Why Indiana football road trip to Rutgers is important after 4-0 start

BLOOMINGTON — Five weeks into the 2025 Indiana football season, in the afterglow of a nervous, physical five-point win at Iowa, Pat Coogan sat with reporters and delivered a line that would prove remarkably prescient.

“The best feeling in the world,” Coogan said, “is knowing you can get so much better, and knowing we’re not even close to the peak of maximizing our abilities and talents, and we’re 5-0.”

The same message might apply to these Hoosiers at roughly the same point in the calendar.

No. 5 Indiana travels to New Jersey for a primetime road opener Saturday night still searching — like many teams this time of year — for its best. The Hoosiers (4-0, 1-0 Big Ten) remain undefeated, even through a relative scare last weekend against Northwestern. They will fly east this weekend comfortable favorites against a Rutgers (1-3, 0-1) team that hasn’t yet beaten an FBS opponent this season.

Curt Cignetti’s team will board that flight to Piscataway in roughly the same place Coogan found them at the start of October one year ago: striving through their flaws to become a more complete, complementary team, and one prepared to realize all its undeniable potential.

A team, essentially, still in search of itself.

“We’ve got to get a lot better,” Cignetti said this week. “We’ve got to improve.”

Buy IU football tickets!

Will sold-out Rutgers create challenging environment?

Speaking during his weekly Monday news conference, Cignetti outlined the ways in which Northwestern had managed to keep the Hoosiers close and, equally, the ways Rutgers might do the same.

“I give Northwestern a lot of credit. I do think they're a good football team,” Cignetti said. “They made plays. It was a hard-fought game. If you go back and re-watch that game, it was physical and hard-fought. I give our guys credit for making the plays at the end.”

Still, Cignetti cautioned, refusing to learn from the mistakes that made that game more stressful could lead Indiana into an equally uncomfortable position this weekend in New Jersey.

He touted a night-time atmosphere for Rutgers’ homecoming, the Scarlet Knights’ planned stadium blackout, and a sell-out crowd. It remains to be seen how many of the 52,000-some-odd fans who show up will be cheering for the road team, given IU’s robust alumni presence on the East Coast.

Cignetti’s focus will be on the field, where his team is a heavy favorite.

The Hoosiers were the same before Northwestern used a first-half goal-line stand and Aidan Chiles’ second-half heroics to push Indiana all the way to the final whistle. Whether Rutgers has the same capacity or not, Cignetti will want to see the lessons learned against the Wildcats applied effectively one week later.

“Last game, positive is we were in a close game and prevailed. There is value in that,” Cignetti said. “Negative is we didn't play well. We were very inconsistent. We got to play better. We're not going to go very far playing the way we played (Friday) night.”

No need to panic yet on Indiana football

That might be his safest assumption at this point. The rest remains a work in progress.

Kelvin Sampson still won’t win many popularity contests in this part of the country. But among his best bits of coaching wisdom, one certainly applies across sports to Cignetti’s Indiana.

You don’t, Sampson would say, play February basketball in November. In other words, there’s a right time for your team to peak, and it’s not in the first half of the regular season.

It’s for that reason that, while Cignetti might stress over the ways in which his team needs to improve, he won’t panic over them.

Indiana remains incomplete to the naked eye, much less to Cignetti’s meticulous evaluation. He’s not wrong to say under other circumstances, the performance delivered against Northwestern would get the Hoosiers beat.

Yet the Hoosiers are far from peering over the cliff edge that it might have felt to some fans was rapidly approaching during the fourth quarter.

The Hoosiers still boast one of the best offense-defense balances by yards and points per game in the Big Ten. Their rushing attack remains among the league’s most explosive. Josh Hoover, who’s yet to commit a turnover, has the conference’s best passer rating four games into the season. Bryant Haines’ defense co-leads the Big Ten in tackles for loss.

What it doesn’t feel like Indiana has found yet is balance, and harmony between all those separate aspects of its collective character.

That run game, for example, remains boom-or-bust. Of Indiana’s 800 team rushing yards across the last three games, 516 have come on 25 carries.

That’s an average of 20.6 yards per carry, a remarkable number. It also leads to a much more concerning one — the Hoosiers have averaged just 2.2 yards per carry on their other 127 in that time.

“The run game sometimes ties into (run-pass options), and sometimes RPOs not thrown that can be thrown result in maybe a 2- or a 3-yard gain,” Cignetti said. “I’m never going to walk away from 270 yards rushing in a Big Ten football game. That’s pretty darn good.”

IU football to be measured by polished progress

Its coach, there, illustrates the present conflict with this team.

It is doing well, showing progress, flashing that aforementioned potential. It is also less complete than perhaps we expected, and clearly still short of its best. You don’t play December football in September, but at some point, you should feel like you’re on a clearly defined path from here to there.

That’s what Indiana seeks as it digs into its first conference road test. The Hoosiers do not need to look entirely finished and refined. They need to look better. More polished. More confident in their collective identity, and closer to the complementary, all-phases football history tells us Cignetti will lead them to find.

“We're going on the road. Still playing on a 100-yard football field, 52 yards wide. Got a lot of veterans on this team that have been there,” Cignetti said. “It's a business trip.”

One IU needs to end in the same place it found itself after five games a year ago — undefeated, eager and with plenty of room to improve.

Want more Hoosiers coverage? Sign up for IndyStar's Hoosiers newsletter. Listen to Mind Your Banners, our IU Athletics-centric podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the latest on IndyStar TV: Hoosiers.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Why Indiana football road trip to Rutgers is important after 4-0 start

Our editors independently choose our recommendations. Some content is produced with paid support from a third party, however our editorial decisions remain independent. If you buy through our links, the USA TODAY Network may earn a commission. Prices and availability may change.