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BLOOMINGTON – In the summer of 2023, hoping to smooth the road for then-coach Tom Allen to reach bowl eligibility, Indiana’s athletic department paid a $1 million buyout to remove itself from the last two years of a three-year series with Louisville.
In its place, the department planned to add more winnable nonconference home games, its intentions easy to read: Facing a future defined by a school’s status in football, IU meant to make it easier to win enough games annually to raise its own program’s floor.
No one could have known how quickly that program’s needs would shift.
What do first CFP rankings mean for IU? Choose your own adventure.
‘We think highly of Indiana.’ Playoff committee explains IU ranking.
Now, the Hoosiers are 9-0 in Curt Cignetti’s first season as head coach. They debuted at No. 8 in the first College Football Playoff rankings Tuesday night, and No. 9 in the seeding on account of No. 9 BYU earning a bye as a top-four conference champion.
The Hoosiers present a fascinating case — they have been winning like no one else in the country, with the largest average margin of victory in all of college football, but they’ve done it against far and away the easiest schedule of any of the 12 teams in Tuesday’s reveal. Indiana is the only team in that dozen with a triple-digit strength of schedule, according to ESPN’s Football Power Index, and only one other, Notre Dame, even has a SOS outside the top 70.
It makes the ground underneath IU’s feet more perilous than some direct competitors, but how much more perilous remains to be seen. Which is why the committee should take care in how it treats the Hoosiers, and recognize the precedent it will be setting in the way it deals with Indiana. Because it is going to get another Indiana.
Two years ago, this sort of thing wouldn’t have been a problem.
If anything, the Big Ten had the opposite issue. In the four-team Playoff era, when the path to a semifinal berth was much more narrow, the conference’s clustering of its best programs in its East division artificially depressed the ability of one of the country’s two major leagues to consistently compete for multiple spots in the field.
In the five years before this one (removing the COVID season when teams did not play full schedules), only twice were the old Big Ten East’s big three — Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State — not the three highest-ranked teams in ESPN’s final FPI ranking of the season. Never once in that span was a team from the old West top two, and only one team, Wisconsin, broke that hegemony.
The Big Ten centralizing all its power in one of its two divisions meant it rarely gave itself the chance to push a conference title game that matched up two teams that might both make an argument for Playoff consideration, win or lose in Indy.
Now, the league faces the opposite problem, and it’s not alone.
In an era of 16-, 17- and 18-team conferences, schedules are going to be as unbalanced as we’ve ever seen in college football.
In 2021, five Big Ten teams finished in the FPI top 20. Four played in the Big Ten East, and the only one — Penn State — that did not defeat at least one of the other three that season lost to Ohio State by nine, Michigan by four and Michigan State by three. Each team played the other three, because they shared a division.
This year, there is a clear hierarchy in the Big Ten, with (according to current FPI ranking) No. 2 Ohio State, No. 7 Oregon, No. 10 Indiana and No. 11 Penn State each entering the home stretch with zero or one losses. All four teams appeared in the top eight of the first Playoff rankings.
Collectively, they have played each other twice, Ohio State at Oregon, and Ohio State at Penn State. The Buckeyes host Indiana later this month in the last game between the three remaining in the regular season. None of Indiana, Oregon or Penn State play each other.
Undeniably, the Big Ten is in this position partly because the bottom fell out of its middle class in October. USC, the next highest-ranked Big Ten team in the FPI at No. 17, is currently 4-5, while teams like Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Illinois have either struggled for even footing all season, or are slumping their way into November.
Even the teams now holding together that middle class aren’t major players in CFP strength-of-schedule conversation. Iowa and Minnesota, each 6-3, only face one of the top four teams in the conference once all season. Iowa lost at Ohio State in October, and the Gophers host Penn State later this month. That’s it.
We’re also dealing in limited data sets right now. It’s possible when we get 3-5 years of the 12-team Playoff (if we even make it that far before it’s expanded again) we’ll find these kinds of seasons are outliers.
But the data we have doesn’t stop with the Big Ten. Other conferences are encountering a similar phenomenon.
Iowa State and BYU, the two highest-ranked Big 12 teams in the committee’s first top 25, will not play unless it’s in their conference championship game. ACC frontrunner Miami, undefeated and No. 4 in the first Playoff ranking, doesn’t play any of Clemson, Pitt or SMU — the three teams chasing the Hurricanes in the ACC — in the regular season.
Miami might be the most direct argument for IU fans’ complaints about brand bias, but Indiana is the best case study for the question of resume against metrics. The Hoosiers have a high-flying offense, a disruptive, stingy defense and the heaviest ankle weight of perception leaning against them: Who have they played?
When you spread conferences out this way, you risk these kinds of resumes. Teams can only play nine of a possible 15, 16 or 17 opponents. It’s harder to engineer schedules to lift everyone.
Louisville debuted at No. 22 in the first rankings Tuesday night. Maybe if Indiana had kept the Cardinals on its schedule and won that game, the Hoosiers would be in a better position. Of course, if they’d beaten Louisville, then Louisville wouldn’t be in the top 25 right now. Just as they’d be in a better position if Nebraska, for example, weren’t in something of a tailspin, but there’s a possibility — perhaps a good one — that tailspin began when the Cornhuskers lost by 49 on the road three weeks ago at … Indiana.
Selection committees famously move the bar they ask teams to clear year on year. It’s confounded and frustrated basketball coaches on many a Selection Sunday. And that’s not entirely on the committee. You have to find comparison points to sort teams. Otherwise, there’s no reasonable way to draw up rankings.
But this committee finds itself at an interesting intersection this year. Just as the Playoff expands, conferences contract, and in two dimensions, the old methods of sorting through contenders will need to be modernized.
How it approaches Indiana — particularly one-loss Indiana with that loss coming at Ohio State — will represent precedent for a question that’s bound to be asked again, in a sport more centralized than it’s ever been.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IU’s football’s fascinating CFP case: Winning big but with no big wins