Rourke reaches uncharted territory for a Canadian quarterback

Kurtis Rourke is officially in uncharted territory for a Canadian quarterback, leading an undefeated Indiana Hoosiers football team into November with a berth in the College Football Playoff in his sights.

No Canadian has ever led a team this good, this far in a season. 

It’s been a remarkable run for a player who played his high school football in Oakville, Ont., and then followed big brother, Nathan, to Ohio University in the Mid-American Conference.

Most of his five seasons there took place outside of the national spotlight. But all of that began to change when Rourke entered the transfer portal last December to take advantage of an extra season of eligibility granted to him by the 2020 COVID-shortened season.

The results have been nothing short of stunning – an undefeated 9-0 season thus far with Indiana ranked eighth nationally at the start of this week and Rourke being vaulted into the Heisman Trophy conversation, ranked fifth by ESPN this week, ahead of notable names such as Alabama’s Jalen Milroe, Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders and Penn State’s Drew Allar.

Not bad for a player who was ranked the 97th-best quarterback prospect of his recruiting class in 2019 and the 17th-best available quarterback in the portal last winter.

Rourke played last season believing it would likely be his final one in college football, but he began to reconsider near the end of a year in which he failed to live up to expectations he had set the previous season with Ohio.

Around the same time, Indiana was in the process of hiring Curt Cignetti as its new coach, fresh off a run at James Madison University where his team stacked wins off a high-powered pro-style offence.

Cignetti arrived in Bloomington talking a big game about becoming immediately competitive in the Big Ten, which seemed fanciful at the time.

To do so, he needed an experienced quarterback to lead his team and opted for Rourke, describing his decision to go after him when watching tape “as soon as I saw him.”

Rourke did his own research on Cignetti’s run at JMU and liked what he saw – particularly the pro-style scheme and commitment to being competitive immediately.

The combination has been magical. Rourke has competed 73.3 per cent of his passes while throwing 19 touchdown passes against just three interceptions.

Though to the average college football fan in America it may seem that Rourke came out of nowhere, his journey has had more than a few twists along the way.

The path from Canada to playing quarterback at the Division I level is not well-worn, especially among the power conferences.

(Only Jesse Palmer, at Florida in the late 1990s, and Christian Veilleux, at Pitt for half a season in 2023, have started games as Canadian quarterbacks for power conference teams in the past 30 years.)

Ohio was willing take him straight out of Canadian high school ball in part because of its familiarity with Nathan, who was still the starting quarterback when Kurtis arrived as a freshman in 2019.

But while Nathan at 6-foot-1 was more a dual-threat quarterback in offence that relied heavily on the run, 6-foot-5 Kurtis played in more of a pro-style offence with the Bobcats.

He experienced a breakout season during his junior year at Ohio in 2022, completing 69.1 per cent of his passes for 3,257 yards, 25 touchdowns against just four interceptions. However, an ACL injury at the end of that season killed any chance of entering the transfer portal to a bigger program and instead put him on course for a full off-season recovery.

Rourke was cleared just days before the start of the 2023 season but never lived up to his performance the previous season. He refused to blame any of his shortfall on the injury, as he completed 63.5 per cent of his passes for 2,207 yards, 11 touchdowns and five interceptions.

So, when the opportunity came to try and close out his college career on a higher note he took the leap, believing Cignetti would make good on his promise to make the Hoosiers instantly competitive.

No one could have guessed how competitive Indiana would be this season, or how well Rourke would thrive in Cignetti’s system.

Making the transition to a new coach and program for one final college season required Rourke to grind for months leading up to the season.

But Rourke told himself he wasn’t there to save the program, and adopted the mentality of just getting the ball into playmakers’ hands. The payoff has been huge. 

The Hoosiers, coming off a 47-10 win at Michigan State, have three games remaining to complete a perfect regular season: at home this weekend to Michigan, at Ohio State on Nov. 23, and then at home to Purdue.

All of these games will attract national attention as Rourke is projected to have an opportunity to be drafted to the National Football League. How good that opportunity will be depends on how he performs over this next stretch, and likely during the playoffs in December.

There have been lots of great stories about Canadians playing NCAA football in recent years, as players from this country have reached new heights at some of the biggest programs in America.

Kurtis Rourke has set the bar higher than any of them.