With No. 22 Indiana football slated to face Indiana State University at 6:30 p.m. Friday inside Memorial Stadium in Bloomington, head coach Curt Cignetti’s weekly radio show was bumped up a day to Wednesday.
Cignetti joined play-by-play announcer Don Fischer on “Inside IU Football” at Hoosier Hank’s in Bloomington.
Indiana offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan joined the show after Cignetti, marking the second consecutive week the Hoosiers’ coordinators have spoken as defensive coordinator Bryant Haines did so last week.
Cignetti and Shanahan hit on several topics throughout the show:
About Indiana State
Led by ninth-year head coach Curt Mallory — the son of the late beloved Bill Mallory, who coached Indiana for 13 years — the Sycamores enter the contest at 2-0 after defeating Division II McKendree University and Eastern Illinois University.
“I see a really well-coached team,” Cignetti said. “Defensively, they’ve got some really good players. They’re tied in. Offensively, they’re very balanced.”
Indiana State redshirt sophomore quarterback Elijah Owens suffered a collarbone injury in the Week 2 victory over Eastern Illinois. Mallory said during his press conference Monday that he expects to have Owens back in the fold later this season.
Redshirt junior Keegan Patterson will slot into the starting role Friday against the Hoosiers. He entered the contest in relief of Owens, going 11 for 17 with 111 yards passing and a pair of touchdowns.
“They’ve got some nice skill guys,” Cignetti said. “They do a good job coaching. They're going to come in here and be excited about playing.”
The Hoosiers will learn a lot about themselves Friday
Indiana has a 99% chance of victory, according to ESPN, and is favored by 48.5 points to defeat Indiana State. Still, Cignetti said he wants to see his squad play a “clean” game against the Sycamores.
The second-year Hoosiers head coach told his team Monday that they’re going to learn about their maturity level.
“And we got a lot of new guys,” Cignetti said. “And we got people that need to learn how to do things like championship programs do things day in and day out.”
Cignetti said he and his staff have to coach the little things with the team, explaining it’s different than the 2024 squad. With 24 transfers joining the program in the offseason, several transferred from schools without a strong football program, so “they don’t know they don’t know sometimes.”
“A lot of them are responding and getting better,” Cignetti said, “but there’s a couple of them we got to find a way to reach.”
Every team is different, however. Last season, there were 13 players who followed Cignetti to Indiana from James Madison University. This season, just seven of those players remain. Exactly half of last season’s starters returned for 2025.
There are several aspects in which Cignetti holds his players to a certain standard.
“It’s how we practice,” he said. “It’s meeting attitude. It’s consistency and performance at practice. It’s being locked in when you’re not in there. ...When you’re not in there, I don’t want to turn around and see three guys having a BS session. It's not a social event, you know what I'm saying? But we’re getting there. We’re getting there.”
Some transfers, including sixth-year senior tight end Riley Nowakowski and redshirt senior center Pat Coogan, Cignetti said, understand the standard.
Other new additions to the program are still learning.
“But that’s why they call us coach, ‘cause we got to get them there,” Cignetti said. “I’m happy with the progress between Week 1 and Week 2 ... in terms of the score. I’m happy that we made improvement, but the performance was not clean.”
Player leadership
The Hoosiers are a veteran team. They have 29 players in their last season of eligibility — tied for the third most in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
Naturally, there’s a “good core group” of leaders with more emerging, Cignetti said. However, he doesn’t talk to his squad a lot about leadership. Instead, he focuses on preaching standards, expectations and accountability.
“Leading with your mouth is nothing,” Cignetti said. “That means nothing. You lead by example by what you do every day. How you do something is how you do everything.”
How the short week impacts the Hoosiers
Former Indiana head coach Tom Allen believed Friday night belongs to high school football games.
Cignetti is far from the same. He said he likes high school football on Friday nights, but he loves college football.
“Hey, you tell me when we’re kicking off and we’ll have them ready,” he said.
With playing Friday instead of Saturday, the Hoosiers have one less day of preparation. The coaching staff kept Monday the same as a typical week, but Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday's practices were shortened. Cignetti wants his squad rested.
The only difference, Cignetti said, is the Hoosiers will have a team meeting around noon Friday.
“It’s worked out well in the past,” he said.
Louis Moore
Sixth-year senior defensive back Louis Moore is now eligible for Indiana's next two games against Indiana State and No. 9 Illinois after he reached a temporary agreement with the NCAA. His temporary restraining order, which allowed him to play the first two games of the season, was previously slated to expire.
Cignetti said he’s “glad” the Hoosiers have Moore for two more weeks because they are “very thin” at safety.
Still, Cignetti described Moore as “one of those guys that’s got to get better.”
“He’s got talent,” Cignetti said. “He’s played a lot of football. He’s got to practice better. He’s got to prepare better. He’s got to play with more urgency. ‘Cause those things all show up on tape. I’m not real happy with the safety position after last game, I think you know that.”
Moore has notched a pair of interceptions, two tackles for loss and 14 total tackles through two games. But after Moore’s takeaway against Kennesaw State University, Cignetti wasn’t thrilled.
“Should have taken the ball down the sideline like he’s taught instead of going straight ahead and getting tackled and then running in the endzone, look at me,” Cignetti said. “I don’t like that stuff.”
Fernando and Alberto Mendoza
Against Kennesaw State on Sept. 6, redshirt junior Fernando Mendoza and redshirt freshman Alberto Mendoza became the first pair of brothers on the same team to throw a touchdown pass in the same game since 2015.
Fernando finished the contest 18 for 25 for 245 yards passing and four touchdowns. Alberto went 3 for 3 for 35 yards and a touchdown.
“They’re always kind of bantering back and forth, talking some smack at times, giving each other a little jab here and there,” Shanahan said. “They’re fun to be around and they both love football. They work at it and I think that’s rubbed off on a lot of other guys on the team too.”
Throughout the week in the lead-up to the Hoosiers’ contests, Shanahan said the duo strives to one-up each other. But they’re always together.
“When you see one, you usually see the other,” Shanahan said, “and there’s a couple other guys that run around with them too that you usually run into.”
Friday will likely serve as Alberto’s final opportunity to get meaningful in-game reps this season as Indiana wraps up its nonconference slate.
Follow reporters Dalton James (@DaltonMJames and jamesdm@iu.edu) and Conor Banks (@Conorbanks06 and conbanks@iu.edu) and columnist Quinn Richards (@Quinn_richa and qmrichar@iu.edu) for updates throughout the Indiana football season.
