Sports
How Hoosiers can upset CFP
BLOOMINGTON Just another game.
That's the message IE football coach Curt Cignetti delivered his team twelve weeks in a row.
The stage is a little 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 Playoffbut Cignetti does not deviate from the philosophy that brought them to the great dance.
You prepare for this like you prepare for everything else, Cignetti said earlier this week.
How IU football shocked the road to CFP:Bombastic talk, player-only meetings, making history
Dive into a postseason edition of The Runout for what stood out last week, players to watch, a prediction and more:
IU football vs. Notre Dame: Channel, betting odds
- When: Friday, December 20 at 8:00 PM ET
- Where: Notre Dame Stadium (77622), South Bend, Indiana
- TV: ABC/ESPN
- Line: Notre Dame -7
- Series: Notre Dame leads 23-5-1
- Last meeting: Notre Dame final Indiana, 49-27, on September 7, 1991
More:Riley Leonard is one of the best dual-threat QBs in the FBS. Indiana Football wants him to pay a price for that.
IU football players to watch Notre Dame
Elijah Sarratt, WR: Can Indiana exploit the youth in the Notre Dames secondary?
The Irish will start true freshman Leonard Moore and true sophomore Christian Gray at corner. They don't lack size. Moore is 6-foot-1 and Gray is 6-foot-1, but they have just 17 career starts between them.
Sarratt has been the big threat for IU all 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 touchdown against the Boilermakers, which highlighted his chemistry with Kurtis Rourke, which he said improved in the second half of the season.
It took a while to connect on some deep routes, Sarratt said. Honestly, it was like the first deep route where we connected, we said, 'Okay, this is how it's supposed to be,' and it clicked from there. Did a lot of reps after training. We have work coming in after training and that's been built in over time, and a lot of things are starting to sink in, you know.
That first was a 71-yard touchdown in Week 2 against Western Illinois. Sarratt blew the top off the coverage of the play even though he collided with one of the Leathernecks' linebackers coming off the line of scrimmage.
According to Pro Football Focus, he has caught 11 passes on 18 targets for 391 yards with five touchdowns on throws of 20 yards or more. The 11 catches are tied for 11th among FBS receivers.
Notre Dame hasn't given up many explosive passing plays this season, only 26 completions of 20 yards or more, but the secondary hasn't been tested much by the likes of Navy (No. 132 in the 134 passing offense rankings FBS teams) and the military (No. 134). ).
Sarratt and IU's other talented receivers will be a much bigger test for the Irish on Friday night.
Indianas linebackers Aiden Fisher and Jailin Walker: Indiana linebackers will have to do much of the heavy lifting in South Bend to slow down Notre Dame's talented running backs Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price, both of whom averaged more than 7.0 yards per carry, and contain quarterback Riley Leonard to keep.
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 imposed on us, Walker said Tuesday night.
Walker, who had 72 tackles (35 solo) with nine tackles for loss, eight pass breakups and two interceptions, had IU defensive coordinator Bryant Haines install some new adjustments to the defense this week, including some looks where one of the linebackers would do. are charged with spying on the quarterback.
While planning the right decisions will be important, Fisher said players should also consider their technique. Fisher earned first-team FWAA All-American honors this week with a team-high 108 tackles,
You want to make sure you keep everyone in front of you, Fisher said. They're doing a great job with the run attack, and our thing will be the same thing we've been playing with all year, great corners.
This will be an area of ​​strength on strength for the teams Notre Dame ranked 10th in 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 group entering the game.
We have to stop the run, Fisher said. Something we are very proud of here as a defense, and something they are very good at in attack. It will be a very good match.
Indiana 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 their season total) during 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 dug deep into the film and described the flaws as day one security flaws.
They cleaned up a lot of that against Purdue, but the talent level of Notre Dame's front seven, with defensive end Rylie Mills and defensive tackle Howard Cross III, will resemble what IU struggled against.
Will facing a team with more speed and size lead to them repeating similar mental mistakes? They have something to prove this weekend in South Bend.
Indiana Football: CFP First Round Odds and Ends
Silent night: Cignetti said he will never use a silent count again after the Ohio State debacle. The Buckeyes found the Hoosiers' signals and disrupted everything they tried. The crowd noise has been on his mind since the defeat, and when he returned to Bloomington he made a big change by turning up the artificial crowd noise at every practice, from the time his team stretched out until the moment when they left the field. anticipating playing on the road in the College Football Playoff. They had previously only used crowd noise for certain practice segments.
Strong boys: One of the adjustments Haines made late in the year was using true freshman Roljiah Hardy instead of Isaiah Jones when IU had three linebackers on the field at the same time. Hardy went from averaging nine snaps per game to 21.3 snaps over the team's final four games. Hardy has shown in his limited playing time that he is a true playmaker with two interceptions and two forced fumbles. He's impressed a lot of people, I know, and he's just a great player and we're very happy to have him in our room, Fisher said. He's a bit more athletic than Jones, and the Hoosiers can cover a lot of ground playing next to Walker. It will be interesting to see if Haines sticks to his basic 4-2-5 defense against Notre Dame or wants that extra bigger body there with Hardy.
Special Delivery: Notre Dame's punt return has Cignetti's full attention. They have blocked three punts and forced a few bad snaps because of the pressure they consistently apply. So they gained points there. Then when they kicked, they recreated three kicks, which can be a game changer in a game. Indiana saw how costly special teams blunder can be in Ohio State. Cignetti told his players that they must be right this weekend and not give away any 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 over 200 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 averaged just 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 have to stand up for myself. I think I won all the prizes, not almost all of them. I don't qualify for the Dodd because I haven't been here in a year, Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, when asked how it felt to win almost all awards for Coach of the Year
Prediction: Indiana 34, Notre Dame 24
Will Indiana struggle against Notre Dame's ground game? How do they handle a true dual-threat quarterback?
Those are fair questions, but the more important question might be whether the Irish's passing defense can hold up against Kurtis Rourke and company. Notre Dame struggled against the top 30 passing offenses it faced this season (Louisville and USC), and those were two of the more competitive games it played aside from a loss to Northern Illinois.
Notre Dame has the third-ranked passing defense in the country, but those numbers are a bit skewed because they played Navy and Army, two of the three teams in the FBS that allowed fewer than 200 passing attempts.
If Indiana avoids the kind of failures in pass protection it had against Michigan (mostly in the second half) and Ohio State, it will have a real chance to alleviate the anxiety. The Hoosiers could even win comfortably if they don't turn things around. The lessons learned in those games should help them overcome 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 reporting by clicking here.
Sources 2/ https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/indiana/2024/12/20/iu-football-vs-notre-dame-preview-how-indiana-hoosiers-can-pull-off-cfp-upset-playoff-prediction/77100503007/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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