IU Football Coach: The Bye Week Was Productive for Us

Source: Indiana University Athletics

BLOOMINGTON, Ind.–The 2-3 Indiana Hoosier football team is coming off a bye week that their Head Coach Tom Allen called “productive.” They face 2nd ranked Michigan this Saturday.

“I’m encouraged by our guys’ mindset. Our two goals during the bye week were to get healthy and get better,” said Allen in a news conference on Monday.

Allen says his coaches spent several days recruiting and the players rested their bodies and decompressed after losing to Maryland 44-17 on September 30.

“The health part of it is guys recovering and getting some injured guys back. We’ve had a lot of guys who have played a lot of snaps,” said Allen.

They’ll be facing a Michigan team that is scoring 37 points per game and allowing only 7 points per game defensively. Indiana is scoring 20 and allowing 24.

“Michigan is obviously playing as well as anyone in the country right now and playing with a lot of confidence,” said Allen.

Allen says his team needs to do better in the red zone and finish drives offensively, but he believes his offensive coordinator Rod Carey can help make that happen. Carey replaced Walt Bell as offensive coordinator last week. He also talked about why Carey has been named the full-time offensive coordinator as opposed to just having the interim tag.

“There’s continuity piece. There’s an understanding of the philosophy of what you want to do with that area and the trust factors you mentioned. And just feel like that those are things that we’re looking for, and obviously with the flexibility and the ability to move forward and make some good, positive changes to our offense. So I just feel like we’re aligned in the things we want to align in.

And obviously needed a new voice in that room and that’s the change we made. And I just, having spent enough time with him here the last two years working with him closely, especially a year ago when I was calling the defense and he was in there with us, and you kind of get to the mind of a coach and how he thinks and how he sees the game and evaluates things and communicates with a group of individuals, both players and coaches, especially the coach piece in that role.

And obviously last year had a chance to see him work with our offensive line. So had a chance to see him physically coach, because as a QC you can’t do that, but as an on-field position, we replaced (indiscernible) the O line spot last year, got a chance to see him in front of the room and run the meetings and just see that group respond to him.

So those were variables that kind of played into this decision as well. So just understanding the big picture of recruiting and what that means for guys. And understanding what, to give him a clear picture of the direction we’re going in the future I think is important as well.

So just to me it was the right decision to be able to create that decision to make that change and to go that direction. So that’s what we’re going to do together. Because there’s such a rapid flow from the season into the portal window as it opens and just how it affects recruiting and affects your current roster and your future roster, those different things. There’s a lot of different variables that goes into that,” said Allen.

Michigan is coming off a 52-10 win over Minnesota. They lead the all-time series against Indiana 61-10. Kickoff on Saturday is at noon eastern.