LIVE BLOG: Follow Indiana’s Football Game Against Western Illinois

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Welcome to the live blog for Indiana’s opening game of the season against Florida International. Kickoff is at 7 p.m. ET.

Game two of the Curt Cignetti features a dreaded FBS vs. FCS contest. Fans of the FBS schools really don’t like these games and I don’t blame them. The only skin in the game is getting a win towards bowl eligibility.

We’ll see what we see from Indiana tonight. I expect a relatively vanilla approach. Cignetti won’t want to put too much on film for UCLA to see for the Big Ten opener next Saturday.

Pregame – Indiana injuries today submitted to the Big Ten for the availability report, all players listed as out: WR Donaven McCulley, CB Jah Jah Boyd, WR E.J. Williams Jr. and TE Brody Kosin. Nothing unexpected and it’s good that RB Kaelon Black is absent from the list.

• Students are starting to fill in a bit now as the pre-game clock hits the 15-minute mark. You can see a large throng of students walking down 17th Street from the press box. Kind of what you’d expect. We’ll see how the rest of the stadium fills out.

• I’ve been to Western Illinois for football many times. Hanson Field is a very quaint stadium. Sort of inside a natural bowl of sorts. It has a good atmosphere. Difficult place to drive to from any direction other than due north, though. Macomb, Ill. is a nice town, but you bank a lot of two-lane highway time to get there.

• Security is very optimistically placed at the top of the student section on the east side of the stadium. With 23 minutes to kickoff? Still plenty of student seats available below the tunnels. The rest of the stadium? Wide open spaces. Not a surprise to me … but I’m not the one who pointed out the habits of the crowd either.

• Fashion report. Indiana in its same default red jerseys, white paints with the regular IU helmet. Western Illinois appears to be in all white.

• It’s overcast at Memorial Stadium with a steady breeze coming from the north. Temperatures have been dropping all day and it should be cool for the majority of the game.

• The two-hour acid test of driving into the parking lot to gauge the crowd? It’s unscientific, but let’s just say I parked about as close to the stadium as my Gate 11 pass allowed me to. Tailgaters were around, but thin on the ground. Now, it’s a Friday game versus a Saturday game and that makes a huge difference, but I just hope Curt Cignetti has appropriately calibrated his expectations of what the crowd will be. It’s just not going to happen in the span of a game or two to change habits that have been ingrained in Indiana football fans for generations.

• Other Big Ten games this weekend: Northwestern hosts Duke at 9 p.m. ET tonight. I happened to be in Chicago earlier this week, and while I was there, I checked out Northwestern’s temporary stadium on Lake Michigan. Interesting joint.

On Saturday, the big game is No. 3 Texas at No. 10 Michigan and there is one Big Ten conference game as Maryland hosts Michigan State. Other games: Bowling Green at No. 8 Penn State; Rhode Island at Minnesota; Akron at Rutgers; Iowa State at No. 21 Iowa; South Dakota at Wisconsin; Eastern Michigan at Washington; No. 19 Kansas at Illinois; Colorado at Nebraska; Western Michigan at No. 2 Ohio State; Boise State at Oregon and Utah State at No. 13 USC.