Kurtis Rourke reaches uncharted territory for Canadian defenseman

Kurtis Rourke is officially in uncharted territory for the Canadian quarterback, leading the undefeated Indiana Hoosiers in November with a berth in the College Football Playoff in sight.

No Canadian has ever led a team so well, so far into a season.

It was a remarkable showing for a player who played high school football in Oakville, Ont., and then followed older brother Nathan to Ohio University in the Mid-American Conference.

Most of his five seasons were spent outside the national spotlight. But all that began to change when Rourke entered the transfer portal last December to exercise the extra season option granted to him by the COVID-shortened 2020 season.

The results have been nothing short of stunning: an undefeated 9-0 season, Indiana ranked eighth nationally earlier this week, and Roark being included in the Heisman Trophy conversation, ranked fifth by ESPN this week, ahead of big names like like Alabama’s Jalen Milroe, Colorado’s Sheader Sanders and Penn State’s Drew Allar.

Not bad for a player who was ranked as the 97th-best quarterback prospect in his recruiting class in 2019 and the 17th-best available quarterback in the portal last winter.

Rourke played last season believing it would likely be his last season in college football, but he began to second-guess his decisions near the end of a year in which he did not live up to the expectations he had set in the previous season with Ohio.

Around the same time, Indiana was in the process of hiring Curt Cignetti as its new coach, fresh from a career at James Madison University where his team had won victories with a high-powered pro-style offense.

Cignetti arrived in Bloomington talking big about being immediately competitive in the Big Ten, which seemed like a fantasy at the time.

To do that, he needed an experienced defenseman to lead his team, and he chose Rourke, describing his decision to pursue him while watching tape “as soon as I saw him.”

Rourke did his own research on Cignetti’s performance at JMU and liked what he saw, especially the professional scheme and the desire to be immediately competitive.

The combination turned out to be magical. Rourke completed 73.3 percent of his passes, throwing 19 touchdown passes with just three interceptions.

While it may seem like Rourke came out of nowhere to the average American college football fan, his path has had its fair share of twists and turns.

The path from Canada to quarterback at the Division I level is not a well-worn one, especially among power conferences.

(Only Florida’s Jesse Palmer in the late 1990s and Christian Veilleux, who played half a season at Pitt in 2023, have started games as Canadian defensemen for power-conference teams in the past 30 years.)

Ohio was willing to take him straight out of Canadian high school ball in part because of its familiarity with Nathan, who was still the starting quarterback when Curtis arrived as a freshman in 2019.

But while the 6-foot-1 Nathan was more of a dual-threat quarterback in an offense that relied heavily on the run, the 6-foot-5 Kurtis played more of a pro-style offense for the Bobcats.

In 2022, as a junior at Ohio State, he had a standout season, completing 69.1% of his passes for 3,257 yards, 25 touchdowns with just four interceptions. However, a season-ending ACL injury ended any chance he had of transferring to a bigger program and instead put him on the path to a full recovery in the offseason.

Rourke was dropped just days before the start of the 2023 season but was never able to live up to his performance from the previous season. He refused to blame his woes on injury as he completed 63.5 percent of his passes for 2,207 yards, 11 touchdowns and five interceptions.

So when the opportunity arose to try to end his college career on a higher note, he made the move, believing Cignetti would deliver on his promise and make the Hoosiers instantly competitive.

No one could have predicted how competitive Indiana would be this season or how well Rourke would thrive in Cignetti’s system.

The transition to a new coach and program for one final collegiate season required Rourke to work for several months before the season.

But Rourke told himself he wasn’t here to save the program and adopted a mentality of just getting the ball into the hands of the playmakers. The reward was huge.

The Hoosiers, coming off a 47-10 win over Michigan State, have three games left to complete a perfect regular season: at home this weekend against Michigan, at Ohio State on Nov. 23 and then at home against Purdue.

All of these games will attract national attention as Rourke is projected to have an opportunity to make it to the National Football League. How good that opportunity is will depend on how he performs over the next stretch and likely during the playoffs in December.

There have been many great stories about Canadians playing NCAA football in recent years, as players from the country have reached new heights at some of America’s biggest programs.

Kurtis Rourke has set the bar higher than any of them.