In some respects, Tom Allen has been here before.

Promoted from defensive coordinator to head coach at Indiana in the wake of Kevin Wilson’s departure in December 2016, Allen and the Hoosiers began their 2017 season with an unusual, unenviable Big Ten conference game. Welcoming No. 2 Ohio State to Memorial Stadium for a Thursday, Aug. 31 night game, with ESPN’s College GameDay on campus, the Hoosiers played to a halftime lead before ultimately dropping a 49-21 decision.

Three years later, amidst an offseason unlike any other in college football, Allen and the Hoosiers are looking to begin the season on a better note in spite of the many challenges presented by the past eight months of COVID-19 and its fallout.

“You throw in the mix opening with a Big Ten team. There’s no chance to get guys broken-in in an incremental standpoint,” Allen told reporters Monday. “It feels a lot like 2017 when we opened against Ohio State here at home. That was a challenging opportunity, so it feels similar to that, playing a team of that caliber.

“The bottom line is that you have to have all of those typical first game questions answered, but the margin for error is much, much smaller.”

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As Allen would go on to say, that’s because the Hoosiers are expecting an opponent who will present a challenge of a similar magnitude to the Buckeyes three years ago. And for the program to reach its next levels of progress, hoping to build upon the success of an 8-5 season in 2019 that represented the Hoosiers' first above .500 since Bill Lynch's first season in 2007, they'll need to get through more games like the one against the Nittany Lions with wins than losses.

In sizing up the No. 8-ranked Nittany Lions, Allen said the’ offense boasts a deep group of terrific running backs, has an offensive line he described as one of the best in the country, a quarterback he called “excellent,” a strong receiving corps and “arguably the best tight end in the country.” Along with a new offensive coordinator in Kirk Ciarrocca, the end result will be an immediate set of challenges presented by Penn State’s offense, particularly in the earliest stages of the game (3:30 p.m., FS1).

“Then you throw in the other variable, which is a new offensive coordinator. There's no question, you watch what he did at Minnesota, but it's never gonna look the same,” Allen said. “The personnel is different and every year it's a little different, so you don't really know for sure. You got an idea, but you don't know for sure, so you're just trying to figure all that stuff out.

“There's going to be a lot of adjustments made after the first couple series on both sides of the football and probably special teams. But that's where our coaching staff is going to have to be, really, really sharp with that area and be able to adapt to what they're showing us and what they're doing to us and we've got to have answers.”

In Allen’s tenure with the Hoosiers, those answers have proven challenging to find when facing ranked opponents. In three seasons, the Hoosiers have fallen in each of their 13 opportunities against ranked opponents, among the most recent coming last Nov. 16 when No. 9 Penn State pulled out a 34-27 win at Beaver Stadium, followed by a 39-14 defeat suffered at the hands of No. 13-ranked Michigan the next week.

Indicating that the Indiana program takes no solace or encouragement from coming close or remaining competitive with ranked opponents, Allen stressed that heightened attention to detail in all three phases of the game, and especially on special teams, will be critical on Saturday.

“I do think it adds a sense of urgency and a heightened focus to your guys when they know they're playing a team of the caliber of Penn State to open the season in everything that you do,” Allen said. “We have goals as a program and beating those Top 25 teams is something that we haven't been able to do a lot in the past. So that's one of our team's goals that we go through and the team came up with these. That's the objective that we have. Playing team like Penn State gives us that opportunity.

“We talk about what's next for our program, it's winning these games. Being close, it's no longer acceptable or the goal or the objective whatsoever, it's to find a way to finish and win these games. We've been in them. We've been close. We now have to finish them.”

Penn State’s recent history with the Hoosiers demonstrates the point.

While losing just once to the Hoosiers in the 22-game history of meetings between the two programs, Penn State has been tested in each of the last two meetings, a 33-28 decision at Indiana in 2018 and last year’s 34-27 game. And in welcoming their own new offensive coordinator to the equation for this year’s meeting, promoting Nick Sheridan to OC from stints in charge of the quarterbacks (2017-18) and tight ends (2019), the Hoosiers are hoping to present just as many challenges to Penn State as the Nittany Lions present to them.

“You take all those things combined and it creates a much more challenging situation,” Allen said. “Everybody's kind of in similar situations other than the coordinator piece, and I guess you could say the same thing for us, we have a new coordinator as well on offense, so I guess both teams are facing a similar situation.”

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