Indiana football: Most pressing questions for new-look Hoosiers going into spring practice

BLOOMINGTON — First-year Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti has laid out lofty expectations for the 2024 season ever since landing the job.

“We’re going to win and we’re going to win this year and we’re going to change the brand and the expectation level and the way people see Indiana football,” Cignetti said.

Cignetti didn’t have to set such a high bar for himself in year one considering the team has only nine wins over the last three seasons and only three wins against power five opponents during that stretch.

That’s just not how Cignetti is built though.

The work starts on Thursday when IU opens spring practice, here’s some questions we have for the team going into Cignetti’s first spring camp:

How long will it take Indiana football’s transfer-laden roster to gel?

Indiana’s previous coaching staff relied on the transfer portal as much as any team in the country from 2022-23. The Hoosiers signed 38 transfers (fifth most of any FBS team) but the results weren’t what they hoped for.

They landed very few impact players and none of the quarterbacks they signed panned out.

For every success story of a team relying heavily on the portal — Ole Miss had a three-win improvement after signing 23 transfers last season and SMU won four more games than it did after signing 26 players — there’s a team that continued to struggle like Colorado (51 signees) and Arizona State (31 signees).

Indiana’s new coach Curt Cignetti had to rely on the portal given the mass exodus of talent. It’s much different than any of his previous rebuilds since the portal was just in its early days when he took over at JMU in 2019.

Cignetti has expressed plenty of confidence in his evaluation process — he does have a proven track record — but it’s still hard to expect everything to immediately click into a place with so…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/indiana-football-most-pressing-questions-091815853.html

Author : The Herald-Times

Publish date : 2024-03-21 09:18:15

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