EAST LANSING, Mich. – The Indiana Hoosier defensive line was chaotic. They directly caused 147 negative yards for Michigan State’s offense. They were the main stopping force to the Spartan offense that jumped out 10-0 over Indiana. The performance left their 62-year-old head coach, Curt Cignetti, in awe.
“That’s really impressive,” Cignetti said after the 47-10 victory. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen those kinds of numbers on a team. Credit to the coach, that’s a great credit to our defense players, staff, and they got after them up front.”
The seven sacks are a team high on the season, beating IU’s six against Western Illinois in week two. It should be noted Western Illinois and Michigan State are very different calibers of opponent.
The man with a front-row view to the dominance is junior linebacker Aiden Fisher. Fisher picked up half a TFL and racked up nine tackles in the win against the Spartans. His success is directly affected by the defensive lineman play. He started to smile when he talked about the line postgame.
“They're just dominant,” Fisher said. “No matter who's in the game, no matter what front we're in, it's just dominant play all across the board.”
Fisher wanted to highlight one player in particular, who’s name is catching on in the national media.
Indiana’s monster named Mikail
“Especially Mikail Kamara, everybody's catching national attention on him, and they should,” Fisher said. “He's a great player, and he’s done phenomenal things for us.”
Redshirt junior Mikail Kamara is having one of the best defensive lineman seasons in the country right now: Twenty-seven tackles, 10 for loss, and seven sacks coming into Saturday’s game.
He left Spartan Stadium adding four and a half TFLs, two and a half sacks, and seven tackles against an offensive line that helped run over defending national champions Michigan’s defense a week prior.
Mikail has garnered attention since Big Ten Media Days from Cignetti, Fisher, and the rest of the players there. The media didn’t take notice until Mikail made them.
All in this together
Fisher credited the whole defense after his shoutout to Kamara.
“But you know, the more this group continues to gel and builds continuity that we need to grow and build, sky’s the limit for us,” Fisher said.
Senior James Carpenter sacked the QB once and poured on another one and half TFLs to the Hoosier total. Carpenter didn’t smile postgame talking about it — he stayed stoic like his head coach does.
“Like I said, it's an explosive defense in this you know, it’s as it was meant to be,” Carpenter said.
Eleven players tallied into the 15 TFLs the Indiana defense produced. Seven of those 11 were the guys who made up the seven sacks that derailed the Spartan offense.
It was a whole unit effort to take MSU’s offense out of the game, just like it was a total team effort to score 47 unanswered points and shut out Michigan State after going down 10-0.
