IU football vs. Western Kentucky What I'm Watching: Another shootout could await Hoosiers

BLOOMINGTON – Now, the fun begins.

A 2-0 start has at least allowed IU football coach Tom Allen’s team to feel like it has put the ugliness of 2021 in the past. But with two tough nonconference games upcoming and the remainder of the Big Ten schedule around the corner, there are no places left on the schedule to hide.

What will determine success or failure Saturday afternoon against Western Kentucky? Five things I'll be watching during a quietly crucial game:

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Can Hoosiers get in position to get in position?

There’s a concept presented by Bob Knight in John Feinstein’s famous book “A Season On The Brink” I often think about around this time in any season. It’s simple, but it’s meaningful:

Get yourself in position to get in position.

We’ll get to the nuts and bolts of Saturday’s game in a minute, but I wanted to start here.

Knight’s point in the book is that to be a genuine Big Ten championship contender in 1986, Indiana needs to win a handful of key early games that will insert the Hoosiers into the title race and make them a factor when the most meaningful games arrive in mid- and late February.

Tom Allen’s program endured what it would almost certainly have described as its worst collective nightmare in 2021. Everything said or done inside the walls of the North End Zone facility since that time has been with view to moving on from that nightmare, the clearest way of doing that a return to the bowl field this winter.

I’m not convinced yet IU is a bowl-level team, certainly not off the back of the Hoosiers’ unimpressive performance against Idaho. Having said that, they’re 2-0. They needed to find a way across the first two weeks of the season, particularly against Illinois, and they did.

Now comes Western Kentucky, high-scoring and reliably feisty. Certain Group of Five programs have an undeniable DNA, no matter who’s in charge, and the Hilltoppers — throw it lots, score it lots, try to make hay from chaos on defense — fit that description.

Vegas likes Indiana as the early favorite, while Bill Connelly’s SP+ favors Western Kentucky by less than a touchdown. This is the sort of game the Hoosiers, if they are to even threaten a return to the postseason in 2022, can only afford to win. This is the last of the games needed to put them in position to be in position to try and make a genuine bowl push.

Ball security

The Hilltoppers have made their name across successive coaching regimes as a program unafraid to throw the ball and unbothered by shootouts. But the number that jumps furthest off the page through their first two games — a Week 0 win against Austin Peay and a Week 1 thrashing of Hawaii, before a bye last weekend — comes from the other side of the ball.

Through their first two games, the Hilltoppers have produced an eye-popping 10 turnovers. Only Nevada has more, and Western Kentucky is tied with the Wolf Pack for the national lead in interceptions (7).

That’s not a glitch, but the system. Western Kentucky finished tied for third nationally in turnovers gained last season as well, and the Hilltoppers’ 21 team interceptions were second only to Iowa in 2021.

The wealth gets spread too. In 2021, 13 Western Kentucky players grabbed at least one pick. Already this season, five different Hilltoppers have at least one interception, a suggestion that this is system as much as it is skill.

Connor Bazelak has been fairly secure with the ball through his first two games as IU’s starter, with just two interceptions (one on a tipped ball), one sack and no fumbles. That security will be tested Saturday.

Causing havoc

When you consider Western Kentucky posted 36 team sacks in addition to all those turnovers in 2021, and then you realize the Hilltoppers already have seven sacks to go with their seven picks through two games this year, it reinforces the idea that scheme matters as much as talent in Bowling Green.

Yes, the faces have changed. Last season’s sack leader, DeAngelo Malone, is an Atlanta Falcon now, and both of last season’s co-leaders in interceptions, Omari Alexander and Beanie Bishop, have moved on.

That hasn’t slowed Western Kentucky’s production of havoc plays, which again lends credence to the idea that this is as much the scheme working as the players performing.

And it doesn’t stop with sacks or picks. The Hilltoppers have also posted 16 tackles for loss across their first two games, and 10 quarterback hurries. Seven different players have been credited with at least one of the latter already this season.

Take those numbers for what they are when you consider the competition. Austin Peay is an FCS program (albeit one that’s won its two games since losing to Western Kentucky by a combined score of 104-0). Hawaii is 0-3 and at the start of a rebuild.

But Indiana will need no reminder of how dangerous Western Kentucky can be. One of the Hoosiers’ two wins last season came in Bowling Green but with substantial stress, as IU was pushed to its limit before finishing a 33-31 victory.

The Hilltoppers may allow some yards, and even some points. But they also know how to disrupt early and often.

IU against the pass

It should come as no surprise that Western Kentucky wants to throw the ball. Austin Peay actually outgained the Hilltoppers on the ground in that Week 0 meeting, and Western Kentucky’s transfer quarterback, Austin Reed, has already thrown for 551 yards and seven touchdowns across his team’s first two games.

The Hilltoppers may not be quite the force they were last season, when Zach Kittley and Bailey Zappe collaborated on the nation’s most-prolific passing offense. Zappe is in the NFL now, while Kittley is calling plays at Texas Tech, but Western Kentucky doubled down on his system when it replaced Kittley with co-coordinators Ben Arbuckle and Josh Crawford, both of whom were on staff last season.

Both were coaching at the high school level as recently as 2020, but they’ve inherited — and, per early returns, maintained — a high-level passing offense in Bowling Green.

That probably won’t scare Indiana. Already this season, the Hoosiers have six sacks and 14 tackles for loss as a team. They didn’t produce a turnover against Idaho, much to Allen’s chagrin, but they turned Illinois over four times, which feels more representative of the defense’s level on its good days.

With Allen calling plays again, IU looks more and more like the defense that helped the Hoosiers reach three bowls in five seasons from 2016-20: versatile, adaptable, disruptive, play-making. Many of Indiana’s best and most-experienced players on that side of the ball are best in pass defense, whether rushing the quarterback or in coverage.

And if you could get Allen in a completely candid moment, last season’s win at Western Kentucky — when the Hoosiers raced out to a 14-0 lead and still wound up hanging on by their fingers late in the fourth quarter as Zappe and Co. picked them apart through the air — might be one of the performances he had most in mind when he said this offseason his decision to take the defense over again was based on his belief it had strayed too far from his principles.

Reed is not Zappe, and this Western Kentucky offense may not be quite what it was a season ago. But it’s still almost certainly going to be a major challenge for IU’s pass defense, front to back, and perhaps our best barometer yet of how far back toward being a Tom Allen defense this unit has moved in the past nine months.

“Unfazed Baze”

That’s what starting tight end AJ Barner said Saturday he calls Bazelak, the Missouri transfer who won Indiana’s No. 1 quarterback job in the offseason.

It’s been a mixed bag of a first two weeks on the job for a player offensive coordinator Walt Bell also describes as virtually unflappable.

On the one hand, Bazelak has started slowly in both games, 4-of-11 against Illinois and 6-of-17 against Idaho. He admitted sometimes he needs to find his timing and rhythm as a quarterback more quickly, and he seemed particularly effected by the rain against the Vandals last Saturday.

On the other, he eventually passed for 330 yards and a touchdown in his debut against the Illini. After that sluggish beginning last weekend, he was a hyperefficient 10-of-12 for 148 yards and two touchdowns in a commanding third quarter against Idaho. He’s building a clear rapport with players like Barner, Cam Camper and D.J. Matthews, he’s taken just one sack across IU’s first two games and he seems to generally have his teammates’ implicit trust. He looked every bit Barner’s nickname leading the game-winning drive late against Illinois.

Now, he prepares for an opponent that, on paper anyway, looks more capable of testing that poise than Indiana’s first two. Can Bazelak be as safe with the ball? Can he stay as clean in the pocket, and keep his nerve when split-second decisions are required? In a game that could very well mimic the track meet these two teams got into last season, is he prepared to be third-quarter-against-Idaho or last-drive-against-Illinois Connor Bazelak for the best part of 60 minutes? Because that’s what will be required.

In many ways, this is Bazelak’s biggest test so far. Should he pass, and IU win, then next weekend’s trip to Cincinnati would replace it, and then the trip to Nebraska, and so on. Such is the life of a quarterback.

Indiana now has the opportunity to put itself in position to get in position. It needs Connor Bazelak to lead the way.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana Hoosiers football vs. Western Kentucky preview: What to watch