Column: Struggling defense could doom Hoosiers against Big Ten competition

As deadly as the IU offense has been through three games, it is not nearly lethal enough to offset what has been a fragile Hoosiers’ defense.

If IU misses tackles and blows coverage assignments like it did in a 35-20 win against Akron on Saturday, the Hoosiers will give up 40 points per game during the Big Ten season, and they might struggle to win a conference game.

(Note: IU was playing without defensive captain Tyler Replogle, who missed the game with a concussion. With Replogle, who is probably the team’s surest tackler, the Hoosiers are undoubtedly a better team than they are without him.)

Stats rarely tell the whole story, but in this case, they tell most of it — at least in the rushing department.

The IU defense allowed 160 yards rushing to a team that came in averaging only 115.3 per game, good for 99th-best in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Those numbers are slanted in the Zips’ direction because of a 224-yard performance against Gardner-Webb. In its other two games against Syracuse and Kentucky, Akron rushed for only 61 yards per game.

The Hoosiers let one of the nation’s worst ground attacks eat them up on multiple occurrences. Are they ready for Michigan and Denard Robinson, the nation’s leading rusher?

“We weren’t wrapping up. We were going for the big hit, and they were just bouncing off of it and getting extra yards,” said senior safety Mitchell Evans.

Had the Zips eliminated a couple of mistakes — mainly dropped passes — this could have been a scary game for IU. Akron wide receiver Jeremy LaFrance beat the Hoosiers’ coverage on a fourth-and-one play midway through the fourth quarter and had a clear path to the end zone, but the ball fell right through his hands.

If he makes that catch, it’s 35-27 with plenty of time left for a comeback. A Big Ten receiver pulls that ball down 10 times out of 10. The Hoosiers won’t be so lucky when they start playing legitimate competition next week.

“Our offense was doing a great job, and I think if our defense really needed to, we could come up big,” Evans said. “They had a couple of drops that we saw on film. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than skilled.”

It’d be great to believe the Hoosiers can just flip the switch on defense if they need a big stop like Evans said. At this point in the season, however, they haven’t shown us they can do that.

In a lot of ways, the Hoosiers are starting to resemble the Indianapolis Colts of a few years ago: They put up big offensive numbers, primarily in the passing game, and struggled to stop their opponents from scoring.

The thing about those Colts’ defenses was that they bent but didn’t break.

They stayed off the field enough to give Peyton Manning and the offense a chance to win the game.

I don’t think this IU team, as it looks right now, can hold Big Ten clubs to field goals instead of touchdowns and give senior quarterback Ben Chappell the same opportunity.

After the game, IU coach Bill Lynch called Akron “a good offensive football team.”

I can’t help but wonder what he’s going to say about the Wolverines a week from now.

The Hoosiers have plenty of room to improve on the defensive side of the ball. They had better do so in a hurry because Robinson is lurking.

E-mail: jmalbers@indiana.edu