All signs point to a career-best season loading for Indiana quarterback Josh Hoover.
Why’s that?
As we outlined earlier this week, that is exactly what has happened for each of IU football coach Curt Cignetti’s last six (at least) signal callers at James Madison and Indiana. The improvement for those six quarterbacks was dramatic, and the results postseason award worthy.
Dramatic improvement is an exciting proposition for Hoover, who arrived in Bloomington as college football’s active career leader passing yards with 9,629. He’s second in active passing touchdowns with 71 — the exact same career total of Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza.
But Hoover does arrive with a game in need of improvement in some areas, especially ball security. As his former head coach seemed eager to point out while missing the irony, he has turned the ball over 42 times in 31 career starts.
Here’s an overview of how Cignetti’s last six quarterbacks have improved under his watch, from the year before he had them to the first year with them:
- Completion percentage improved 3.4 percentage points
- Passing yards per game improved by 32 yards
- Touchdowns per game improved by 1.24
- Interceptions per game decreased by .33
- Touchdown to interception ratio improved from an average of 1.6 to 6.0
- Quarterback rating improved from an average of 138 to 172.8
- PFF grade improved from an average of 72.3 to 89.1
So what does all of this mean for Hoover?
Of course Cignetti would say it means nothing. Hoover has to prove it on the field, he’d accurately tell us. And Hoover would likely echo that sentiment.
But we don’t have to be quite so cautious with our words.
For the baseline, last season Hoover completed 65.9% of his passes for 3,472 yards, with 29 touchdowns and 13 interceptions. He had passer rating of 153.4 and a PFF grade of 76.8.
How should those numbers improve under Cignetti? Let’s base it on a 12-game season since that’s how many games Hoover played in 2025. So in essence, this is an estimation of where Hoover’s passing numbers might stand at the end of the regular season.
Hoover’s completion percentage would rise to 69.3%, which would be a career-best and just a tick under Kurtis Rourke’s 69.4% in 2024.
His passing yards would increase to 321 per game and 3,856 for the season just based on the typical improvement seen by Cignetti’s quarterbacks. But Hoover came from a pass-heavy offense at TCU, so this might be a case where his yards don’t change dramatically, or even decline at Indiana where the team runs that ball effectively, and often has big leads. After all, Mendoza and Kurtis Rourke averaged 221 and 253 yards per game in 2025 and 2024, respectively. So let’s peg Hoover at Rourke’s mark of 253 per game.
Similarly for touchdowns, Hoover is unlikely to add a full 15 touchdowns to his 2025 total as the averages suggest he might. That number might hold around 29 or increase slightly. Mendoza had 32 touchdown passes through 12 games, and Rourke had 27, so we’ll keep Hoover at 29.
Because he’ll likely be passing less, it’s also possible Hoover will see a higher than expected improvement in interceptions. But he does have more of a tendency to throw picks than Rourke or Mendoza before they arrived at IU, as did Cignetti’s last shorter quarterback Jordan McCloud. So perhaps the .33 per game improvement, or four less on a 12 game season is appropriate. Let’s call it eight interceptions in 2026 for Hoover.
Based on these projections, Hoover’s passer rating would improve by more than 20 points to around 174, a mark more than 20 points better than any of his three prior seasons. We won’t pretend to know with any degree of precision how PFF computes its grades, but you could expect a similar percentage improvement for that measure that puts him in the high 80s.
2026 Josh Hoover 12-game regular season projection: 69.3% completion percentage, 3,036 yards, 29 touchdowns, 8 interceptions, 174 QB rating.
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