Editor’s note: This story is the first of two parts. Coming Wednesday: Kurtis Rourke’s long road to Division I football and the detours that solidified his passion.
BLOOMINGTON — What’s the biggest change for Indiana football quarterback Kurtis Rourke since arriving in Bloomington as a transfer last year?
He gets to wear red again. In fact, it’s a pretty big job requirement.
Rourke joked about the change during IU’s bye week as he reflected on the past 12 months of his life. He entered the transfer portal after spending five seasons at Ohio University — three as the team’s starting quarterback — where red was the color of the school’s chief rival, Miami of Ohio and was forbidden for athletes on campus.
The color has suited him just fine as he’s led the No. 5 Hoosiers (10-0, 7-0 Big Ten) to the best start in program history.
He’s been one of the most productive quarterbacks in the country with 2,410 passing yards (71.8%) and 21 touchdowns. He’s the highest-rated passer in the FBS per Pro Football Focus (92.3) and has the second-best efficiency rating (182.7).
Rourke is a national semifinalist for the Maxwell Award, Davey O’Brien Award and Walter Camp Award. He’s also one of five finalists for the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award.
How did the perpetually overlooked talent land at Indiana? New coach Curt Cignetti and his staff — a group with a long history of identifying offensive talent — did their homework while Rourke bought the vision they laid out for a program that was long a punchline in the Big Ten.
The partnership has made IU a national title contender.
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Rourke came out of Holy Trinity School in Oakville, Ontario in the 2019 signing class as an unheralded three-star prospect — he was the No. 1 recruit in Canada but ranked No. 2,221 overall — despite having put up eye-popping numbers while leading his team to a provincial title during his senior year.
As a quarterback from north of the border, he faced an uphill battle landing at an FBS program.
It’s difficult for Canadian-born recruits to get exposure, especially when most collegiate coaches have concerns about the level of competition they face and their ability to adapt quickly to the American game.
Cignetti was among the coaches who largely avoided Canada during his time as a recruiting coordinator and assistant in the power conferences.
“We had some Canadian kids at Pitt way, way back with lukewarm success,” Cignetti said in a phone interview with The Herald-Times. “We dabbled with Canadians at some other schools I’ve been at, but the last one I recruited was at Pittsburgh with Johnny Majors.”
Indiana quarterbacks coach Tino Sunseri got to know the Canadian game having played in the CFL for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, and echoed Cignetti’s sentiments.
“Most of those kids in Canada don’t necessarily have the fundamentals,” Sunseri said. “They aren’t taught them at a young age, so whenever they get to high school, recruiters say this guy needs a couple of years to develop.”
At the time Sunseri played in the CFL, each team had to have a Canadian-born quarterback on the roster, and he enjoyed hearing their unique stories.
“You got to talk to those guys a lot about how they were taught in school, the things they did to get where they were — the different college levels and stuff like that — you could see a lot of the things that were translating to what they could do to play at that level and things they needed to improve on too,” Sunseri said.
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Rourke was long past that transition when he landed on Indiana’s radar. He benefited in his initial foray to the States by following in the footsteps of his older brother Nathan. The three-time All-MAC quarterback paved the way for Kurtis to land at Ohio University.
Kurtis led the Bobcats to back-to-back 10-win seasons and had plenty of individual success as the 2022 MAC Offensive Player of the Year. He would have broken his brother’s single-season passing record if he hadn’t suffered a torn ACL at the end of that season.
He wasn’t getting any NFL draft buzz after the 2023 season and faced many of the same question marks he dealt with coming out of high school.
That made taking advantage of his extra year of eligibility from the COVID-19 pandemic and entering the transfer portal the obvious path forward, but Rourke still agonized over the decision.
The photos from his wedding album help explain why.
Rourke earned two degrees at the school including a Master’s in the Science of Education and Coaching and met his now wife Caroline in Athens, Ohio. They met in 2022 as members of OU’s Athletes in Action chapter, a faith-based organization for student-athletes. She was a two-time All-MAC volleyball player for the Bobcats.
Half of their 20-person bridal party consisted of former teammates from the school, and the guest list included people with ties to the school, including Ohio football head coach Tim Albin and offensive coordinator Scott Isphording.
The relationships they built on campus gave him pause, even as all the advice he received made it clear moving up to the Power Four was the best way to achieve his dream of being drafted.
Rourke also remained grateful to the staff at Ohio for being the only Division I program that offered him an opportunity to play.
“He’s a loyal and leader, and he struggled with the message that was going to send to the rest of his teammates,” his father Larry Rourke said.
Rourke’s closest confidants all encouraged him to explore his options and that overwhelming consensus made a difference.
He officially entered the transfer portal on Dec. 5 of last year.
The Rourkes got married two months later at College Hill Presbyterian in Cincinnati. He was already enrolled at IU, and Isphording got emotional with a mixture of pride and appreciation for his former pupil when he talked about the event.
“As a coach who is 31 years into this, it’s those relationships that you enjoy,” Ishpording said. “It’s not every player, but guys that start three years for you like both Nathan and Kurtis did, you certainly grow close. I’m proud of the man he’s become and what he’s doing there at Indiana. I’d like to think Ohio had a little to do with that.”
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As Rourke charted his future, Cignetti was settling into his new job about 300 miles down the road. He said he was watching the portal “day and night” to see new entrants and his top priority was identifying a quarterback.
The coach who later coined “Google Me” as his catchphrase relied on the search engine as the first step in the process.
“I want to see what their career stats look like, production and numbers,” Cignetti said.
If the numbers were promising he would turn on the newly installed projector in his office to watch cut-ups and game film.
Indiana strongly considered one other transfer quarterback before turning their attention to Rourke. Cignetti declined to reveal the transfer’s name but said it was more of a dual-threat quarterback who played a “different style” than Rourke.
“We were full go on Kurtis as soon as we did the research,” Cignetti added.
Cignetti tasked all the JMU assistants who followed him to Bloomington with scouring the portal as well to find players who would fit their system and replenish a roster that saw a mass exodus of talent during the coaching transition.
His edict from the outset was “production over potential” and his staff benefited from knowing the kind of players who would flourish under the watchful eye of one of Nick Saban’s former disciples. That was particularly important at quarterback since they wanted a veteran who would quickly pick up the offense.
Sunseri had a similar process as Cignetti — he watched at least an entire season of film for all the quarterbacks that would eventually land on his short list — and came to the same conclusion about Rourke.
“You want to be able to see the reactions whenever things don’t go their way, you want to see their body language and how they persevere at hard times,” Sunseri said. “There’s so many things that happen in a season let alone a game that you want to be able to have a guy that’s able to shrug some things off and continue to play at a high level and make sure he understands the most important thing is the next play not what previously happened.”
Rourke knew that better than most.
He tore his ACL in Week 12 of the 2022 season after establishing himself as one of the most promising quarterbacks in the Group of Five. He was named MAC Offensive Player of the Year honors a few weeks removed from having surgery.
While he made it back for the 2023 opener, he struggled at times and the offense took a step backward. The challenges Rourke faced were just as instructive for Sunseri as the success he had a year earlier.
“He didn’t have quite the stats, but the way he played the game and the way he did things, you were able to see he was more than capable of being able to play at a high level,” Sunseri said.
Sunseri was one of the first coaches to send a direct message to Rourke on X when his name showed up in the transfer database. Rourke joked he gained a lot of new followers on social media when the news broke and IU’s quarterbacks coach was one of them.
For Sunseri, the initial phone conversation they had later that day was a pivotal moment in the process.
Sunseri needed to hear Rourke was just as ready to be Indiana’s backup if the competition didn’t go his way despite the quarterback’s impressive resume.
“Are you ready to be the best teammate you can be?” Sunseri asked. “And make sure you are still leading the room and be a guy that can elevate the people around you and not be a problem.”
Rourke’s genuine response reaffirmed the positive vibes Sunseri felt throughout the call.
“He told me, ‘Coach, I want to be able to learn from you and I want to be able to play for coach Cignetti and Indiana,’” Sunseri said. “Him being able to say that with the qualities and traits you were able to see on tape, I thought it was a no-brainer. That’s the guy we need to be able to have in year one of our program.”
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Wake Forest looked like it would be Indiana’s biggest competition for Rourke. The Demon Deacons had a revolving door at the position in 2023 after former All-ACC quarterback Sam Hartman entered the transfer portal and signed with Notre Dame.
They had multiple quarterbacks leave after the season and were set to bring Rourke to Winston-Salem for an official visit before the Hoosiers.
Rourke’s father was at the Vancouver airport waiting for a flight to meet his son in North Carolina when their plans changed. The coaching staff canceled after receiving a verbal commitment from former Louisiana Tech and Boise State starting quarterback Hank Bachmeier, a sixth-year transfer who had a similar level of experience (37 career starts) as Rourke.
He zeroed in on the Hoosiers as BYU and Vanderbilt also expressed interest.
“We were going to go to Indiana later that week, but when they heard he wasn’t going to Wake Forest they had him come right away,” Larry Rourke said. “I moved my work schedule around and flew right out to Bloomington.”
Rourke’s official visit came at a busy time for the newly hired staff as they played host to dozens of transfers and high school recruits leading up to early signing day. The quarterback’s visit had a business-trip-like vibe with an itinerary that focused on getting Rourke to FaceTime with the coaching staff.
Sunseri showed Rourke, his father and his wife (then fiancee) around the facilities at Memorial Stadium while highlighting the program’s resources.
While the Hoosiers might not sit atop the Big Ten in the football facility arms race, the work the athletic department has done to centralize and upgrade everything from the locker room to the weight room in recent years made a strong impression on a quarterback coming from the MAC.
The most revealing part of the trip came when Rourke sat down with Sunseri and offensive coordinator Mike Shananan to watch film in the offensive staff room — much of it from their time at JMU — and get an overview of the offense.
“They had great track records and you could see they liked to throw the ball around at James Madison and had a balanced attack,” Larry Rourke said. “They were sharp and had creative minds. It was just a very exciting opportunity.”
They also highlighted how successful that offense has been in recent years.
At JMU, Cignetti had three different quarterbacks earn conference Offensive Player of the Year awards and his former starter Cole Johnson broke the school’s long-standing single-season records for passing touchdowns and yards in 2021, and those achievements are a point of pride for the coach.
“It was a really good representation of who they are and what their vision is,” Rourke said at the time. “It was a very NFL-like offense and that’s what I wanted to see from all the places I talked to. That meeting played a really big part in my decision.”
Before driving back home to Athens, he went up to the third floor in the North End Zone of Memorial Stadium for a face-to-face meeting with Cignetti. The message he delivered to Rourke sounds prophetic now that IU is 10-0 and in contention for a spot in this year’s College Football Playoff.
“They have won wherever they went and that was a big driving force in their pitch and rightly so,” Rourke said in an interview with The Herald-Times back in December. “He said they aren’t going to rebuild or take a year to get things going. They are going to come in and win this year.”
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Cignetti chuckles when asked to revisit the quarterback competition that took place throughout IU’s offseason. He was tight-lipped about the proceedings involving Rourke, returning quarterback Tayven Jackson and freshman signee Tyler Cherry.
“Why open them up to all you guys?” Cignetti said, referring to the media, but he was just as reserved with the quarterbacks themselves.
It was a much different experience than Rourke had at Ohio where he shared a very transparent relationship with his former offensive coordinator.
“We didn’t have any idea, we took how many reps we were getting with who (as a sign), but it was kind of just like go out there and play,” Rourke said.
Rourke’s vast experience advantage over his fellow quarterbacks showed up on the practice field, and by the end of spring, he was taking most of the first-team reps.
“The coaching staff kept that pretty close,” Larry Rourke said. “When we talked to him (Kurtis) he never gave us an indication he was the starter. He just would say I’m getting first-team reps. We went to the spring game, the number one offense didn’t do as good. We didn’t know how it was going to play out, they obviously had a plan in place.”
Cignetti paid Rourke the ultimate compliment when he compared his offseason to the JMU transfers that Indiana signed at mid-year. He credited that group for setting the winning standard the program is benefitting from now.
His teammates echoed that sentiment.
“Every time we would huddle up for a series, he’s getting us going, telling us what we need to do, that we need to pick it up or keep going,” Indiana veteran offensive lineman Mike Katic said. “It was early on in fall camp that I realized, this dude gets it. Leadership comes super natural to him. He’s always been a loud guy in the means of being a quarterback. It comes so naturally to him.”
It became official when Rourke took the first snap of a 31-7 win over FIU. He joined Jesse Palmer at Florida and Christian Veilleux at Pittsburgh as the only Canadian quarterbacks to start a game for a power conference since 2000, per SportsNet.
“I won’t be the last,” Rourke said. “We are getting more and more players out of Canada that are having an impact. You look at the award for best Canadian athlete (Jon Cornish Trophy), the list gets longer every single time with more impact players.”
He got IU off to a solid start that included a 77-point performance against Western Illinois in Week 2 that broke a single-game team record that was set back in 1901. The Hoosiers made it through those tune-ups before traveling out west to face UCLA at the Rose Bowl.
When Cignetti looks back at Rourke’s season, he identifies that game as when it all clicked into place for Rourke, who was near perfect with 307 yards on 25 of 33 passing and four touchdowns. It was only the sixth start of his career against a power conference opponent and was 1-4 in those previous games.
“I thought he was really sharp,” Cignetti said. “He built on every success after that.”
Rourke said his success against UCLA stems from the film session he had after the season opener. He was frustrated over his performance against FIU for trying to do too much and playing the game like he had something to prove.
“I didn’t stick to my training,” Rourke said. “I’ve seen all the coverages that defenses are going to throw at me, I know what everyone is going to do. I settled down after that. We got a ton of amazing athletes on this team and all I have to do is get the ball to them.”
The only speed bump for the Hoosiers on their way 10-0 was the thumb injury on his throwing hand that Rourke suffered against Nebraska.
He joined his team on the sidelines for the second half and put on a smile as Jackson brought him over to the student section in the corner of Memorial Stadium for a curtain call after the win, but he was still reeling from the x-ray results.
“I shed some tears,” Rourke said. “I was like how long am I going to be out? I wanted to be part of what this team was doing.”
Rourke didn’t get an answer to that question until he underwent surgery a few days later.
He credits Indianapolis hand specialist Dr. Lance Rettig, an IU alum, for helping him avoid the fate he suffered in 2022 when he had to watch Ohio compete in the MAC Football Championship Game and the Arizona Bowl from the sidelines.
“It was a miracle,” Rourke said, calling back to his faith. “It was definitely the goal to be back as soon as I could. I didn’t know if it would be Michigan State, a lot of people said it wasn’t going to be the case.”
“I saw it improving throughout the week and I believe God was a big part of that. He put Dr. Rettig in my life and the whole training staff. The swelling went down and it was just a matter of being able to grip the football.”
Rourke still finds it amazing that he didn’t even miss a full week of practice. The Hoosiers picked up where they left off when he returned to the huddle with 263 passing yards and four touchdowns in a 47-10 win over the Spartans.
The victory set a new IU record for the best start in program history, a mark previously held by the 1967 team that reached the Rose Bowl.
Indiana is hoping to make more memories in the coming weeks starting with a trip to Columbus on Saturday. It isn’t lost on Rourke or his family that this is exactly what Cignetti said was possible a year ago.
“To his credit, it has worked out exactly as he said it would,” Larry Rourke said.
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
