Indiana coach Curt Cignetti gave a playful wink to reporters after answering a question about transfer quarterback Josh Hoover, who joined the reigning national champion Hoosiers from TCU this offseason.

In a March interview, Horned Frogs coach Sonny Dykes mentioned that Hoover turned the ball over 42 times in 31 career starts at TCU. Hoover joined an Indiana program that has protected the ball as well as anyone in the country under Cignetti, committing a national-low 17 turnovers over the past two seasons.

Cignetti acknowledged that Hoover, who is replacing Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza, has to clean up the mistakes but sounds optimistic about his potential.

“I’m excited about Josh, first of all, and he’s got a body of work in terms of winning football games, passing yards, touchdown passes,” Cignetti said at a news conference Thursday. “We’ve got to clean up some of the turnovers, obviously, which coach Dykes made light of.

“But when Josh got here, he met his two new best friends: a great defense and a really good run game. And he was never the same after that.”

Hoover started at TCU for the better part of three seasons and the Horned Frogs’ scoring defense never ranked better than 62nd nationally in any of those seasons. Indiana has been a top-six scoring defense under Cignetti the past two years. TCU also ranked 97th nationally in yards per rush last season (3.92) and 103rd (3.70) in 2024. The Hoosiers ranked 68th in yards per rush in 2024 (4.37) but improved to 19th this past season (5.17).

Dykes brought up Hoover in response to a question about new offensive coordinator Gordon Sammis, who joined TCU after a strong two-year stint at UConn, which had a top-25 offense in scoring and yards per play in 2025.

“Numbers are numbers and stats are stats. You look, for us, I think Josh started 31 games here for us as a quarterback and he turned the ball over 42 times in those 31 starts,” Dykes said in an interview. “You go and look at Gordy was the offensive coordinator last year at Connecticut and their quarterback turned it over twice. That’s where we want to get to. You look at the teams that played for a national championship. You look at Indiana this year, they were No. 1 in the nation in turnover margin.”

Hoover had nine multi-interception games over the past two seasons at TCU. He had a three-game stretch in November where he threw at least two interceptions in each game. After Hoover’s departure, the Horned Frogs added Harvard transfer Jaden Craig through the transfer portal.

“The last three years we’ve turned it over way too much,” Dykes said. “So we took some steps to address that and hopefully we can be a team that doesn’t beat ourselves.”

Hoover, who arrived at Indiana for spring practice, is No. 5 in The Athletic’s updated ranking of the top 20 transfer quarterbacks for 2026, while Craig is 12th.