When North Texas takes the field at Memorial Stadium on Saturday, the quarterback lining up across from Indiana won't be a stranger. He will be a Hoosier. Or at least he used to be one.
Tayven Jackson, a Greenwood, Indiana native who spent two seasons under center for the Hoosiers, has been named as the starting quarterback for the North Texas Mean Green. It's a homecoming with a twist: the local kid, the little brother of IU basketball legend Trayce Jackson-Davis, walking back into Memorial Stadium wearing a different shade of colors.
From Greenwood to Rocky Top
Long before the transfer portal became part of his story, Jackson was one of the country’s most sought-after after high school arms. At Center Grove High School in Greenwood, he threw for 4,813 career yards and 47 touchdowns, completing more than 60 percent of his passes across three varsity seasons. His senior year alone produced 1,842 passing yards and 21 touchdowns, numbers that helped make him a nationally ranked Top-15 quarterback.
That production led him to commit to the University of Tennessee to begin his college career.
Jackson's path to Saturday has taken him through four programs. He appeared in three games as a true freshman at Tennessee in 2022 before entering the transfer portal and landing at Indiana.
Four transfers in five years
In his first season in Bloomington in 2023, Jackson competed with Brendan Sorsby for the starting job. After the two split time through the first two games, Jackson was named the starter heading into IU's third game of the season. He went on to make five starts that year.
His second season in Bloomington, 2024, is the one Hoosier fans remember most. During Indiana's run to the College Football Playoff, starter Kurtis Rourke went down with a thumb injury against Nebraska; Jackson stepped in at halftime and delivered, keeping the undefeated season alive. The following week, he made his first start of the season against Washington, throwing for 124 yards and a touchdown, including a 42-yard strike to Omar Cooper Jr., and a rushing touchdown in another Indiana victory.
In January 2025, Jackson transferred to UCF, where he took over as the full-time starter. He appeared in 11 games with 10 starts for the Knights, throwing for a career-high 2,151 yards with 10 touchdowns and 8 interceptions. Then, on Jan. 10, 2026, he transferred again, this time to North Texas, setting up Saturday's return trip to Bloomington.
Across his four college stops, Jackson has now appeared in 27 games with 16 starts, completing 62.8 percent of his passes for 3,451 career yards, 16 touchdowns and 14 interceptions, while adding eight more scores on the ground.
IU coach Curt Cignetti hasn't forgotten what he saw from Jackson in an Indiana uniform just two years ago.
“Tayven played really good football for us in 2024,” Cignetti said this week, recalling the Nebraska relief effort and the Washington start that resulted in wins.
Cignetti added that Jackson has a live arm, can move, and is simply a good football player who's proven he can start and win games at this level.
A family name Bloomington knows well
Jackson's ties to Indiana run deeper than his own playing days. He's the younger brother of Trayce Jackson-Davis, the former IU basketball All-American forward who became a fan favorite during his four years in Bloomington before being drafted into the NBA. Jackson-Davis now plays for the Toronto Raptors. Jackson-Davis will be in Bloomington on Saturday, although he says he won't be wearing the cream and crimson.
“I’m going to be repping the Mean Green with my brother. It’s always family first,” Jackson-Davis said in an interview with Sam Acho and former IU men's basketball director of athletic performance Clif Marshall. “I have no hate against Indiana by any means, but it’s definitely going to be a Mean Green show. I’m going to be there front and center cheering them on.”
Saturday is an unusual day for a family so tightly woven into Indiana athletics history. The Jackson name will be in green on the visiting sideline as one of the most notable Indiana basketball icons cheers him and the Mean Green on.
Winning the job in Denton
Despite transferring to North Texas, the starting quarterback position wasn’t promised to Jackson. North Texas was forced to retool their entire roster after former head coach Eric Morris left to become the new head coach at Oklahoma State. When Morris left, he took last year’s American Conference Offensive Player of the Year, Drew Mestemaker, with him to Stillwater.
New head coach Neal Brown, who spent last season at Texas as an assistant and six seasons prior at West Virginia as head coach, was forced to bring in over 50 transfers to replace the 30 players who departed Denton after the 12-2 season in 2025. From that overhauled group, Brown chose experience, naming Jackson the starting quarterback late in fall camp.
The North Texas coaching staff leans on Jackson’s experience to lead the team into 2026. Brown says the locker room has fully bought into Jackson as the starter, describing it as a team that believes in him.
“He hasn’t had a storybook career. He’s gone through adversity. He’s learned from it. He’s grown from it. I think he’s hardened,” Brown said Tuesday. “I think his story is going to be a story of redemption.”
What it means for Saturday
For Indiana’s coaching staff, familiarity only helps them when scouting Jackson. With roughly 70 new players on the North Texas roster, Cignetti and the Indiana coaching staff have compared scouting for this game to piecing together a program's tape by looking at three different programs: West Virginia, Texas and Baylor.
Cignetti thinks that this is one of the more difficult preparation periods he’s ever dealt with as a head coach.
“I’ve never really played a game quite like this one, where there are so many new faces, both players and coaches,” Cignetti said in a press conference on Monday.
In the one position where new information usually matters most, the Hoosiers already have a book on their opponent, built from two seasons of practices, meetings, and game reps with Jackson himself.
Whether that history amounts to an edge won’t be clear until kickoff at noon Saturday. But for the fans in Bloomington who remember Jackson’s relief effort in 2024, and who spent four years cheering on his brother inside Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, Saturday’s opener carries a little extra weight. A hometown quarterback, all grown up, coming back to Memorial Stadium on the other side of the field, with his brother in the crowd in a green jersey.
