BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – For a second straight week, Indiana’s defense put together a near-perfect performance.

The offense may get more of the plaudits after Friday’s 77-3 win over Western Illinois because it set the program’s all-time single-game scoring and total yardage (701) records. But including last week’s 31-7 win over Florida International, Indiana’s defense has kept pace with its counterpart.

Defensive coordinator Bryant Haines’ unit allowed just 182 total yards and 3.1 yards per play against FIU, and it was even more stifling on Friday night, giving up 121 total yards and 2.3 yards per play to Western Illinois. 

But in both games, the defense’s lone letdown came in the same moment. Indiana allowed a 12-play, 75-yard touchdown drive against FIU, which concluded with just 52 seconds left in the first half. On Friday, Western Illinois’ drove 69 yards across 12 plays and settled for a field goal with 30 seconds left in the first half.

Despite the lopsided scores in both games, those end-of-half drives left something to be desired.

“That was pretty bad, I’ll be completely honest,” Indiana defensive end Mikail Kamara said Friday. “That was pretty bad. The same thing happened last week, so we gotta end the halves a lot better. That’s something we’re definitely going to be focusing on, especially that middle eight. That’s something we gotta do better going forward.”

The reason behind those drives?

“Maybe just a little bit of complacency,” Kamara said. “Guys just kind of settling down, getting ready for halftime instead of keeping their foot on the pedal.”

And the solution?

“Communicating whenever we see some of the guys get a little too happy, not happy, but when they get a little too fat and happy, we just gotta bring ‘em down a little bit,” Kamara said. “But little things like this, them scoring at halftime, things like that should humble us down.”

Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said postgame there were a few defensive mistakes and substitutions during Western Illinois’ scoring drive, though he didn’t want to give a full evaluation until watching the film. But in general, he knows from 14 years of head coaching that the beginning and end of halves are crucial to sustained success.

“We’ve been starting the third quarter well, but we haven’t finished the half well,” Cignetti said. “We’ve been starting the game well and finishing the game well too. There’s a lot more positives, but just like 98 percent of the teams in the country, we have a couple things to work on and improve on.”

Outside of those two drives, Indiana’s defense has mimicked what made James Madison successful in 2023. Kamara and five other first-year Hoosiers played on that James Madison defense, which led the nation in tackles for loss and run defense. 

Indiana totaled four sacks and eight tackles for loss against FIU, followed by six sacks and eight tackles for loss against Western Illinois. Neither team was able to run the ball, with FIU gaining 53 yards on 30 carries and Western Illinois rushing for just 12 yards on 26 attempts. 

Kamara said nothing is really new from last season for him, it’s just a matter of proving it at the Big Ten level. That begins next week at UCLA, and he’s confident defensive success in the first two games will carry over.

“We feel good, but teams like [Western Illinois], we gotta keep a foot on their jugular,” Kamara said. “That’s what good teams do, and that’s how we view ourselves as. That’s something – obviously a win’s a win and it’s hard to win in college football, but this is something that should not happen.”

“I don’t know what you guys think of our defense right now, but I expect us to blow all that out the water. I expect us to really show everyone what this defense is about.”

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Each and every Saturday, WISH-TV highlights a local company together with our partners at Indiana Grown.

This week, Kristen Gilkison, owner and chief executive officer of Timbar, joined News 8 at Daybreak.

Timbar is a new range of protein bars that are made with plant-based protein and natural sweeteners. The protein bars are also completely free of gluten, eggs, dairy, whey, and other artificial preservatives and ingredients.

Gilkison says her inspiration for the protein bars came after she was diagnosed with celiac disease.

“I am a physician assistant and have always been passionate about preventative medicine,” she said. “And several years ago, I was diagnosed with celiac disease and some other food allergies. That inspired me to get in the kitchen.”

She says that as a busy working professional, she needed healthy options but struggled to find them.

“Most protein bars on the market weren’t really that healthy. They had a lot of artificial ingredients, sweeteners, were high in sugar, or just didn’t taste good. So, I got to work creating a protein bar that was well-balanced, healthy, free of most of the major allergens and that tasted great,” Gilkison said.

Timbar recently launched a chocolate peanut butter-flavored bar, and Gilkison says they plan to launch more this year.

The protein bars can be purchased on Timbar’s website, Amazon, or Market Wagon. They will also be available at the Indiana Grown Marketplace at the Hamilton County Fairgrounds, which runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 14.

Watch the full video above to learn more.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – On Wednesday, I wrote about why Indiana plays games against FCS competition and why it’s beneficial to the bottom line for the FCS schools.

For Indiana? It’s the path of least resistance to reach bowl eligibility to play a FCS team. Not every FCS team is created equally, but you don’t schedule this game to lose it when it’s agreed to. In the case of Western Illinois, a team that had lost 25 games in a row going into Friday’s game? The path of least resistance is akin to a six-lane interstate.

For the Hoosiers, it’s a chance to play a lot of players without much worry about that pesky competitive part of the game getting in the way.

For Western Illinois? Yes, it’s a chance to test yourself against a team far better than what you’ll see in the Ohio Valley-Big South Conference. But the biggest thing for Western Illinois is the $450,000 check they take with them back to Macomb, Ill.

Those are the practical reasons for these games from the point of view of the teams, a transactional exercise that also fills a Big Ten Network window.

So what do the fans get out of it? For Indiana fans, they got the satisfaction of a dominant victory. And they don’t come any easier than the 77-3 rout the Hoosiers administered to the Leathernecks on Friday.

And that’s about it. Entertainment value? Minimal once you realize how poor the opponent is and how easy it was to pile those points up. Stakes? Almost non-existent.

Let’s be honest. These games stink. You know it when you see it on the schedule years in advance. You know it when game-week approaches and you get to know the tale of the tape. You know it when you walk towards the stadium, pondering in your mind how early the competitive phase of the game will cease.

This one was much worse than most. You can say, without hyperbole, that Western Illinois was the worst opponent Indiana has ever faced. The 77 points scored are an Indiana school record, breaking the 76-point record that had stood since 1901. The Hoosiers just missed their all-time victory margin (also 76) and set their all-time record for total yardage at 701.

It’s great that Indiana took care of business in the dominant manner it did, you’d worry if it didn’t, but it’s empty calories in the long view. The Hoosiers won’t see a team this bad for the rest of the season and maybe ever.

Meanwhile, the fans get the short end of the stick. There’s very little in it for them to sustain interest, much less justify the cost for the ticket.

The game was over before the first quarter ended with Indiana ahead 28-0. At one point, Indiana had a 21-0 edge in first downs. They did have a 415-to-98 edge in total offense at halftime. Indiana set an all-time total offense record at 701, so I suppose Indiana fans who were there can say they witnessed it, but what satisfaction comes from it when the opponent is so weak?

(I don’t want to go down an asterisk wormhole, but the previous record was 692 set against Purdue in 2013. That’s against a peer school. It’s almost as if the record book should differentiate between Big Ten games and nonconference games.)

All of the above is what made Curt Cignetti’s comments on the crowd a tad ill-timed last week. To be fair to Cignetti, when he made the remark about fans leaving early, he wasn’t doing it (necessarily) to drum up a sellout for Western Illinois. It was purely an honest reaction in the moment.

Playing Western Illinois also isn’t Cignetti’s fault. He didn’t schedule the game. He spoke to that after the game.

“The schedule is what it is. We’ll enjoy this one and think about the next one tomorrow or Sunday,” Cignetti said.

However, since the Western Illinois contest was next after he said something about the crowd? Naturally, it was going to be viewed as a bit of an acid test, especially after Cignetti addressed the topic again on his radio show.

Games between FCS and FBS games should never be viewed as any kind of acid test for anything. Indiana gets its win for bowl eligibility and Western Illinois gets its guarantee. That’s all that came of it.

Based on what Cignetti said about the fans, I can imagine some argued in their own heads whether they should heed his plea from the previous game and stick it out to the end?

I can also imagine, and could see with my own eyes, that it wasn’t a very long internal debate. Indiana fans did what almost any other fanbase would do – they found something more interesting to occupy their time. For the second straight week, fans bolted for the exits at halftime.

I can’t blame them one bit. What little skin was in this game to begin with had long dissipated.

At some point, a game can’t just be a game for the sake of it. Fan support can’t just exist in a vacuum. There has to be something at stake, something to hold interest. Why should fans of any school stick around just for the sake of doing it? Whatever passion the game could have produced was exhausted in the first quarter.

As Cignetti has said, college football is entertainment. The entertainment phase of this game was over long before the sun set on Memorial Stadium. After that? It was just an exercise in piling up statistics.

I much preferred it when power conference teams played one or maybe two tune-ups per season and then played a peer in their other nonconference game.

Indiana has moved away from that model, most recently by dropping Louisville, and perhaps history has taught them it’s necessary to beat up on tomato cans to get a bowl bid at the end of the rainbow.

I understand it and decry it all at once. Fans want quality matchups, so I can’t blame them one bit for ignoring mismatches like this even if it does make the path to a bowl that much easier.

The teams concoct reasons or create the economic conditions to make these games matter.

Fans know better. They’ll jump on-board when there’s something in it for them. A huge win over a Big Ten team would feel fantastic.

A 74-point win over a very bad FCS team? Outside of the acknowledgement of the domination of an inferior opponent? It doesn’t feel like much at all.