Entering a Week 8 battle with No. 3 Indiana on the road, I thought to myself: there’s no way that Aidan Chiles should be under center against the Hoosiers.
My opinion on who should have been starting against the Hoosiers had nothing to do with who I believe is the best option (it’s Chiles), but rather what I thought playing Chiles against the No. 3 team in the country on the road might do to him.
Chiles got injured in the first half of the Nebraska game a couple of weeks earlier, and he hadn’t looked the same since. He finished with fewer than 100 passing yards against the Cornhuskers as well as UCLA, totaling 151 yards and two interceptions in those losses. He clearly looked unhealthy, and word was that he had been practicing lightly all week before Indiana.
And Indiana has one of the nation’s best passing defenses. In fact, the Hoosiers rank No. 23 in the nation against the pass, and that ranking was a lot higher before facing Michigan State.
A quarterback that hadn’t looked healthy in two weeks, coming off a devastating loss to a 1-4 team at home, and who hadn’t practiced much all week facing one of the nation’s top-15 passing defenses? Yeah, that felt like a recipe for disaster, and it was only going to further hurt Chiles’ confidence and make even more fans turn on him with another sloppy performance.
Boy, was I wrong.
Chiles ended up having arguably the most success any quarterback has had against the Hoosiers, and looked confident throughout the 38-13 loss. A lot of points were left on the field which wasn’t solely his fault, and he finished with 243 yards and a touchdown on 27-of-33 completions. He didn’t turn the ball over, and he made all of his throws look routine.
The only knock on him was audibling out of a pass on third-and-7 in the first half and checking into a run play to the short side of the field that went nowhere and stalled a drive.
Other than that, he was pretty much perfect.
Chiles looked like the quarterback we saw through the first four games and proved that the Nebraska and UCLA performances were extreme outliers (potentially because of an injury?).
Any doubt that Chiles is QB1 should have been erased after watching his Indiana performance. He just deserves better coaching.