Rourke not ready for Indiana run to end

Kurtis Rourke has one of those stories that reminds you how much can change in the course of a year.

On Friday night, Rourke will lead the Indiana Hoosiers into Notre Dame Stadium to face the Fighting Irish on the opening night of the first 12-team College Football Playoff.

The game will be watched by tens of millions, and a pair of tickets anywhere starts at $1,300 (CAD).

Rourke and the Hoosiers enter the game coming off an 11-1 season, with the Oakville, Ont. native graded as the most efficient passer in college football, which helped him finish ninth in voting for the Heisman Trophy.

“A year ago around this time I committed to come here, and I never would have said I’d be in the top 10 for the Heisman,” Rourke said this week. “I’m very grateful … just ready to continue this journey I’m on.”

A little over a year ago, Rourke wasn’t even sure he’d be playing college football this season.

He began the 2023 season believing it would be his last. He’d graduated, was engaged to be married in the spring of 2024, and was coming off a spectacular 2022 season for Ohio University that saw him named the Mid-American Conference (MAC) Most Valuable Player and Offensive Player of the Year.

His coaches told anyone who would listen that Rourke had the skills and makeup to be an NFL quarterback. All he had to do was go out and replicate his previous season, or close to it, and he could become one of those rare MAC quarterbacks for whom doors to the NFL would open.

There have been others, of course, although the list gets awfully thin once you get past Ben Roethlisberger.

Rourke’s fantastic 2022 season should have given him an opportunity to enter the transfer portal and land a starting job among the power conferences. However, a torn ACL suffered at the end of that year wiped out those plans. Instead, Rourke faced nine months of rehab, and was cleared to play just days before the start of the 2023 season.

Rourke has never conceded that his knee injury in any way affected his statistical slide in 2023, when he threw for 1,000 fewer yards, saw his completion percentage dip sharply, and went from throwing 25 touchdown passes in 2022 to just 11 the next season.

Rourke admits it wasn’t his best season but attributes it largely to a change in the team’s playing style. In 2022, the Bobcats defence routinely lead its offence into shootouts, allowing Rourke to rack up passing stats that weren’t repeatable when Ohio played in tighter, more conservative games the following season.

His coaches echoed that message over the course of last season as well. But others disagreed, with scouts insisting he wasn’t as confidently mobile and wasn’t driving the ball with his lower body like he once did.

By the end of last season, Rourke had opened himself to exploring the portal to see what was out there. The decision, he said, was to “bet on myself.”

Becoming a late-round NFL draft pick would have been a longshot at the time, but a free-agent deal was a real possibility. At 6-foot-5 and with all that arm talent, someone would want to take a closer look.

There have been exceptions, but college free-agent quarterbacks rarely get more than that look. Today’s NFL front offices have a near obsession with quarterback pedigree to the extent that fans of losing teams routinely shift their attention to the next draft by November.

Safe to see a free-agent quarterback from Ohio was going to have a very tough road to overcome all of that, and would need some true breaks along the way.

So why not give it one more shot?

Rourke put his name in the transfer portal and got immediate interest from Vanderbilt, BYU, and Wake Forest – all of whom made him offers.

He also heard from a coach who’d recently left a spectacular five-year run at James Madison University to become the new head coach at the University of Indiana.

Curt Cignetti was determined to take college football by storm in year No. 1, and needed a veteran quarterback to make that happen.

Rourke was looking for a program that he could count on to be competitive during his one and only season there. And while Indiana and it’s recent history of just three winning seasons this millennium would seem like an odd choice to answer that desire, Rourke bet on Cignetti. He also loved the team’s pro-style offence, which would allow him to showcase his talents for NFL teams.

There were challenging times when he got to Bloomington in the new year, both in terms of the off-season grind and also finding the right mentality to compete in the Big Ten against programs regularly in the running for a national title.

Then he found it.

Rourke wasn’t there to save the program. He was there to distribute the football to the players around him in the best way possible. That’s been the focus ever since.

“It’s just my way to get them the ball,” he said this week in a familiar refrain.  

No one could have imagined the transformation that would come to Bloomington this season. Indiana’s offence has looked and scored this season like the one Cignetti coached at JMU. Rourke has looked and produced like the quarterback who dominated the MAC in 2022, finishing ninth in voting for the Heisman.

Only against the top defence in all of college football did it falter, falling 38-15 at Ohio State for their only loss in an 11-1 season.

Ohio State is also the only top-25 opponent Indiana has faced all season before seeing it’s second in South Bend, Ind., on Friday night. Notre Dame also has one of the best defences in college football. Friday night is Indiana’s second chance to show they are truly capable of playing among the best of the best.

It all might end on the campus that is home to Touchdown Jesus, where the Hoosiers will be taking on a packed house and a whole lot of history. Indiana hasn’t beat Notre Dame since 1950. It hasn’t beat them at Notre Dame since 1906.

But if Rourke and the Hoosiers were affected by history, they wouldn’t be here.

The Canadian quarterback has put himself solidly on the radar for NFL teams, leading up to what could be his final college game. The longer Indiana’s season continues, the harder his talents will be to ignore.

“Just knowing it might be my last college game definitely comes to my mind,” Rourke said this week. “We can talk about my last college game in four games.”