In this era of extreme player mobility, one fairly reliable measure of the health of a program is roster retention.
Coming off an 11-2 season and an appearance in the College Football Playoff, it was reasonable to expect Indiana might do fairly well when it came to keeping most its key contributors.
IU coach Curt Cignetti says he took a proactive approach to making sure his star players were taken care of up front.
All-American defenders Aiden Fisher, D’Angelo Ponds, and Mikail Kamara all announced their intent to return to IU in the days following the end of the season. On the offensive side, stars like Carter Smith and Elijah Sarratt indicated they were returning as well.
Indiana has had 14 players transfer out since the start of the 2024 season. That’s a fairly typical total for a Power Four program over the last five years.
But Cignetti said all of those players fall into the category of moves that were made because it was mutually beneficial, rather than elite players looking for more prestige and money.
“There really weren’t many conversations (about leaving),” Cignetti said. I think everybody was in a good place, excited about where we’re going. Obviously had a good experience last fall. And really didn’t lose anybody that was in our long-term plan, which is a real plus.
“Now, your key guys, all-conference guys, the very visible players, you know, we handled those guys on the front end. And I like what’s going on. We’re off to a good start in the weight room. So the retention piece was not really an issue.”
Indiana has seen some top talent leave via the portal in years past. Players like Michael Penix, Jr., Dasan McCullough, Reese Taylor, and A.J. Barner come to mind.
And in the days that followed the firing of Tom Allen and the hiring of Cignetti, several members of the 2023 entered the portal. Unsure whether Cignetti would be able to orchestrate the turnaround and how they might fit in, many left the program.
But this time around, not only were key players not leaving the team, some who had already left or decided to leave were coming back.
The 2025 roster will feature some familiar names who didn’t play for the Hoosiers in 2024 but are familiar with Bloomington.
“I thought the one telling thing about what we’ve accomplished in a short time we’ve been here is we had two starters from the year before that had gone to the portal and left — one went to Ole Miss and one went to Colorado — and wanted to return after they saw what was going on here at Indiana,” Cignetti said. “That would be Kahlil Benson and Louis Moore, who earned some All-Big Ten honors in ’23.”
Some of Indiana’s midseason departures in 2024 had a common theme.
Players who were in their final year eligibility wanted to preserve a redshirt season, and they could only do that by making sure they didn’t play in five or more games with Indiana in 2024.
Wideout E.J. Williams fell into this category, and after some bumps in the road ultimately became a retention story as well.
Cignetti shared the back story with Williams this week.
“E.J. wanted to redshirt after his fourth game,” Cignetti said. “And like I said to him, ‘I decide who redshirts.’ If you can help the team, then that’s what everybody is here to do. And he had dreams of playing in the league. It was his last year. So his only recourse was to go into the portal.
“About mid-December we got together. We wanted him back; he wanted to come back. So that was another win for us as well, another guy that had started in ’23, the year before I got here. So I think it says a lot about what went on last year that guys who had left on the front end and then returned.”
IU football: A position-by-position look at what we know about the 2025 roster (UPDATED)
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