Indiana 2025 Spring Game Recap

Happy End of Spring Camp, folks! Let's react to what we saw Thursday evening in Memorial Stadium.

Indiana hosted its 2025 Spring Game on Thursday night at Memorial Stadium, and it was as electric of an Indiana Spring Game as I can remember. The crowd was much larger than last year’s event, and several fans made note of that. When the gates opened, fans rushed to grab towels and schedule posters.

The team began with position-specific drills, before expanding to skeleton drills (just skilled position players and defenders), then to isolated plays. They came back together for more team stretching and warmups before starting the scrimmage at about 20-after 8:00. Two halves of 15 minutes each.

The crowd was very engaged, and the football was good, especially the defense.

If you’re curious what I was watching for, I wrote about it earlier this week, which you can read here.

Let’s get into some instant reactions!

The defense is intense and multiple

From the start, Bryant Haines’ defense was active, and it was very entertaining, both on the field and on the sidelines. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell how much is experimentation and how much is real, but what seems to be clear is that the Hoosiers are going to be rotating defensive players, particularly interior defensive linemen, quite often.

I’ll note some of these things as this post moves along, but Indiana was very active in its substitutions. It clearly has packages for specific looks, as it would remove the Rover and replace him with a third LB based on what the offense was showing. Sometimes that sub included sending backup safety Bryson Bonds onto the field as well. There were also packages that included five defensive linemen and some that had a DT on the edge of the line, rather than a DE. This was all intentional.

What was the most unpredictable, though, was how the LBs were used. There were the traditional two LBs, of course, but sometimes the LB would be far out in coverage or a LB would drop down to Stud. They were everywhere.

None of this really depended on field position either. The staff seems to believe it has depth in certain areas of the defense and wants to weaponize particular skillsets, including increased size on the interior of the DL.

This defense will look slightly different this season, but it’s already carrying the same intensity with it.

In my eyes, the defense won the night. It was extremely fast and physical and appears to be multiple versions of itself on any given play. It could be very dangerous.

Indiana needs to get/stay healthy