Rourke leads Hoosiers onto college football’s biggest stage

An undefeated opponent rolling into Ohio Stadium in late November to face the Buckeyes is about as big as NCAA college football gets.

So Saturday’s matchup between No. 2-ranked Ohio State and the No. 5 Indiana Hoosiers comes with a couple of special distinctions. 

It is arguably the biggest football game in Indiana school history, which is saying something when you’re talking about a place that started playing the game 137 years ago.

Indiana, which is one of two undefeated teams in the Big Ten, along with Oregon, hasn’t won the conference since 1967. At 10-0, the Hoosiers appear headed to the 12-team College Football Playoff, although a bad loss at Ohio State is one of the few things that could interfere with that.

It is also arguably the biggest game ever for a quarterback from Canada.

Kurtis Rourke of Oakville, Ont., has gone from a relative unknown in the world of college football to being named a finalist for every postseason award he’s eligible to win, currently sitting with the fourth-best odds to win the Heisman Trophy, and the second-best amongst quarterbacks.

“Indiana football” and “Canadian quarterback” are not terms you usually hear around the November battles for U.S. college football supremacy.

Neither has traditionally been part of the story. In fact, you have to go back 24 years to find the last time a Canadian started an NCAA football game that compares to Saturday’s Indiana-Ohio State matchup. Ottawa native Jesse Palmer led No. 3 Florida against No. 4 Florida State on Nov. 18, 2000, in what ended in a 30-7 win for the Seminoles.

Rourke’s move from Ohio of the mid-American Conference to Indiana last December didn’t grab national attention at the time. On the surface it appeared to be a quarterback with limited options transferring to a historically bad program.

Yes, he was going to get to play on a big stage in the Big Ten, but the results weren’t likely to be pretty. Or so most assumed.

Instead, Rourke and Indiana are having a historic undefeated season. They were 3-9 in 2023 and have had just three winning seasons this millennium.

A win at the Horseshoe Saturday before 102,000 fans would leave them one game short of a perfect season, with only 1-9 Purdue left on their schedule.

It’s fair to suggest that no one saw this coming, with one exception.

From the moment he arrived in Bloomington last December, Indiana’s new head coach, Curt Cignetti, told anyone who would listen that he had no plans to rebuild the program slowly or take a slow road to the top.

Fresh off the success he’d enjoyed going 52-10 over five seasons at James Madison University in Virginia, Cignetti promised that Indiana football would be competitive from the get-go, a claim that sounded outrageous at the time.

It also just happened to be exactly what Rourke wanted to hear if he was going to return to college football instead of entering the draft, where his best options would be either getting to NFL training camp as a college free agent or taking his talents back home to Canada and the CFL.

He’d spent most of three seasons as the full-time starter at Ohio and wanted no part of the front end of a rebuild. He took Cignetti at his word and committed to Indiana.

To say the combination of coach and quarterback has been a match is an understatement. 

Rourke has completed 71.8 per cent of his passes for 2,410 passing yards, 21 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. Pro Football Focus, which grades the top college football played on a weekly basis, has him as the highest-rated quarterback in the Power 4 conferences. 

Indiana is averaging 43.9 points per game, second best in major college football.

Meanwhile, Cignetti was recently rewarded with a new eight-year contract that averages $8 million per season, plus an annual $1 million retention bonus – double the amount per season he agreed to only a year ago.

When asked recently how he goes about selling his vision to recruits, the coach deadpanned his response.

“It’s pretty simple … I win. Google me.” 

It’s been a magical ride all around thus far, but Ohio State represents a different challenge. The Buckeyes are the only nationally ranked opponent on Indiana’s schedule and a team that possesses college football’s No. 2 defence.

History says this game is a complete mismatch. 

Indiana is 0-30-1 in its last 31 games versus Ohio State since 1988, the lone tie coming 34 seasons ago. Over the past six years, the average margin of loss has been 30 points.

The Hoosiers football program sat more than 200 games under .500 when this season began, with its all-time accomplishments limited to two conference titles. 

By comparison, Ohio State is more than 600 games above .500, showcasing 41 conference titles and 15 national championships.

But Saturday has nothing to with history. 

“We can play with anybody,” said Rourke this week. “It doesn’t matter who we play against. We just have to execute.”

In this new era of college football, traditional doormats can rise up, led by players who exist in the shadows of smaller conferences, stepping up to get their shot on the biggest stage. In Indiana, those forces have come together to create a college football title wave no one saw coming.

Riding that wave is a Canadian quarterback whose NFL dream looked marginal at best one year ago, but now has the attention of the football world. 

A win Saturday, at one of the loudest and toughest places to play college football, and Rourke’s present and future will both come a little more into focus.