For an Indiana football team that had struggled mightily to find a spark, Kevin Wilson figured that he had nothing to lose by looking to true freshman quarterback Tre Roberson to try and get his offense moving in the right direction.

He had the right idea, but Roberson’s contributions on the offensive side of the ball weren’t enough to overcome the Hoosiers’ other weaknesses in a loss to an explosive Iowa team.

The Indiana Hoosiers (1-7, 0-3) fell to the Iowa Hawkeyes (5-2, 2-1) by a 45-24 final score, as the IU offense had its most productive game of the season but was unable to recover from its own sloppiness and an anemic performance from the Hoosier defense.

“I don’t understand all of the penalties,” Kevin Wilson said afterward. “We’ve had some games where we were really sloppy, some games where we didn’t have as many. Today we had a boatload of penalties and we need to work on that.”

He continued on the defense.

“We didn’t play well, didn’t tackle well,” he said. “I don’t think we had a defensive stop until the fourth quarter, so they worked us well in both the run and the pass.”

“There was one time,” Wilson continued, “that they were just running a crossing route. There, your safety’s just supposed to drive down and our guy took out two of us. So we had three guys on the ground like dominoes falling around. It’s just something that we need to work on awareness and cleaning it up.”

Like Wilson said, Iowa’s offense was not stopped until the fourth quarter, and the potent James Vandenburg-to-Marvin McNutt connection was a big reason for that. McNutt caught six passes for 184 yards and a trio of touchdowns on his way to setting the new Hawkeye career touchdown reception mark with 24. McNutt wasn’t the entire Iowa offense though, as sophomore running back Marcus Coker was a horse, totaling 139 yards and two touchdowns on the ground, the first of which capped a 12-play, 69-yard drive to begin the game.

The Hawkeyes scored on that drive and on their other four in the second half to help open up a commanding lead. After Coker’s touchdown run, McNutt caught three touchdowns with another Coker run in the middle to give Iowa a 35-14 halftime lead. Everything that they did was working and Indiana’s much-maligned defense seemed to have no answers.

“I had some trouble personally getting back into some coverages and I’m mad at myself for taking as much time as I did to get back into game speed,” said Leon Beckum. “(McNutt) is just a great player, we were there, but he just made plays most of the time.”

Despite the struggles of the defense, the offense managed to provide a few bright spots for the Hoosiers. Roberson answered the first two Hawkeye drives with two of his own. On the first drive, he hit Cody Latimer in the back of the end zone for his first career touchdown through the air and after Stephen Houston plunged into the end zone from one yard out on the second drive, it appeared that Indiana might have been able to trade punches with the Iowa offense.

While IU would end up falling behind and eventually lost by three scores, it was still the best Hoosier offensive performance of the conference season and the fact that it came with a true freshman at quarterback gave plenty of reason for hope. 

After falling behind 35-14, Roberson led IU down the field to what looked to be a touchdown, but after a review, a dropped pass and a penalty, the drive ended in a field goal to make the score 35-17. The Hawkeyes scored 10 more points to take a 45-17 lead and all but put the game away, but Roberson wasn’t quite done. He led one last scoring drive, highlighted by a 34 yard scramble and capped with a second Houston touchdown to make the score 45-24.

“I think Tre did well,” said Houston after the game, when asked to evaluate Roberson’s performance. “He kept his composure even when we had a drive stop and he can’t do anything but get better. I just told him to keep pushing forward and that we need to get ready for Northwestern so he’d better be ready for practice on Monday.”

Indiana will get the chance to show how well they prepared this week when they take on the Wildcats (2-5, 0-4) next week in Bloomington.