Tom Allen likes explosiveness, confidence from Hoosiers entering 2019

Indiana is entering its third season under head coach Tom Allen while looking for its first bowl appearance since 2016.

The Hoosiers finished 2018 with a disappointing 5-7 record, but that alone does not tell the full story of the season. Indiana went 1-6 over the final seven games last season with three of those losses coming by seven points or less.

Allen is certainly hoping for better results in 2019, and it sounds like he is seeing a hungry team at the start of fall practice. According to Sammy Jacobs with Hoosiers Huddle, some of the biggest improvements Allen sees is a much more explosive and confident squad at the start of camp:

Definitely a more powerful, more explosive team with better speed and more confidence,” said Allen, “which that’s an outgrowth of — I think that’s where you get your confidence, I really do.

“I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of having a great strength staff that the players believe in, and they really believe that those guys are going to make them more explosive players, and that’s a key term for us, that power. We’ve really gone away from the one-rep max mentality, we’ve gone away from thinking about 40 times. It’s miles per hour and speed and different ways, whether it’s 10 yards, 20 yards, 30 yards, different segments of that, and then their power numbers, which to me that’s football. And then we can always talk about how does it transfer from the weight room to the field.”

Obviously, there’s still a long way to go before Indiana gets a chance to show the results on the field. Still, it should be a good sign that Allen sees a much stronger and confident squad entering fall practices.

Paul Harvey

Paul is a lifelong fan and student of all things college football. He has been covering college football since 2017 and the B1G since 2018.