Second of two parts | Part 1: Curt Cignetti handed Kurtis Rourke keys to Indiana’s offense. They made college football history.
BLOOMINGTON — FBS coaches are apprehensive about recruiting Canadian players for many reasons. The bigger field, extra players, unique rules that include the waggle — backfield players are allowed unlimited motion before the snap — combined with concerns over the level of competition create a stigma surrounding Canadian prep players that’s hard to overcome for anyone who doesn’t have freakish size or athleticism. It’s a problem Indiana football quarterback Kurtis Rourke knows all too well. He got very little attention on the recruiting trail as the No. 1 overall Canadian prospect in the 2019 signing class, and the interest he did get was mostly thanks to his older brother Nathan, who was in the midst of a record-setting career at Ohio. “I would say if Kurtis’ last name was Smith we probably wouldn’t have recruited him, but fortunately it was Rourke,” Ohio offensive coordinator Scott Isphording said. The same Rourke that currently has the fifth highest odds to win the Heisman Trophy and is a central figure in IU’s historic 10-0 start is just the third Canadian quarterback to start a game for a power conference team since 2000, per SportsNet. “I think anyone from Canada is a bit of a long shot,” Nathan Rourke said. “I think the Canadian rules and the competition just scares people, or at least casts some doubt especially for quarterbacks. I think it’s enough to deter coaches from making the journey across the border.”The Rourkes didn’t let that stand in their way. Nathan blazed a path into the FBS for this little brother to follow, and now Kurtis is standing on his own two feet as he leads the No. 5 Hoosiers (10-0; 7-0) to new heights.
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Kurtis Rourke’s uniform fits a bit better than it did when he started out in Oakville, Ontario.
He started playing tackle football at 5 years old as part of an 8-and-under league alongside his older brother. The only reason Kurtis stood out at the time was for his comically oversized helmet. “It was just so heavy,” Rourke said with a laugh. “All the equipment was like that, it was just crazy.”It’s the first memory that comes to mind for his father, Larry, as well.
“If he weighed 60 pounds, his helmet was half that,” Larry Rourke said. “If he ever fell to the ground, he had a hard time getting up.”Their first season as teammates culminated with a championship game at Ivor Wynne Stadium, the old home of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, in the dead of winter, and Nathan can still picture his little brother lining up at safety on defense. “This kid was so, so cold,” Nathan said. “He was just wearing these big old regular winter gloves. He didn’t want to tackle anybody. I was playing quarterback and having a blast. He was happy to be there most of the time, but not that day.”Nathan, who is two years older than Kurtis, bears the lion’s share of responsibility for his brother’s discomfort. Their love of football traces back to when Nathan was just a toddler and he spurned cartoons in favor of a highlight video that he watched on a near daily basis recapping the 1996-97 Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl run.The VHS tape has taken on a special significance for the family.
“My mom was pretty strict about screen time,” Nathan said in a phone interview with The Herald-Times. “We could watch television for an hour a day, that tape was about an hour. I wanted to emulate Brett Favre and play like him.”While most Canadian kids take up hockey, the Rourkes quickly became a football family. Nathan told all his grade school teachers that he wanted to be a professional football player when he grew up, and he passed his love for the sport directly to his brother. “Nathan was the leader,” their mother Robyn Rourke said. “I always joke that Kurtis didn’t need any toys, he just needed his brother. Once they could play sports, the rest was history.”
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As a junior in 2014, Nathan Rourke guided Holy Trinity to a No. 2 ranking in the country and the school’s first-ever Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations Championship. The offense averaged nearly 45 points a game and he put up video-game-like numbers (3,000-plus total yards and 38 total touchdowns), but none of that success caught the attention of FBS coaches. “No one knew who he was,” Larry Rourke said. Nathan and his dad spent summers during high school hitting any camps they could find within a six-hour radius — a process Larry would repeat with Kurtis — but nothing seemed to make a difference. That’s why Nathan was eager to pursue an opportunity in the States when one of his coaches asked him if he was interested in playing his senior year in Alabama. It’s not unusual for Canadian football players to relocate — former University of Illinois standouts Sydney and Chase Brown are prominent examples — to get additional exposure. The Rourkes arranged for Nathan to stay with a host family and attend Edgewood Academy in Elmore, Alabama, but less than two weeks before school started the whole plan fell apart. The organization that set everything up pulled the plug leaving Nathan without any place to live for reasons that aren’t clear to this day.“We had already paid a deposit and been working with them for three quarters of the year,” Robyn Rourke said. “We had two options, Nathan finishes his grade 12 back in Ontario, or Larry or I had to move down there with him.”Larry ended up staying back in Ontario while Robyn and Kurtis moved down to Alabama with Nathan. “I really couldn’t wrap my head around it,” Kurtis Rourke said. “ I just finished my freshman year in high school and met all these friends and had to go through it all again at a place that really wanted nothing to do with me.”
That was evident at midyear when everyone in the school started getting report cards except for Kurtis. Robyn finally had to go into the office to see what the problem was and they somehow hadn’t registered him as a student. The frustrating part for the family was that signing day came and went that year without Nathan getting an FBS offer after he had the best season of his career. He threw for 3,779 yards and 59 touchdowns while leading the program to a state title with a 13-0 record. “The family had sacrificed a lot to make it work,” Nathan said. “It was just so deflating.”
Nathan had one FBS staff on the verge of offering him only to get fired on the day they planned to call. Schools like UCLA and Missouri were in talks with him as a backup option if someone flipped, but the dominoes never fell into place.
Instead of accepting an FCS offer, he decided to go the JUCO route and that’s where he popped up on Ohio’s radar. The Bobcats were looking for an insurance policy as the staff developed then-redshirt sophomore Quinton Maxwell. They wanted to bring in an experienced quarterback and the logical route before the transfer portal was seeking out someone from the junior college ranks.Nathan had a successful freshman year at Fort Scott Community College in Kansas and fit the bill. He was named First Team All-Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference with 2,367 yards and 21 total touchdowns (18 passing). When he got to campus, he simply outplayed Maxwell at the start of the year and won the job. He took over as the team’s full-starter in Week 3 after a promising performance in a 44-21 loss to Purdue. “Purdue could not tackle him,” Isphording said. “They tried, but he made so many people miss and that wasn’t something we were able to see during spring and fall camp. He never looked back.”It was that success that cracked open a door for Kurtis in Athens, Ohio.“It wasn’t until years later that I realized how tough that year in Alabama was on Kurtis,” Nathan said. “I was just so focused on accomplishing my own goals that I didn’t realize how tough it was for him. I hope he feels like maybe it was worth it, and he got something out of it in the end.”
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Isphording had some familiarity with recruiting in Canada from his time at Eastern Michigan. The school’s campus in Ypsilanti sits about 35 miles from the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit that crosses over into Windsor, Ontario.
It was one of his recruiting territories at the time like the Cincinnati area is today. He likened the uphill battle Canadian players face trying to land FBS offers to Division II and Division III players trying to land in the NFL. He speaks from personal experience as a former quarterback at Hanover College, a Division III school in southern Indiana. “There are certain things you may be able to do as a Canadian quarterback that if you are playing Ben Davis or say St. Xavier in Cincinnati, that you aren’t going to get away,” Isphording said.
It’s a common practice for college coaches to recruit the siblings of their top players and Isphording’s main goal when he initially pursued Kurtis was to keep Nathan happy as he set numerous school records and led the team to three consecutive bowl wins. “It’s a blessing and a curse,” Isphording said. “You feel pressure to recruit them and you don’t want the sibling of the guy on your team to go somewhere else. It just looks bad, and even worse, if he goes somewhere else and is a good player.”The problem for Isphording? Kurtis didn’t make much of an impression the first few times he saw him throw. “He truly was the little brother,” Isphording said in a phone interview with The Herald-Times. “Kurtis was going into his junior year and he came to our camp, and I’ll be honest with you he didn’t do a thing. He was not noticeable.”Rourke’s physical transformation over the next six months — he grew to 6-foot-5 and put on 20-plus pounds — wiped away any reservations Isphording had about offering him a scholarship.
It didn’t hurt that Rourke also matched his brother’s success at Holy Trinity with a provincial title, two league MVP awards and 4,250 career passing yards. Ohio’s coaching staff did an immediate 180 after Isphording made the trek up to Ontario in 2018 to see Rourke throw in person. They got back to Athens and sought to lock down his verbal commitment as soon as possible. “We were watching his film, and I wasn’t even sure it was the same dude,” Isphording said. “I said I better go up there and see him, sure enough, he threw the ball and I remember after the very first throw going, ‘oh boy.’”Larry and Nathan still wonder if more teams would have come calling had Kurtis held off on verbally committing. Kurtis didn’t want to run the risk of losing his only FBS offer and Ohio’s stable coaching situation — former coach Frank Solich spent 16 years at the school before retiring in 2020 and much of his offensive staff was with him for the long haul — was a major selling point. Nathan’s only other FBS offer while he was at Fort Scott came from an Akron staff led by Terry Bowden that was fired the year after recruiting him. “They played a little bit, but they wanted to wrap him up ’cause they knew what he could be,” Nathan said.
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At one of Rourke’s first practices as a Bobcat, he got confused running a two-minute drill when the offense didn’t get another play after the clock hit zero. In Canada, teams are allowed another snap if the clock runs out between plays. Isphording laughed at the memory but notes that it was one of the few instances where Rourke wasn’t fully versed in the American game. “There was no doubt Kurtis was further ahead coming in because of all the time he would sit around and talk with Nathan,” Isphording said. “There were a lot of the fundamentals and the elementary aspects of the game that Kurtis had a grasp on.” The Rourkes’ time as teammates in 2019 prepared them for the challenges they faced in the years that followed. Nathan was all about the grind in college and maintained a serious approach on and off the field. Kurtis got on campus and immediately developed unique handshakes with nearly every single one of his teammates on offense for the stretch line. “I think I saw Kurtis smile more in a month than his older brother in three years,” Isphording said. It’s part of why Nathan found having Kurtis on campus so rewarding. “I was a backup my rookie year (in the CFL), and took a lot of things Kurtis showed me and I applied it to my role,” Nathan said. “You still have to work hard and develop, but the role is to be the eyes and ears for the starter and be very supportive.”Nathan was a gifted athlete with an innate sense for making would-be tacklers miss while Kurtis possessed a natural throwing motion that most quarterbacks including his brother were envious of. He showcased an ability to just pick up the ball and “rip it” — a phrase multiple people used to describe his throws — from a very young age. “They both had tremendous talent, but developed kind of opposite ends of the quarterback spectrum,” Isphording said. It made Isphording’s job preparing Kurtis to take over for his brother an easy one. Kurtis’ mechanics rarely needed tweaking and Nathan was the perfect study buddy to learn the offense from. While Ohio briefly experimented using a two-quarterback system in 2021 by pairing Rourke up with Armani Rogers, a big-bodied dual-threat who won MWC Freshman of the Year honors early in his career at UNLV, the Bobcats stuck to the succession plan they envisioned when they signed Kurtis.
He started 35 of the team’s 42 games after redshirting.
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Kurtis Rourke had a breakout season in 2022 for many of the same reasons that he’s been successful in Bloomington. He had a solid grasp of Ohio’s scheme, played with a high level of confidence and was surrounded by a skilled group of running backs and wide receivers. Isphording said he trusted Rourke enough to give him a “tremendous amount of leeway” to make changes at the line of scrimmage.The Bobcats also did the same thing as IU coach Curt Cignetti’s braintrust did in 2024 by building the offense around Rourke’s arm talent. Newly hired passing game coordinator Brian Smith helped with that process. Ohio had a challenging non-conference schedule that year with games at Penn State and Iowa State, but things clicked into place for the Bobcats with an impressive seven-game win streak that saw the offense average 37.7 points and 448.4 yards per game.Rourke was one of the most productive quarterbacks in the country during that stretch. He averaged north of 290 passing yards a game, completed 70.1% of his passes and threw 14 touchdowns to only two interceptions. “I think the college football world is getting to see now the 2022 Kurtis Rourke that we all got to see,” Isphording said. One of the defining moments of the season for Rourke came in the 2022 Battle of the Bricks against Miami of Ohio. Rourke threw 162 yards (9 of 12) with three touchdowns in the second half to turn what was a close game against Ohio’s fierce rival into a comfortable victory. The win put his team on the doorstep of clinching an appearance in the MAC title game. That momentum came crashing to a halt the following week when he suffered a torn ACL against Ball State. “It was kind of a freak injury,” Rourke said. “Not much even happened. My back leg kind of got caught in the turf when I threw the ball and I heard something pop.”His final play of the season was a 13-yard completion right to Sam Wiglusz before halftime and finished 46 yards shy of the team’s single-season passing record, but falling short of the milestone wasn’t as upsetting as missing out on the postseason. The Bobcats had a chance to end a 54-year title drought in the MAC title game that they ended up losing 17-7 to Toledo.“Winning a championship was the goal,” Rourke said. “We were so close to doing that and the hardest thing was not being able to finish out that journey.”Rourke spent the weeks that followed in a state of shock and even visited with one of Ohio’s sports psychologists to talk through the injury. His mother flew down from Vancouver to be at his side for the surgery and saw firsthand the toll it took on him. The recognition he earned — he was named MAC Offensive Player of the Year and a Davey O’Brien Award semifinalist — did little to console him.“It was such a setback and so discouraging,” Robyn said. “You have no mental preparation for that especially when it’s non-contact and so random. It would be discouraging for anyone, but for an athlete, it cramps their love of the game.” Kurtis channeled his frustration into beating the nine-to-12-month timeline the doctors gave him for getting back onto the field. He looked at Adrian Peterson, who won an NFL MVP award 12 months removed from having surgery on a torn ACL, for inspiration. Rourke was fully cleared in eight months and started the 2023 season-opener.
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In 2023, Ohio won 10 games in back-to-back seasons for the first time in history, beat Iowa State and won a second consecutive bowl game.As successful as the year was for the Bobcats, it failed to live up to their expectations. The offense brought back nearly their entire starting lineup and all that experience made them one of the favorites to win the league. The fact that they missed out on reaching the conference title game thanks to a 30-16 loss to Miami of Ohio only added to the disappointment.Isphording and Rourke are both quick to take the blame for Ohio’s underachieving offense, but neither likes lingering on the what-ifs. “I felt 100 percent and trusted my knee again,” Rourke said. “There were moments I could have been better. I just took that stuff and learned from it.”Rourke’s decision to leave Ohio wasn’t tied to the team’s struggles. He reached a crossroads where having another all-conference season in the MAC wouldn’t move the needle with NFL scouts.
That led to some soul-searching and long discussions with his inner circle. Nathan encouraged him to take advantage of the transfer portal having experienced life as an undrafted free agent and fringe player on an NFL roster. It wasn’t until Nathan won the CFL Most Outstanding Canadian award in 2022 that NFL teams started to even notice him. He spent most of 2023 as part of Jacksonville’s practice squad — he was twice signed to the active roster — but landed back in the CFL earlier this fall with the BC Lions, his fifth different team in 12 months. Nathan envisioned a more stable future for his brother if he got the chance to shine on a bigger stage. “He told me to put myself in the best spot,” Kurtis Rourke said. “We talked a lot about it, and he just kept saying to surround yourself with the best and Indiana was that spot. Huge program, great team and great coaches.”
The Rourkes are planning a return trip to Ohio for Indiana’s showdown against No. 2 Ohio State. There isn’t a more fitting campus in the country for the game to take place considering the Rourkes spent much of their collegiate career in the shadow of the Buckeyes. “We would go to our games and people would be wearing Ohio State gear all the time, and it would eat at you,” Nathan Rourke said. “It was like, damn, can you at least wear green for the game?”Kurtis smiled widely when he talked about Nathan attending the game on Saturday at Ohio Stadium. It will be the first time Nathan has been able to sit in the stands for one of Kurtis’ starts, and that includes his two years as a starter for Holy Trinity. Outside of the year they overlapped in Athens, they have spent much of the last decade in separate time zones. The stars have finally aligned to bring them together, and they couldn’t be happier. “For him to be going to Columbus, in that environment and have a chance to beat the No. 2 team in the country, it would be cool on so many different levels,” Nathan Rourke said with a pause. “And I think it’s very possible.”
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.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana football: Kurtis Rourke’s unconventional path to greatness
