Bucket Week Media Monday Coverage

Written By Sammy Jacobs (@Hoosier_Huddle)

It’s Bucket Week and the Hoosiers need a win to go bowling for a second straight year. On Monday Kevin Wilson talked about Purdue, the seniors, recruiting, and more at his press conference.

Coach Wilson Quotes

Wilson has always been grateful to have a rivalry game like the Battle for the Old Oaken Bucket. Here are his comments on the 2016 edition of the game.

“We've got another strong test here this week playing a rival that, offensively has played very well, and putting up numbers. Number one in the conference in passing, quarterback is making all the throws. David Blough is extremely talented, great arm, quick arm. Yancey, their big receiver, statistically and the plays he makes had 155 against Wisconsin the other day, ran by those guys, and Wisconsin is playing about as good a defense as there is in the country.

You look at their outings, the last few outings, they've had Wisconsin in the first quarter last week 3-0, second quarter got away. Northwestern is 14-10 at half. They've got the lead at Minnesota 28-23. They're tied up with Penn State 17-17 at the half. They have the lead at Nebraska 14-10. So last five games, they've came out and Coach Parker has got those guys playing hard, and they're making some plays on offense, and then you've seen us play enough that we've had turnover issues and we've had the ability to leave points on the board, so we're expecting a great challenge.

We're going to have to have what we told our team our best week. We're off to a good start and we've battled, what is this now, about nine weeks in a row, 10 weeks in a row without an open date, but we're, again, healthy coming out of the last game, practicing pretty good, playing good, not quite good enough all the time, but we're going to need a good week because any time you play the rival game, end of the year, there's always a lot of juice and energy from both sides. It's going to be a physical game. It's going to be a tough game, and to me like we told our team last night, we're very, very fortunate to have this game and to have a strong, great rival because there's a lot of programs and schools that don't have this chance, so it's a great opportunity to play the game, and with a lot of respect, we look forward to having a good week. We'll need one.”

Indiana struggled punting the ball against Michigan on Saturday. I asked again today if there was anything the team can do to improve in that area.

“Well, again, all of those were into the wind now, and we didn't manage the one right before. We ran the ball so poorly in the third quarter. Well, we had one good run, had a holding penalty on 3rd and 10 and popped for one. The first drive, we ran the ball, took a deep-ball shot, ran it on 3rd and long and Devine made a great little run against the blitz, and we caught them in something that we thought would have a chance, and we got called for a perimeter hold on one of our receivers. But after that, the rest of the half, we didn't run the ball.

I think there's low minutes left in the third quarter and we came out and the first drive we had a high-percentage throw we thought we could execute because we needed to get a first down, and I think punting one more time on a whim was one of the differences in the game, which we didn't want to do, but we thought we had a high-percentage pass that we had hit earlier in the game to Ricky Jones, and we felt pretty confident we could hit it, and we needed -- and we were backed up. We started out, we spent the whole first half, we spent the whole third quarter and we're going into the wind.

So the one thing that helped the punt team is when your offense runs for 55 yards and they run for 220 yards there's the difference in the game because when you're going against the wind you've got to be tough enough to punch it out. So we needed to flip the field position, and we didn't. Quite honestly, we were very fortunate that they didn't get more. I think the one drive on the 1-yard line we had a go ball to Nick Westbrook coming out and flipped it. Our two drives were both long drives into the wind where we scored our 10 points, because we're really lucky, if we didn't make those plays, it could have even snowballed and been worse.

Now, punt team we had two errors where two guys basically just missed an assignment, and we cut a guy clean, and it's not very confusing on who we got; A, B, C, who you got, and we had some guys just make some mental errors trying to help a guy not do their jobs. That was where the punt blocks were, and then punting into the wind, no one was going to kick into that wind. That's why we squib kicked it on our kickoffs, a little bit into the wind.

But the offense was a little bit of the Achilles heel. When you don't run the ball well in late November and in the Big Ten games, it's just hard to have some success. That comes back to the finding a run game.”

Saturday is Senior Day for the Hoosiers and Wilson took time to reflect on this year’s senior class

“Well, it's a good group. It's not a lot. I think last week they had 43 seniors up there. I think we've got seven that are playing, and some of these guys -- there's always a fourth-year guy that may not want to play his fifth year. That's an option we give kids. Sometimes it's our thought, you're not playing a lot, sometimes it's their thought. Some of those guys, the wear and tear on your body and the year-round commitment to play some of those positions is pretty gruelsome.

But academically I think we've got mid-year graduates, maybe eight mid-year graduates that are graduating in December with our fifth-year guys, so proud of those guys, from Dimitric Camiel, who hasn't played recently, and Ralph Green and Dan Feeney and Wes Rogers, Jacob Bailey, all those guys are mid-year graduates, Mitchell Paige, Ricky Jones, Dawson Fletcher. They're all mid-year graduates, so proud of those guys.

That actually opens up recruiting spaces for mid-year, if you want to put a walk-on on scholarship or bring in mid-year guys. You can't bring in mid-year guys if spaces aren't available, and the only way space becomes available is if a guy graduates. So we've got some of those guys.

It's a good group. I mean, to me it doesn't seem -- they've been such a pleasure to coach for the last couple weeks, it doesn't seem -- the weather has been awesome. Got cold here the last couple, three days, but it hasn't seemed like November. Seems like it's October because it's a good group to coach. You don't feel like you're pulling teeth every day to get them going. So it's a good group, they've set a pretty good standard.

But as far as the game, we go back to it's -- this is this week, and this team and this week, and last year's team had success, where other teams have or haven't, but my thing with these guys, we just come back to this week and the game and the week of preparation, and not to be corny, but that's how we started with them yesterday. It's about this week.

Love them to death. It's a great group of guys that are going to be very, very successful. We've had several strong classes overall of kids that I think are helping us get there. Not where we want to be. I think we've got some guys that will have a chance maybe for NFL opportunities. As a matter of fact, I don't think it'll come -- can I make that comment right now? Okay, we'll have good news about one of our guys here within an hour. We're having a little accolade for one guy that's coming along, so there's some good things happening for guys, so it's a great, great group. Love them, and really we're not melancholy about like it's the end, because to me, I enjoy coaching those guys so much, it's like I just talk about you want the season to continue and maintain the life of working together, and we went out today, and we didn't talk a lot about seniors. We talked about the best Monday we can have and the best prep we can have to have a great game and play well in our game against Purdue on Saturday.”

Indiana is going for their fourth-straight Bucket win, something that hasn’t happened since IU won four in a row from 1944-47, but Kevin Wilson wants the focus to be on the 2016 Old Oaken Bucket.

“Well, again, that'll -- that's a story that you guys will talk -- all we talked about was this team and this week because that's not this team's -- somebody this week is going to earn that bucket, this team or the rival. And that's all we talk about, like that bucket is last year's. That's last year's. Now it's this year. You've recruited, you have developed, you have practiced, you have played your season, and now you're into this game week, and now you have this game week and you go play this game. You go about and see if you can do what it takes to earn it. That's all we talk about.”

With the regular season winding down, recruiting season is right around the corner. Here is what Wilson said about the status of the Hoosiers 2017 recruiting class.

“Well, one, it'll be interesting because as you go through this season, exactly what do our final numbers end up being. We have a small senior class but we always use the walk-on scholarships because those are kind of one year and those guys earn them back. What are our exact numbers? Do we get to 20, 21, 22? Do you have guys that decide to -- is anybody going to look at the NFL? We'll next week talk to kids and we'll go through the process of if anybody wants to, to get their grade, we'll visit with their families and give them a chance to make their decisions.

You'll have some fourth-year guys that say, hey, I think maybe I want to graduate. We've got a couple guys that have been dealing with injuries. We've had -- like this past year was Isaac Griffith or a year before it was Ralston Evans. We've had Dom Booth, guys that couldn't play anymore. So what is your final scholarship numbers. We don't know, but down the stretch we need a quarterback, and we're working hard at that. We need a couple receivers with what's gone on. I think defensively, we'd still take another D-lineman. I think we'd take an offensive tackle possibly. We've got two tight ends, maybe a running back if we find the right one, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a corner or safety in the mix. We do need two linebackers in the class. We've got one but we need two more.

And at the same time, I don't know what you've got because recruiting, unless it's a mid-year kid, will start Thursday after the convention, January, I think it's the 12th, and then it's hang on until February 1, and it's rock and roll, because there will be a lot of -- with coaching changes and coordinator changes and things and out of the blue guys coming out of the woodwork. Right now recruiting has gone solid, but we need to hang on, and we need to finish strong, and we expect to do so.”

Quick-Hitters

Players of the Week

Offense-Nick Westbrook (WR)
Defense- Nate Hoff (DT)
Special Teams- Griffin Oakes (K)

Scout Offense- Peyton Ramsey (QB), Justin Berry (WR), 
Scout Defense- Wesley Green (WR), Thomas Henderson (LB)

Injuries
There are no new injuries to report