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Indiana Football head coach Tom Allen joins JMV to talk everything IU football. He gives his take on what he has seen from his players coming out of the spring season heading into the summer, the new offensive system, some defense, team personnel and recruiting, and the on-going quarterback battle.
On the spring season:
“I thought we had a great spring. Our guys set goals of what we wanted to accomplish and really improve fundamentally and technically. We still have a lot of young guys that we are expecting to do a lot of playing and their development was huge for us so we tried to get as many line reps as we possibly could. Install the new offensive system, as well as tweak some things on defense with the new defensive coordinator as well. There are definitely some changes and some positive things for sure and I love where our team is right now and the mindset that they have. We have a couple more key months of preparation this summer but excited about where we are headed.”
On the process and timing of the implementation of the new offensive scheme:
“It definitely takes time. I don’t know if I can put an exact timeframe on it but we tried to really do some things this spring to help accelerate that. This summer we have added some player practices within the framework of what we are allowed to do to put more time into that and more preparation for our offense. We have the whole install set for fall camp to allow us to be where we want to be. We open Big Ten play week three and obviously we have a huge opener at Lucas Oil so we don’t have a lot of time to rev that thing up. We have to be able to hit the ground running when we get into fall camp so the preparation for that has been critical here this offseason.”
On the continous quarterback battle and if he had to choose a starter today:
“In all fairness, I would have to answer that honestly, Peyton Ramsey is the returning starting quarterback on our football team. He started every game last year and two years ago. It is a competition. I stated that openly starting in the spring. Someone is going to have to beat him out of it if they are going to uproot and I know he has a mindset for that not to happen. Then you have Michael Penix who played a year ago and did some good things but he had his season cut short by injury and he is coming back. He had a really good spring and is physically changing himself and getting himself ready to be 100{42836eb61b4ca4ddd9ec45ae386c9311b687b2127b5746fc216d4c5f0c3c98e3} here soon which is very exciting for our program. Then you have Jack Tuttle who joined us as a transfer from Utah, originally from California. We have a set of three guys there that I think are very talented and have all different attributes for sure that make them unique in what they bring to the table but I think it will make for very interesting competition. As we get into fall camp, we are going to find out who that guy is gonna be. It is a very important decision that we will have to make but an important part of our next step in the program.”
