IU football prepares to embrace Kinnick Stadium noise in first road test at Iowa
- Josh Pos
- 1h ago
The sound of cheers has blanketed the northern part of Indiana’s campus for two hours each of the past two evenings.
It is not the sounds from Saturday’s 63-10 throttling of No. 9 Illinois still ringing. Instead, it’s Indiana preparing for its first road test of the season.
A Saturday afternoon date with the Iowa Hawkeyes inside venerable Kinnick Stadium awaits Indiana’s explosive offense.
The team is preparing for the challenge in the same way it does for home and away games – with an entire practice enveloped by crowd noise at full volume inside the stadium.
“It’s loud and obnoxious and, like, it rings your ears,” offensive lineman Pat Coogan said. “There are no breaks or anything, because there’s not gonna be any breaks on Saturday.”
Kinnick Stadium seats nearly 70,000 loud and passionate fans, and until recently, it has been a graveyard for top-25 opponents.
The Hoosiers’ crowd noise practice aims to be precautionary, as their performance seeks to silence the crowd on Saturday afternoon.
Iowa is in the midst of a 10-game skid against ranked opponents. The Hawkeyes haven’t won a ranked game in almost 1,500 days. Despite numbers showing signs of Kirk Ferentz’s squad faltering against top-25 opponents, their home stadium has never made it easy for a visiting team.
The last time IU football visited Iowa City as a ranked team, the result was poor. The opening game of what became a two-win season began with a 34-6 drubbing for No. 17 Hoosiers.
Iowa has been dominant against Indiana in recent years. The Hawkeyes have won four straight and eight of the last nine meetings against Indiana dating back to 2008.
As Iowa has remained constant with Ferentz, Indiana has moved forward with Curt Cignetti.
Cignetti lacks a comprehensive understanding of Kinnick Stadium and its rich history. However, his comprehension and respect for Ferentz’s success are all he needs to know that the Hawkeyes will need his team’s undivided attention.
“The thing about Iowa in general is that they will not beat themselves,” Cignetti said Monday. “You will have to beat them, and they play really well at home.”
Both of Indiana’s road losses last season, specifically at Ohio State, were in large part due to trouble with the snap count. The Buckeyes swiftly picked up on the silent count, leading to a multitude of pressure on Kurtis Rourke.
Cignetti and offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan developed a different plan of attack for this season. The Hoosiers will return to their traditional clap cadence in an effort to maintain a normal offense throughout the game.
Changes based on the sour experiences of road struggles last year have trickled down to players like linebacker Aiden Fisher.
Noise has less impact on the defense than the offense. Still, Fisher — the only defender with the coach-to-player communication sticker — aims to maintain control and prevent big plays from compounding.
“It’s something you had to learn from,” he said. “It got loud. I think at times it did falter our communication. We just have to be better with that.”
Coogan, who has a wealth of experience in loud atmospheres from his days at Notre Dame, is now a veteran when it comes to managing crowd noise in game plans.
“We’ve got to make sure everyone’s tuned into the cadences and all the little things,” he said. “Sometimes you can kind of gloss over it because when you can hear everything, everything’s good.”
The noise inside Memorial Stadium is sure to pale in comparison to that of Kinnick Stadium, but Indiana is better equipped to manage the noise.
An early scoring drive would set the tone for Indiana’s first road match of the season. Quieting the rambunctious Iowa crowd early could tilt the trajectory toward a positive result.
The noise of the faux fans in Bloomington will ultimately give way to a loud stadium of college football’s most passionate fanbase rooting against Cignetti’s team.
It’ll be up to the road team to silence the real thing.
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