LAS VEGAS — “You ever hear of Slippery Rock?”
Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti had a smirk on his face when he posed the question to reporters at Big Ten media days Tuesday. He took a brief stroll down memory lane while speaking to reporters about his team’s 27-17 loss to Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff.
IU-Pennsylvania’s old rival factored into the discussion as a cautionary tale of sorts for Hoosiers players still haunted by their early postseason exit.
“We lost a really tough game my first year as head coach to Slippery Rock (in 2011),” Cignetti said. “I just couldn’t let it go; couldn’t let it go. It hurt us the next couple of weeks, it’s over, you file the lessons away and you grow from it.”
Indiana’s veteran leaders still view the loss as a missed opportunity, but found a way during the offseason to turn that pain into something more constructive.
IU football relives a ‘d—’ moment rewatching CFP loss to Notre Dame
Indiana wide receiver Elijah Sarratt couldn’t initially stomach watching a replay of the game. He finally relented in hopes of learning from the loss a few weeks into the offseason, but it still wasn’t easy to relive the offense’s various miscues.
“It’s a d— moment,” Sarratt said in an interview with The Herald-Times. “What if I could have done that better? I take it to heart; it’s a real motivation factory. I’m thinking about that stuff in my workouts like when I’m tired. If you do this, it’s going to pay off the next time.”
Mikail Kamara started watching the Notre Dame game on the bus ride home and frequently revisited it throughout the offseason.
He gets restless after games until he watches the film, win or lose. He’s developed a routine to put the tape on once he gets back home from the facility (or a road trip) and watch it the entire way through before going to bed.
“I just had to see it,” Kamara said. “I might turn it on once a week, watching the little things I could have done a little bit better. I just like to see what I missed in these games, whether it’s schematically or technique, that I can be more dominant in those positions going forward.”
Aiden Fisher felt a similar urgency to dive into the Notre Dame game and see what exactly went wrong.
“I’ve watched it countless times now,” Fisher said. “There’s so many little things in the film that I think I was able to take and add to my game to make sure that outcome doesn’t happen again. It was definitely a tough loss, but something you can really learn from.”
IU football has corrected the mistakes it made in CFP
Fisher’s ultimate takeaway from those film sessions was that IU’s defense was “lackadaisical” in critical areas.
“The angles we took, especially on pursuit angles to the ball,” Fisher said. “There’s some plays, first downs and big gains, that happened just because of a broken tackle, and that’s something that really bothers me. We eliminated all those things in spring, you know just having one foot in the air when you are tagging off a player. We corrected it.”
The moment that stands out above the rest for both defenders was Jeremiyah Love’s 98-yard touchdown run on the third play of the game.
Fisher regretted taking a bad angle to the ball and getting swallowed up at the line while Kamara tried to shed his blocker to the outside away from the play. Love built up a head of steam and won a footrace down the sideline against the Hoosiers secondary.
After the game, Indiana defensive coordinator Bryant Haines said they had a defender out of position and lamented not being more aggressive with the Fighting Irish backed up at their own goal line.
Cignetti acknowledged the touchdown run turned the game upside down, but also pointed out that there was plenty of blame to go around.
“Offensively, just not good,” Cignetti said, with a shake of his head. “We did run the ball a little bit early in the game and made a catch or two in the second, probably should have gone to the two-minute drill earlier in the fourth quarter. Punter was awful. They played well, we didn’t play well. They beat us.”
Indiana players used the film of the game to make sure those same mistakes don’t trip them up again as they eye a return trip to the postseason in 2025.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: ‘Real motivation factory:’ What Indiana football learned from CFP loss to Notre Dame
Reporting by Michael Niziolek, The Herald-Times / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
