Lynch discusses Doss, WKU game

Doss practices; healthy for game
Preseason All-Big Ten selection and junior wide receiver Tandon Doss returned to full speed for practice Monday after missing more than a week.

Doss missed the Towson game on Sept. 2 after suffering a groin injury and hasn’t been involved with the team workouts as a result.

“We made a conscious decision all the way back to the day he injured himself,” IU coach Bill Lynch said. “We took a look at it, and the medical advice was that if we could just shut him down, let it heal, then hopefully he would be ready to go.”

Doss led the Hoosiers in receiving a year ago with 77 catches for 962 yards.

Perez out for season
Freshman running back Matt Perez has a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and faces season-ending surgery, Lynch said Monday.

“That was an unfortunate one,” Lynch said during his weekly press conference at Memorial Stadium. “Really, when you go back and look at it, it was non-contact. When he made the cut, that was it.”

Perez, from Main South High School in Park Ridge, Ill., was hurt running with the ball during a non-tackling scrimmage drill at practice Sept. 7.

He will have surgery to repair the torn ligament sometime this or next week when the swelling subsides, Lynch said.

Perez was used quite often in practice this season, but he was most likely to be redshirted and didn’t play in the season opener against Towson.

A running back and linebacker in high school, Perez was ESPNChicago.com’s 2009 Player of the Year.

WKU running back focus for IU defense
The Hoosiers travel to Bowling Green, Ky. Saturday to face Western Kentucky for the second game of the season.

The Hilltoppers have faced a tough early schedule that included playing at Nebraska and at in-state foe Kentucky. WKU dropped both contests by a combined 112-38 score, but the team had a bright spot in the backfield.

Junior running back Bobby Rainey rushed for 155 yards on 30 carries against the Cornhuskers before bursting to a 184-yard performance Saturday night
against Kentucky.

“Those aren’t inflated numbers when you do that against those kind of defenses,” Lynch said of Rainey’s rushing numbers, good for fourth best in the nation.

Lynch said the Hoosiers started to focus in on WKU’s offensive and defensive schemes on Saturday — meaning they are about two days ahead of the normal game-week schedule.

Replogle, Towson MVP?
Lynch was asked about what he and his staff learned from the season opener against Towson, and they narrowed down their defensive problems to two things: pursuit angles and senior linebacker Tyler Replogle.

The Replogle problem, as Lynch cracked, isn’t something that can be fixed. Instead, they might be telling Replogle to keep up the effort.

“It was Tyler Replogle going 100 miles per hour, and he ran over Mitchell Evans who had the guy man-to-man,” Lynch said of the play that resulted in Towson’s second touchdown.

On the play, Replogle made a move to follow a pass to Towson wide out Hakeem Moore. In doing so, he collided with senior safety Evans who was covering Moore.
The result was both players being taken out of the play and Moore finding a seam up the middle of the field to score on a 64-yard touchdown pass.

“Those are correctable things,” Lynch said.