EAST LANSING, Mich. – Whether it’s Big Ten money or a good A/V department or just local preference, the field-level microphones at Spartan Stadium are remarkably effective.
They pick up a lot more ambient noise than is normal for a stadium this size — crunching hits, tumbling players, etc. — so it wasn’t very hard to, when Michigan State took a 10-0 lead in the first half Saturday, hear several Spartan fans chanting “over-rated!” at undefeated Indiana.
This proved misguided.
The Spartans would not score again, instead getting flattened 47-10 in a win that saw No. 13 IU set a host of program and series records.
Doyel:#NeverDaunted is more than fight song lyric. It’s IU’s dominating mindset.
IU vs. Michigan State grades:#9WINDIANA as Hoosiers play with their food.
Saturday marked the first 9-0 start in IU history, the most points the Hoosiers have ever scored in this series and their largest-ever margin of victory over Michigan State. This win, pushing Indiana just three away from a perfect regular season as we reach the business end of the college football calendar, means it’s time to start using the (CF)P word in Bloomington: These Hoosiers are emphatically College Football Playoff contenders.
Michigan State, for all its early bravado, learned that the hard way Saturday afternoon.
“For some reason,” junior defensive end Mikail Kamara said, “people still don’t believe in us, so we’ve just got to keep going.”
That’s the only adequate way to describe what Indiana’s doing anymore.
The Hoosiers (9-0, 6-0) are so ferocious, so efficient, so clear-eyed and dominant. At the final whistle Saturday, they’d scored 51 more points in Big Ten games than any other league team, and 101 more overall. Even removing Western Illinois from that discussion — lopping off an entire game — they would still have scored more points than anybody else in the conference.
Saturday was record-setting in all the ways previously discussed, but it was not a fair fight. By the end of the third quarter, the Hoosiers looked like a predator playing with its food.
They spotted Michigan State that 10-point lead while Kurtis Rourke (263 passing yards, four touchdowns) regained the rhythm lost to his week off because of a thumb injury. Then they buried the Spartans in every imaginable sense.
“Now we can’t say we’re a team that never trailed before, because we got down 10-0. Now we all know how we’re gonna respond when we’re down,” IU coach Curt Cignetti said dryly postgame. “I didn’t talk so much about wanting to see it. You guys (the media) did. I knew at some point we’d be behind, and I knew we’d be fine.”
More than fine, Indiana is soaring. The Hoosiers have achieved a remarkable cycle of success that’s difficult to break. They score so much and so often and so easily teams cannot afford to be offensively passive. But throw the ball too much against this defense that’s already so good at forcing disadvantageous down and distance, and you risk the kind of treatment Michigan State got Saturday.
The Spartans (4-5, 2-4) allowed seven sacks and an eye-popping 15 tackles for loss in this game. Kamara, the Big Ten sack leader rapidly building himself a defensive-player-of-the-year resume, accounted for 2.5 and 4.5 of those, respectively.
Indiana intercepted Aidan Chiles twice before driving him from the game and then went to work terrorizing his backup. At one point sixth-year North Dakota transfer Tommy Schuster was so overwhelmed by the relentlessness of IU’s pass rush he — facing defenders barreling toward him from both sides — simply dove to the ground.
Michigan State had its fun at 10-0. And then for virtually every minute after that, it got the total opposite.
“I know, when the other guys watch tape, when the opponent watches tape, then they get to the game, I know they’re a little bit nervous. It breeds our confidence,” Kamara said. “When we’re up and we know you’ve got to pass, 3rd-and-long is just, pin your ears back and get off the rock.”
Through nine games, Indiana is beating opponents by an average of 32.9 points per. Remove the Western Illinois game and count only FBS wins, and that number still comes in at 27.8 points per.
The only question left to ask of this team is whether it’s played anyone worth merit, but that’s hard to judge when, week after week, the Hoosiers leave nothing but smoking wreckage and disassembled machinery on the field behind them.
Every time we think we have the measure of Cignetti’s team it does something new to suggest we still don’t know where it’s ceiling is.
“There’s no ceiling, bro,” Kamara said. “We’ve just got to keep on winning, keep on doing what we do. Go 1-0 every single week.”
That is perhaps the last frontier in exploring what makes this group so successful. Every coach in America preaches focus and attention to detail. Everybody tries to go one game at a time. But we’re nine games and 10 weeks into a historic season and not for one moment has Indiana looked fazed by it.
The Hoosiers’ ability to compartmentalize their success and adopt their coach’s demanding, laser-focused approach to everything is the most fundamental reason they are where they are, and they’re doing what they’re doing.
It’s why it is past time to talk Playoff in Bloomington. Three games remain: Michigan, at Ohio State, Purdue. The Hoosiers will be favored in two of them, and the third is probably the most important date left on whole the Big Ten schedule.
Two wins in three probably guarantees an at-large Playoff berth. Three in three opens the road not just to the Playoff but to the Big Ten championship game, and a potential bye after that.
None of this is fantasy anymore. Indiana’s reputation is hard earned and impressively won. The Hoosiers have legitimate credentials among the best teams in America, and the scariest part is, they only seem to be getting more ruthless.
“They continue to play consistently,” Cignetti said. “It’s never perfect. And they’re never satisfied.
“Never satisfied.”
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