There are a lot of ways this could go
In a few short weeks, we’ll get our first look at the new era of Indiana football. We’ll be able to adjust and recalibrate expectations from there, but the college football season is a fast and unpredictable one that makes it easy to get caught up in the week-to-week.
We did a roundtable preview of the schedule last month, but there was no consensus as to realistic expectations across the three great minds of Crimson Quarry. Two of us believe that Indiana will be bowl-eligible after the Old Oaken Bucket game, while Miles is more reserved.
Predictions aside, we have yet to consider what it would take for this season to be considered “good” from an Indiana perspective. A lot of fans are just happy to have something to believe in again right now, but does this persist if Indiana misses the postseason?
Looking at the data from the first season of every first-year head coach since the conference added Maryland and Rutgers in 2014. The average win record for coaches in that span has been 5-6, with 10 of 23 coaches reaching Bowl games in year one.
However modest that data may sound, the numbers can be a bit deceiving. First of all, one of the ten coaches to reach a Bowl in year one, Nebraska’s Mike Riley, reached a Bowl game in his first year without hitting the usual six-win requirement for eligibility.
There are also coaches like Ryan Day and Paul Chryst in the dataset, who first experienced success as coordinators at their respective gigs before receiving the head coaching job. They also inherited teams with a lot more talent and continuity than Cignetti will.
Given that kind of historical precedent, it may be better to err on the side of caution and expect something closer to five wins and no postseason. Even that would be a marked improvement from what the program has been in recent years.
While history may not sound promising for Indiana’s bowl chances this year, history does not account for Indiana’s 2024 schedule.
Even a conservative prognostication likely has Indiana at halfway to bowl eligibility by week four, with a real chance to be undefeated. As we noted at the time, the new 18-team conference has a lot of new coaches, which should be an advantage to Cignetti.
If he can reach a Bowl game, history will favor the Hoosiers. New coaches in the last decade of the Big Ten have gone 7-3 when they’ve reached Bowls, a record that seems incomprehensible considering Indiana’s dismal Bowl record in recent seasons.
Realistically, success on the field will likely come down to the eye test rather than record. If Indiana looks like a team with a game plan that it executes with moderate success and improves over the course of the year, I think most people will be happy.
There’s also the recruiting side. National 247 recruiting reporter Tom Loy reported that Indiana leads in the effort to flip Julian Lewis from his existing commitment to USC.
Lewis’ ranking has dropped in recent months with his reclassification to the class of 2025, but he is a consensus top ten quarterback in his class with either a four or five star rating, depending on which service you trust most.
Indiana has only ever landed three quarterbacks in the top 25 of their respective classes and the Hoosiers have two of those players on its current roster in Tyler Cherry, a Cignetti recruit who will likely redshirt this season, and Donavan McCulley, now a wide receiver.
Adding a player like Lewis so early in one’s tenure can really accelerate a rebuild, as we saw with Michael Penix and Kalen Deboer, who, at one point, seemed destined to rebuild Indiana before bringing Washington to the National Championship Game.
Unfortunately, the Tom Allen tenure was a stark example of how recruiting wins can fail to translate to on-field success, especially in an era when players like Dasan McCullough, Indiana’s highest signing to date, can find a long list of suitors in the transfer portal.
Whether this staff lands Lewis or not, having a guy like Tyler Cherry on the roster means they can focus on winning now to retain and attract elite talent in the future. Developing Cherry into a starting quarterback for a winning team would certainly be a selling point going forward.
Cignetti seems to have the players to win now, too. Kurtis Rourke is landing on multiple preseason watchlists, as have teammates D’Angelo Ponds, Aiden Fisher, Cooper Jones, James Evans, Zach Horton, and Elijah Sarratt, at their respective positions.
In all, it’s hard to see how this season won’t be at least a modest improvement on last year’s record. It could be special, but we likely won’t really know until week three, when Indiana heads to UCLA for a winnable road game in the new, coast-to-coast Big Ten.