IOWA CITY, Iowa — Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti already knows one of the plays he’ll be submitting to the Big Ten for review this week.
After IU’s 20-15 win over Iowa, Cignetti walked reporters through the strange sequence at the end of the game that ultimately forced the offense into taking a safety as time expired on Saturday.
The No. 12 Hoosiers (5-0; 2-0 Big Ten) forced a turnover on downs at midfield with 16 seconds left, but couldn’t just kneel out the clock since Iowa still had all three of its timeouts left.
Cignetti installed a play, “victory delay”, for that very scenario where the quarterback simply walks backward to delay taking a knee in order to run more time off the clock. He used the same call to close out a 32-28 win over Appalachian State during JMU’s first season in the Sun Belt.
It didn’t work this time.
“He (Fernando Mendoza) went back, and, you know, and then the ref blew the whistle,” Cignetti said. “And one guy on the sideline gave me one interpretation, and the referee gave me a completely different one.”
The refs whistled Mendoza down on first down without the Hawkeyes ever moving off the line of scrimmage. The lack of clarity from the officials forced Cignetti to abandon the strategy and tell Mendoza on fourth and 19 to just run out of the back of the end zone to run out the remaining three seconds on the clock.
“He was supposed to go through the end zone, but he got caught,” Cignetti said. “And our quarterback coach, Chandler Whitmer, who does a great job, and I can understand why, said, ‘No, he doesn’t need to go all the way to the end zone,’ because there was only three seconds left on the clock. But I wasn’t taking any chances.”
Mendoza jokingly apologized to gamblers after the game for having “cooked people’s spreads,” but his sole focus in that moment was making sure Iowa didn’t get the ball back and get another shot at the end zone.
“I didn’t want to ever put our team in jeopardy, maybe if I slide with one second left there might be some quirk where we might have to punt it,” Mendoza said.
Cignetti wasn’t totally surprised his team had to fight through the final seconds at Kinnick Stadium to close out the victory.
“This is a hard place to play,” Cignetti said. “They got a great home record. They were juiced up for this game. And come out with a win when maybe you didn’t play your best, and a lot of it’s because of them, it’s huge.”
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.