Josh Hoover, Nick Marsh lead Indiana past North Texas 52-16

The Barstool College Football Show set up shop outside Memorial Stadium for Indiana's title-defense opener, and the vibe was pure preseason theater before a snap was played. Dave Portnoy dragged out his personal Big Ten power rankings board in front of a crowd of fans, ranking teams like Michigan, Oregon and Indiana itself while the rest of the crew needled him about needing extra room on the whiteboard.

Dave Portnoy

@stoolpresidente

My unbiased top 10 teams in the Big Ten (We may need a bigger board)

Then the actual football started, and it got serious fast. Josh Hoover, the TCU transfer brought in to replace Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza, took his first snap in Cream and Crimson and immediately found Michigan State transfer Nick Marsh for a 15-yard touchdown. It was the kind of moment Indiana fans had been waiting all offseason to see confirmed live.

Pardon My Take

@PardonMyTake

Nick Marsh Welcome to Indiana

Hoover kept it up all afternoon, finishing 13-of-16 for 231 yards and 4 touchdowns without a turnover as Indiana rolled to a 52-16 win. Charlie Becker caught 2 of those touchdowns on 4 catches for 64 yards, and Marsh added his own scoring grab, giving the new-look Hoosiers offense a clean coming-out party. It extended the program's active winning streak, dating back to last year's 16-0 national title run under Curt Cignetti, to 17 straight games.

It wasn't all clean. Hoover took a shot to the face that left him bleeding from the nose in the second quarter, and he stayed on the field anyway, up 21-3 at the time.

Between drives, Memorial Stadium unveiled its new national championship signage for the first time — the '2025 National Champions' banner going up above the Hoosier football wordmark, a sight that still doesn't compute for a program that had exactly one 10-win season before Cignetti showed up in 2024.

Barstool Sports

@barstoolsports

Imagine telling someone 2 years ago that this is at Indiana’s football stadium

The best running commentary of the day, though, came from Mike Katic, Indiana's most locked-in fan on the internet, who narrated the whole game pitch by pitch — worrying about the secondary, hyping up Hoover ('HOO HOO HOO HOOVER!!... All in on him. Heisman.'), and wincing every time a lineman got beat. Dante, watching along, summed up the debut simply: 'I know it's North Texas, but this Indiana QB looked really fucking good.' By the final whistle Katic had already turned the page, signing off with '1-0... onto Howard!' — one week into the title defense, and the show from Bloomington already has its next storyline.