great job with the running attack, and our thing will be the same thing we’ve played with all year, great angles.”
This will be an area of strength on strength for the teams — Notre Dame had the 10th-ranked rushing offense (224.8 yards per game), and the Hoosiers had the No. 1 rushing defense in the FBS (70.8 yards allowed) — but IU’s linebackers sound like a confident bunch going into the game.
“We’ve got to stop the run,” Fisher said. “Something that we’re very prideful in here as a defense, and something that they are really good at on offense. It’s going to be a really good matchup.”
Indiana’s offensive line: Kurtis Rourke needs his offensive line to hold up better than it did against Michigan and Ohio State. The Hoosiers gave up nine sacks (half of the season total) over that two-game stretch, and Rourke was pressured on 31% of his dropbacks.
Cignetti said the theme of that six-quarter stretch where they struggled was “missed assignments and poor technique.” He did a deep dive into the film and described the miscues as “day-one” protection errors.
They cleaned much of that up against Purdue, but the talent level of Notre Dame’s front seven that features defensive end Rylie Mills and defensive tackle Howard Cross III will resemble the ones against which IU struggled.
Will facing a team with more speed and size cause them to repeat similar mental errors? They have something to prove this weekend in South Bend.
Indiana football: CFP First Round Odds and Ends
Silent night: Cignetti said he’s never going to use a silent count again after the debacle at Ohio State. The Buckeyes figured out the Hoosiers’ signals and disrupted everything they tried. Crowd noise has been on his mind ever since the loss, and he made a big change when he got back to Bloomington by cranking up the artificial crowd noise at every practice — from the minute his team was down stretching to when they walked off the field — in anticipation of playing on the road in the College Football Playoff. They had previously just used the crowd noise for certain segments of practice.
Hardy boys: One of the tweaks Haines made late in the year was using true freshman Roljiah Hardy in place of Isaiah Jones whenever IU had three linebackers on the field at the same time. Hardy went from averaging nine snaps a game to 21.3 snaps over the team’s final four games. Hardy has shown he’s a true playmaker in his limited playing time with two interceptions and two forced fumbles. “He’s impressed a lot of people, I know that, and he’s just a great player and one that we’re very fortunate to have in our room,” Fisher said. He’s a bit more athletic than Jones, and the Hoosiers can cover a lot of ground with him playing alongside Walker. It will be interesting to see if Haines sticks to his base 4-2-5 defense against Notre Dame or wants that extra bigger body in there with Hardy.
Special delivery: Notre Dame’s punt return has Cignetti’s full attention. “They’ve blocked three punts and forced a couple bad snaps because of the pressure they put on consistently. So they’ve gotten points there. Then when they punt, they faked three punts, which those kind of plays can be game changers in a game.” Indiana saw how costly special teams gaffe can be at Ohio State. Cignetti told his players they have to be “right on point” this weekend and not give away points against a talented Irish team.
IU football stat of the week
200: Notre Dame is 18-0 under coach Marcus Freeman when rushing for 200-plus yards. The program hasn’t lost a game when rushing for at least 200 yards since No. 19, 2016 against Virginia Tech. Freeman has a 30-9 overall record for the Irish, and they only averaged 112.7 yards per game in those nine losses. Indiana set a team record this year by holding eight opponents to less than 100 yards on the ground.
Indiana football quote of the week
“Well, I’ve got to stand up for myself. I think I swept all the awards, not almost all. I’m not eligible for the Dodd because I haven’t been here for a year,” Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, when asked how it felt to win almost all the coach of the year awards
Prediction: Indiana 34, Notre Dame 24
Will Indiana struggle against Notre Dame’s ground game? How will they handle a true dual-threat quarterback?
Those are fair questions, but the key matchup might be whether or not the Irish’s passing defense can hold up against Kurtis Rourke and company. Notre Dame struggled against the top 30 passing offenses it faced (Louisville and USC) this season, and those were two of the more competitive games it played outside of a loss to Northern Illinois.
Notre Dame has the No. 3 passing defense in the country, but those numbers are a bit skewed having played Navy and Army, two of three teams in the FBS that attempted less than 200 passing attempts.
If Indiana avoids the kind of pass protection breakdowns it had against Michigan (mostly in the second half) and Ohio State, it will have a real shot of pulling off the upset. The Hoosiers might even be able to win comfortably if they don’t turn it over. The lessons they learned in those games should help them pull of a historic upset in South Bend.
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
