The Hoosiers walked into the Rose Bowl with a certain Curt Cignetti swagger and walked out with a blowout victory in Indiana’s return to California. Quarterback Kurtis Rourke was on fire, shredding the Bruins’ secondary, going 25/33 for 307 yards and four touchdowns in a 42-13 victory.
The UCLA offense was so abysmal that they’re not even worth mentioning. We’ll chop it up to Eric Bieniemy’s scheme and call it a day.
But it’s Ikaika Malloe that gets put under the microscope today. While UCLA offensive coordinator Tino Sunseri can give a better explanation of how Indiana sliced through Malloe’s coverage, considering Sunseri helped design the gameplan, there are some things to take away and some concepts they could employ early in 2025.
To Malloe’s credit, he got a lot better at changing and disguising coverages as the season went on, so this is more about man management in the early part of the regular season. Malloe is replacing several positions on his defense, and with new parts comes a period of growing pains, these concepts can help stop the bleeding if the defense gets gashed early.
So couple of observations are that Indiana got way too comfortable handling a three and four-man rush. In these situations, as Indiana crosses the 50, Malloe needs to dial up some exotic blitzes despite the risk of getting burned. However, whether raging inferno or slow burn, something is letting lit up, and Indiana’s putting up 6 regardless.
As they cross the 50, the field shrinks, and passing lanes get tighter. The blitz could put the throw-off just enough, a scoring play turns into an incompletion.
UCLA could not cover. Its zone defense was getting shredded It seemed Rourke was reading Kain Medrano on every passing play; UCLA was figured out. Malloe needs to change what Rourke is seeing and reading because he is locked in.
In these situations, I like to stack the line of scrimmage. Have random defenders bail out into coverage and mess up Rourke’s eye line. Rourke may have the coverage figured out but he doesn’t need to know which players are dropping into coverage, how many players and at what time are they dropping. You need to get into his head to mess up his rhyme or to bait the offensive line into committing a penalty.
Malloe needs to rework his tactics. It’s understandable to not mix in certain coverages because of personnel but if you can’t, you need to mix something else up.