Indiana finishes nonconference slate with blowout win — and a lesson in maturity

Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti didn’t spend Friday night tracking the score. That part was never in doubt. Instead, Indiana’s 73-0 rout of Indiana State became the final checkpoint in his preseason experiment: Could the Hoosiers play with urgency and maturity when complacency was the only real opponent?

It was never about whether Indiana could beat Indiana State. That was decided when the game first appeared on the schedule. What mattered to Cignetti on Friday night was whether his team would meet the standards he has spent every waking moment trying to ingrain in them since the season began.

“I told the team on Monday, we’re going to find out a lot about our team and how mature we are in terms of how we handle this week,” Cignetti said during his radio show on Wednesday night. “Because we need to improve.”

Improvement, not domination, was the goal.

In Cignetti’s mind, Indiana’s three-game nonconference slate — Old Dominion, Kennesaw State and Indiana State — was never about strength of schedule or style points. It was preseason in disguise, a laboratory to test his players’ ability to meet expectations before the Big Ten gauntlet begins.

That’s why the Hoosiers’ thrashing of the Sycamores carried significance far beyond the eye-popping numbers. Indiana outgained Indiana State 680-77, tallied 33 first downs and recorded 16 tackles for loss with contributions from a dozen different defenders.

By halftime, the game was long gone. But for Cignetti, the real measurement was how his team handled the inevitable.

“The message today to the coaches and the team: Mental intensity and urgency equals energy,” Cignetti said postgame. “We wanted to play one play at a time like it was the game on the line, regardless of the competitive circumstances. But urgency and mental intensity. And that it would come from the coaches. If it came from the coaches at all times, the players would feed off of it.”

Cignetti’s eyes scanned the sideline more than the scoreboard. What he wanted to see — and what he insisted he saw — was a program beginning to understand the difference between celebration and maturity.

“I think we’ve taken the steps we need to take,” Cignetti said. “I thought we did tonight what we wanted to do, and I was pleased to see that. And I didn’t see anybody relaxing at any point in the game, coaches or players … All in all, we took another big step forward.”

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For the players, the message was clear: maturity is not optional.

“When he’s talking about maturity like that, I think it’s about not seeing a bunch of teeth on the sideline, a bunch of smiling, things like that — especially while we’re up,” defensive lineman Kellan Wyatt said after the game. “Just staying tuned into the game, honed in and locked in the whole game. The start of the season is where you try and ingrain stuff like that.”

Cignetti’s approach meant treating every series as if the season depended on it, no matter if the opponent had already been buried beneath a lopsided score.

Even as backups filled in, the starters rallied behind them, cheering, correcting and reinforcing the standard. The bench became less a resting place than a classroom.

Defensive lineman Tyrique Tucker said that ethos has already taken root.

“We really don’t want to let off the gas until the game is over,” Tucker said. “When the game is going on, you don’t really want to get too happy, too high or too low, you want to stay in the middle. We embrace that as a team.”

That’s the balancing act of Cignetti’s program.

On one hand, Indiana is in rarefied air, fresh off a College Football Playoff appearance last season and carrying the weight of heightened national expectations. On the other, Cignetti refuses to let his players look beyond the details — eye discipline, tempo, body language — that build the foundation of a “championship program,” as he calls it.

SEE ALSO: How it Happened: No. 22 Indiana dismantles Indiana State 73-0 to wrap up non-conference play

The scoreboard told the story of a rout. The sideline told the story of a culture under construction.

What Friday night confirmed is that Indiana handled its final dress rehearsal with the maturity Cignetti demanded. But now, the curtain rises. No. 9 Illinois arrives in Bloomington next week for a primetime showdown that will reveal whether these lessons translate when the stakes are real and the margins are thin.

Indiana’s blowout win over Indiana State will not be remembered as a program-defining victory. It will not be the headline of this season. But it may be remembered as the night when Indiana’s players proved to their coach that they are capable of holding themselves to the standard, regardless of opponent or circumstance.

For Indiana, success on Friday wasn’t found on the scoreboard. It was in the way the team carried itself when the score no longer mattered.