Author: Dustin Dopirak

Indiana wide receivers coach Grant Heard was asked Friday if wide out Miles Marshall is ready for the responsibility that would seem to await him this season with Whop Philyor gone to the NFL but Ty Fryfogle still around after an All-American season. Marshall started last season and caught 19 passes for 290 yards and a touchdown, but the Hoosiers will likely need more than that from him this year. But when Heard was asked if Marshall has embraced the responsibility of being the No. 2 wide receiver, he indicated that there was a faulty premise in the question. “I…

Before formally announcing that running back Sampson James had left his program for good, Indiana coach Tom Allen declared that he had someone to take his scholarship. Jonathan Haynes, a graduate transfer safety from Ole Miss, officially joined the program on Thursday and practiced with the Hoosiers for the first time. Haynes played for the Rebels for two years after a junior college stint at Jones College. In two seasons at Ole Miss he recorded 86 tackles including 1.0 for loss and two interceptions. “He made that decision to enter the portal and once he did, we reached out to…

It’s been made abundantly clear to Indiana’s defensive line by this point that coach Tom Allen wants more from the group than he got a year ago. That’s not to say that the IU front did a poor job necessarily. The Hoosiers led the Big Ten in both sacks and turnovers gained, which wouldn’t be possible if the IU front four hadn’t at least held its own. But to reach it’s full capacity, Allen said, the Indiana defense needs to get production up front, which means it need defensive linemen to not just engage opposing offensive linemen well enough to…

Indiana’s reasoning for wanting to play a professional Serbian basketball club in a foreign tour in the Bahamas is obvious. The Hoosiers are in desperate need of more time together. They have a new coach in Mike Woodson and a new style of play with his four-out, one-in, NBA-style, wide-open offense after four years under Archie Miller, who found himself using two post-men on offense to go with his packline defense. They lost four players to the transfer portal last season but also added three and will be integrating a fourth transfer in Parker Stewart who joined the program in…

As a sophomore, Tiawan Mullen did something no Indiana player at his position had ever done. He was named first-team All-American by the Football Writers Association, becoming the first ever Indiana cornerback to earn such an honor from any accredited organization that puts together an All-America team. Playing both cornerback and nickel, he was one of the hardest defensive players to game plan for in the Big Ten, recording 3.5 sacks and 4.5 tackles for loss while also notching three interceptions and seven pass break-ups. But Mullen knows there’s more he can get out of his game physically and mentally,…

Indiana is ranked No. 17 in the preseason USA Today AFCA Coaches’ Poll, which was released Tuesday. This means the Hoosiers will enter the season ranked in a major Top 25 for the first time since 1968, the season that followed their last Big Ten championship and Rose Bowl appearance. The Hoosiers return 17 starters on offense and defense from a team that finished 6-2 last season with a loss to Ole Miss in the Outback Bowl, but wins over Penn State, Michigan and Wisconsin. They finished last season ranked No. 12 in the Associated Press media poll, which was…

After a first weekend of fall camp in which every day seemed hotter than the next, Tom Allen was pleased to wake-up Monday morning to see rain in Bloomington’s forecast. Preseason camp is about adverse conditions and how players fight through them, and Allen doesn’t just want to see Indiana go through a lot of adversity but a variety of hard times. Playing through heat is good for conditioning, but it’s only so valuable in the Midwest once the calendar turns to October and the temperatures start to fall. But Big Ten teams can find themselves in wet conditions at…

If any returning player on Indiana’s roster had reason to see writing on the wall to tell him his role wasn’t going to be the same under the Mike Woodson regime, it was Rob Phinisee. After he re-recruited Indiana’s returning players and critically got All-American Trayce Jackson-Davis to to come back for another year, Woodson looked to the transfer portal for point guards and snagged Pittsburgh transfer Xavier Johnson. While Johnson brings with him a much higher degree of risk as a point guard than Phinisee does with 302 career turnovers to 129 in three seasons when each of them…

Deland McCullough returns to the Indiana coaching staff with a decision to make. After three seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs that included a pair of Super Bowl runs and one Lombardi Trophy, McCullough takes over an Indiana running back room that needs to find a new starter and create a new system of roles and rotations. There is talent, but there’s no one on the roster who has proven they can be a featured back in a Power 5 program. Even USC transfer Stephen Carr, who was a five-star recruit when he joined the Trojans back in 2017, was…

In most ways, Indiana’s 2020 defense was everything Tom Allen wanted it to be. Allen wants his defensive units to be difficult to game plan for, and the Hoosiers were. They caused havoc in both the offensive and defensive backfields, leading the Big Ten in sacks with 27 and interceptions with 17. But one significant negative that stood out to Allen upon review of the 2020 season was the fact that the defensive line was simply ordinary and too often left plays for the linebackers and defensive backs to make. Just 7.5 of Indiana’s 27 sacks were made by defensive…