Who’s going to kick for IU football? Coaches aren’t sure yet

Jordan Guskey | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Mind Your Banners: The IU Football Season Preview Spectacular, pt. 1 IndyStar IU Insider Zach Osterman and Chronic Hoosier begin their football preview with Part 1 of their breakdown of Hoosiers.

IU at Florida International, Sept. 1, 7 p.m., CBS Sports

​​​​​BLOOMINGTON – The quarterback position isn’t the only spot on IU’s roster where coach Tom Allen and his staff are waiting for someone to separate themselves and make it obvious they’re the man.

Questions abound for the Hoosiers at center, safety, linebacker and, with Griffin Oakes’ collegiate career over, kicker. It’s been clear since fall camp started three names — Logan Justus, Jared Smolar and Charles Campbell — are in the running to replace the only Hoosier kicker ever to win the Big Ten’s Bakken-Andersen Kicker of the Year award twice.

Mind Your Banners: The IU Football Season Preview Spectacular, pt. 1

More: IU's Reese Taylor talks about adjusting during fall camp

Email newsletter: IU Insider heads into your inbox throughout the season

Justus is a redshirt junior, Smolar a Rutgers transfer and redshirt sophomore, and Campbell a true freshman who arrived in Bloomington as a U.S. Army All-American. None have kicked for IU in a live game, and only Smolar owns game experience in college from his time on kickoffs for the Scarlet Knights.

“We’ve got several position battles and that’s a very intense one,” Allen said. “Right now coming out of the scrimmage I felt that Logan and Charles have kind of become the two front runners for that position, for field goals.”

Allen wants to use one kicker on field goals and another on kickoffs, with Smolar, who averaged 55.1 yards per kickoff as a freshman at Rutgers, the front runner. Special teams coordinator William Inge, who spent the past five years coaching IU linebackers, said he plans to make a decision on each spot about a week before IU’s season opener Sept. 1 at Florida International.

Inge said he told Allen whoever’s named the starter will be someone he’s confident in, and whoever isn’t will be ready in case he’s needed. Inge isn’t averse to rotating kickers, and the idea of using one kicker for short-range attempts and another for long-range kicks isn’t foreign to him.

But who fills in when will depend which player shows Inge and the rest of the coaching staff he not only can kick the ball far and be accurate, but do both in high pressure situations.

“We know we all can kick and we all can do our job when it’s 70 and sunny,” Inge said. “But when the heat is turned up, when everything’s on the line and you’ve got 100,000 fans screaming against you, can you still have that same composure, that same calmness, to execute the muscle memory that it needs to be able to put that ball through the uprights?”

How Campbell is able to drive and lift the ball makes him a “special” talent in Inge’s eyes, but even if he doesn’t start it’s not as if he’ll be behind past stalwarts at the position. Oakes redshirted in 2013 before he owned the position the next four years and set a program mark with 69 field goals. Mitch Ewald had redshirted in 2009 before he set the record Oakes surpassed.

Inge appeared open, with the whole special teams unit, to using the new redshirt rule to his advantage, too. It would mean a player with a redshirt year to give, like Campbell, could play in four games and still leave 2018 with four years of eligibility to his name.

Whatever Inge decides, it isn’t the first time he’s coached special teams units in his coaching career.

Punter Haydon Whitehead, who’s the front runner to retain the job he held in 2017, said Inge has helped the group stay focused and improve at a pace quicker than what they were capable of last fall.

“I think sometimes it’s easy for specialists, in particular, to get a little bit lost in their own world and the practice schedule and all that sort of stuff,” Whitehead said. “Coach Inge has been really good with teaching us the discipline that we need to sort of keep on top of everything and make sure that even when we’re not in live segments in practice we’re still doing everything we can to work on our craft.”

Inge isn’t shy about what effect his group can have on games.

“Coach Allen definitely knows that when you’re a developmental program and you’re going to be in so many close games, special teams is your edge often,” Inge said. “Most of the time in all of your one possession games it’s going to come down to special teams.”

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Jordan Guskey on Twitter at @JordanGuskey or email him at jguskey@gannett.com.