Will Indiana finally get a pass rush from its defensive line in 2024?

JMU's defensive staff made its living with effective DL pass rush. Will that translate to Indiana?

This edition of Bite-Sized Bison is in continuation of a two-part series that digs into the primary areas of expected change on either side of the ball. Last week, it was explosion on the offensive side of the ball. This week, it’s pass rush from the defensive line. 

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Let me take you back in time, for a moment, to Week 10 of the 2023 season. Former Ball State QB and then-Illinois QB John Paddock had just thrown for 507 yards and 4 touchdowns to send the Hoosiers crashing toward rock bottom (3-7) after the high of beating Wisconsin to collect a third Big Ten win in as many seasons the week before. 

I wrote this about the defensive pass rush:

“In 2022, Indiana’s pass rush was graded 129th in the country. After Week 11 in 2023, it’s graded 104th. Through 12 games last season, Indiana’s top-4 edge rushers (Alfred Bryant, Dasan McCullough, James Head, Beau Robbins) totaled 74 QB pressures, and so far through 10 games this season, Indiana’s top-4 edge rushers (Andre Carter, Lanell Carr, Anthony Jones, Myles Jackson) have totaled 50 QB pressures. Carter was one of the most coveted pass rushers in the portal, and at Indiana, he’s currently ranked 39th in PFF's pass rush productivity metric and 30th in win percentage among Big Ten DEs with 50+ pass rushes. Carr is 29th and 28th, respectively, in those categories…

…In true pass sets against Illinois – the lowest-graded pass-blocking OL in the conference – Indiana pressured the QB just 7 times and hit the QB just twice, neither time by a DE. This certainly didn’t make the secondary’s job any easier, as John Paddock had more than 2.5 seconds to throw on 50% of his dropbacks.

If one wanted to be reductive, they might say that Indiana’s defense specializes in plugging gaps (graded 46th nationally in run defense by PFF) and nothing else, even though, yes, Indiana still allows more rushing yards per game than any Big Ten team.”

So, things were going well, huh?

It wasn’t entirely the fault of the pass rush, which I noted in other areas of that same newsletter, but as the quilt of a defense patched together through the portal and stitched with the same sect of the 4-2-5 philosophy – with another new face at DC – began to tear, some glaring weaknesses at the core began to show. It wasn’t that the 4-2-5 can’t work or is a poor system. In fact, many top programs are working their ways there now. It was that it couldn’t work this way at Indiana anymore, and part of “this way” was a lack of emphasis on pass rush from the defensive line.