Has there ever been a team more polarizing than the 2024 Indiana Hoosiers? Initially they were a loved, feel-good story that almost everyone was excited about as they unexpectedly put together their greatest season ever. Then later in the same season they became a lightning rod and a team that was crucified by many fans and media members.
This article is not trying to rain on the great season Indiana had. My intent is to better frame their season vs. the extremes I seem to read about Indiana depending on where you are from and what conference you belong to. I am sure I will get some heavy pushback on this but so be it because each side has some legit points.
First, full disclosure. I am an Indiana graduate (1990) and passionate IU football fan since my freshman year in 1986. My years coincided with the best consecutive years of Indiana football from the 1986 to 1989 seasons under Coach Bill Mallory and led by all-time great and College Football Hall of Fame Indiana running back Anthony Thompson. But being an IU football fan has been mostly a miserable existence.
I also am a lifelong Ohio State football fan (what??), having been born in Cincinnati, so I know what great football looks like to counter-balance my Indiana fanhood. I bet you don’t know many Indiana and Ohio State football fans, but this gives me a good and well-rounded Big Ten perspective.
Tom Allen’s “Love Each Other” LEO teams of 2019 and 2020 were also a brief bright spot as IU went 8-5 and 6-2 those years but could not manage to win the Hoosiers first bowl game since the 1991 season vs Baylor. Despite making the Playoffs this year, it’s now been 33 seasons since IU’s last bowl win. Indiana is the all-time most losing D1 football program and Indiana’s magical 11-2 best ever record season this year is just the 3rd time since the 1994 season (2007, 2019, 2020) where Indiana finished with a winning record.
In other words, IU has been the worst D1 college football program in the Big Ten and the entire nation. College football experts and media know this, and that perception is hard to shake from their mind. Then after a 3-9 season last year Indiana hired Curt Cignetti who boldly said IU will win because he always wins, and miraculously that’s exactly what happened.
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Is 2024 Indiana only a product of their easy schedule and were really a fraud and never should have been in the college football playoffs like many advocated? How do you define their season?
Here is what I believe are Six Truths About 2024 Indiana Football:
TRUTH 1: Indiana’s schedule really WAS about as easy as you can get – making them an easy target for naysayers.
TRUTH 2: All teams can only play the schedule they have, and Indiana DOMINATED that weak schedule – the Playoff Committee knew that and valued it despite the naysayers.
TRUTH 3: Indiana DID deserve to be in the Playoffs – part of that is no other viable team played well enough to deserve to be over them.
TRUTH 4: Indiana’s defense was the strength of the team and a legit “Top 10” unit – Indiana’s offense was NOT – still good but borderline “Top 25” material.
TRUTH 5: Indiana followers touted “we only lost to Notre Dame by 10” as proof they belonged in the playoffs. That is quite a stretch and an example of how sometimes numbers can lie.
TRUTH 6: To get the respect Indiana and their fans want, next year they need to have another good year (at least 8-4).
Let’s break each of these down more with the help of real information and data vs. uninformed knee jerk statements.
TRUTH 1: Indiana’s schedule really WAS about as easy as you can get – making them an easy target for naysayers.
In the regular season, Indiana went 11-1 overall and 8-1 in the Big Ten conference. Of their 12 regular season games, only 4 were on the road. Their non-conference slate included Florida International University (4-8), FCS level Western Illinois (4-8) and Charlotte (5-7) for a combined record of 13-23 or a 36%-win rate.
Indiana’s Big Ten schedule included the following:
- Played teams with a combined Big Ten record of 28-53 (35%-win rate)
- Of their 9 Big Ten games played 7 of the 9 worst teams in the Big Ten standings including:
- Washington 4-5
- UCLA 3-6
- Nebraska 3-6
- Michigan State 3-6
- Northwestern 2-7
- Maryland 1-8
- Purdue 0-9
- Only played two Big Ten teams with winning Big Ten records:
- Ohio State 7-2 (Lost 38-15)
- Michigan 5-4 (Won 20-15)
- Combined opponent overall records in the regular season: 41-76 (35%-win rate)
- Of the Top 8 team in the Big Ten (excluding IU of course), Indiana played only two of them (OSU & UM) and missed playing #1 Oregon (13-0), #6 Penn State (11-2), and #21 Illinois (9-3).
Indiana lost to the only ranked team they played in Ohio State (#6 in Final AP poll) by 23 points. And it was not a fluke as OSU outgained Indiana 316 to 153 yards – more than doubling up Indiana. Yes, the IU defense was good, and we will talk to that later, but the offense did almost nothing beyond their opening drive.
Indiana’s best win? It would be the Week 11 win over Michigan 20-15 who ended up finishing 8-5 and 5-4 in conference. That was a good win since Michigan was much better at the end of the year. It was the only team IU beat who had a winning regular season record. The second-best win would probably be Washington who finished 6-7 overall and 4-5 in the Big Ten. The best road win was probably the early 42-13 UCLA win who finished 5-7 overall and 3-6 in the Big Ten.
There is little doubt this is about as easy of a Big Ten schedule as any team can have. The college football talking heads and SEC fans looked at that schedule and felt it was mostly terrible. And it’s hard to argue against that.
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Notice I am not citing “Strength of Schedule” here. It’s because sometimes I question how representative that metric is anyway and lack of transparency in how it is calculated. As the article above from “THEHOOSIER” pointed out, after Indiana lost to Ohio State by 23 points their strength of schedule went up from 106th (of 134 teams) to 51st. To me this shows the flaw in the metric.
TRUTH 2: All teams can only play the schedule they have, and Indiana DOMINATED that weak schedule – the Playoff Committee knew that and valued it despite the naysayers.
Other than the extremely weak non-conference schedule, it wasn’t Indiana’s fault their schedule ended up this bad. As was pointed out by IU supporters, they played Ohio State who is probably the most talented team in football and may win the National Title. And Washington and Michigan were both in the National Championship game only last year and who would think with all that returning talent Michigan would go 7-5? Purdue, Maryland and Nebraska also were expected to be better than they were.
The naysayers said Indiana shouldn’t be rewarded that much for beating a bunch of really weak teams. But this argument ignores how much Indiana didn’t just win but dominated those teams.
Here were the winning margins for Indiana in their non-conference schedule: 24, 74 and 38. In the Big Ten slate their 8 game winning margins were: 29, 14, 17, 49, 14, 37, 5 and 66. That is only one win not by double digits and an average Big Ten-win margin of 29 points/game.
Indiana averaged 43.3 points/game in the regular season and gave up 14.7 points/game. They led the nation in overall scoring margin at 25.7 points/game, followed by Ole Miss at 24.2, Ohio State at 23.6, Notre Dame at 22.7, and Tennessee at 19.6. It is not easy consistently blowing teams out every week and the numbers for Indiana were very impressive. And the Playoff Committee recognized that dominance all along which is the people that really matter anyway.
TRUTH 3: Indiana DID deserve to be in the Playoffs – part of that is no other viable team played well enough to deserve to be over them.
Again, Indiana finished 11-1 overall and despite their weak schedule had the highest scoring margin in the nation. Any Power 4 conference team who loses only one game in their conference (8-1), had a great season by any measure. Some still argued that it’s not just about pure wins but about what really good teams did you beat. Most also said who you lose to matters as well.
This highlighted why Indiana WAS DESERVING of making the playoffs because if they didn’t make it, what team was more deserving based on those criteria? When you ask this, other than opinions from SEC fans and media members who cover the SEC, there was mostly crickets. Because the truth is there was no deserving other team.
The SEC had three teams make the playoffs (Georgia, Texas and Tennessee) and tried to argue three other 9-3 overall SEC teams deserved it based on their good wins. The problem is multiple “bad” losses were too bad to make that a strong enough argument. Alabama lost to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma to negate their Georgia win. South Carolina lost to LSU at home and to Ole Miss at home by 24 points to outweigh their Texas A&M and Clemson wins. And Ole Miss lost to Kentucky at home and Florida to negate their big Georgia win.
However, if Alabama, South Carolina or Ole Miss had only finished with two losses they would have been in over Indiana due to the weak schedule, and I would not have had a problem with it.
Outside the SEC, there was little argument for another team making it so in my view beyond maybe Miami. I believe the Committee was 100% right in placing Indiana in the playoff.
TRUTH 4: Indiana’s defense was the strength of the team and a legit “Top 10” unit – Indiana’s offense was NOT – still good but borderline “Top 25” material.
Through most of the season it appeared both Indiana’s offense and defense were legit Top 10 type units. Then we saw what happened against Michigan in the second half, at Ohio State and in the Playoff Round 1 at Notre Dame. When Indiana faced a really good defensive line, their offensive line was not nearly good enough to keep the Indiana offense humming, despite their strong overall performance during the year.
Indiana finished second in the nation in points/game at 41.3. However, that was heavily influenced by the 77 points vs FCS opponent Western Illinois and 66 against Purdue. Against Michigan, Indiana scored 20 points and had 246 total yards, with most of that coming in the first half. Against Ohio State they scored 15 points and had 153 yards of offense.
And against Notre Dame they scored 17 but had 3 points with five minutes left in the game and had 278 yards of total offense with most coming in their final 2 drives when the game was basically over. I know those 3 defenses are really good to excellent, but Indiana struggled against them and were clearly overmatched at the line of scrimmage.
For the season, Indiana finished 25th in the nation in total offense at 439 yards/game. The bottom line is I would call Indiana’s offense as very good but fairly weak for a playoff level team.
On the other hand, Indiana’s defense proved to be excellent and was the biggest strength of the team. Indiana was 6th in the nation in scoring defense at 14.7 points/game. In yards allowed, Indiana was second in the nation (only to #1 Ohio State) giving up just 245 yards/game.
Even more revealing is against their two best opponents and the two National Championship finalists, the Hoosier defense performed very well. Against Ohio State, they only gave up 316 yards despite their own offense not maintaining drives. OSU had just 201 yards passing and IU held them to 4.0 yards/rush. They gave up 38 points but that included a punt return TD and a botched punt giving OSU a short field.
In fact, all game long Ohio State had a short field, but Indiana’s defense showed they could hang pretty well with the loaded Ohio State offense. This was before Ohio State’s patchwork offensive line that had lost 2 starters got that unit working efficiently like they have in the playoffs, but it was impressive, nonetheless.
Against Notre Dame, IU gave up 394 total yards but that included the early back breaking 98-yard run by Jeremiyah Love. You hate to say “if you take away that play” but in this case, I think that is relevant. For the game the Irish had 193 yards rushing. Take the long run away and its 95 rushing yards on 34 carries for only 2.8 yards/carry against a team whose offensive calling card is a strong ground game.
The Indiana defense was more than playoff worthy.
TRUTH 5: Indiana followers touted “we only lost to Notre Dame by 10” as proof they belonged in the playoffs. That is quite a stretch and example of how sometimes numbers can lie.
I argue Indiana did belong in the playoffs, but the 10-point Notre Dame loss was a completely deceptive score, and Indiana fans and media know it. I know they were wounded by all the negativity that came out of that Notre Dame performance and so they wanted to fight back. But citing this only 10-point loss is just silly. As mentioned earlier, with 5 minutes left in the game Notre Dame scored a touchdown to make it 27-3. They had also missed a field goal earlier. The lead could have been much more if not for how tough the Indiana defense played.
At 27-3 the game was over and only then did Indiana have their best drive of the game going 76 yards in 12 plays to make it 27-11 after a two-point conversion. This often happens when teams go into more of a prevent defense with the game in hand. IU got an onside kick as well and scored again in 8 plays for 50 yards to make it 27-17. That was the final so 126 of Indiana’s 278 total yards came in the final 5 minutes.
It’s great they kept battling but the reality is Indiana got totally dominated in this game. Everyone knows that. Does it mean Indiana did not belong like Sean McDonough and then later Kirk Herbstreit indicated? Hell no, but it was a bad loss made even worse by Cignetti’s passive way he and his staff called this game, after being very aggressive all year. It almost felt like Cignetti was trying to keep the game close vs. trying to win. Not a good look but I would assume Cignetti would do things different again.
TRUTH 6: To get the respect Indiana and their fans want, next year they need to have another good year (at least 8-4).
Rightfully Indiana fans were upset about the disrespect the team received after they played poorly against Notre Dame. I was angry and disappointed about it as well. A big part of the issue is what I mentioned at the start of this article. The perception of Indiana football is really bad from both the college football media and fans and it’s human nature not to want to change that perception based on one season. You simply don’t really believe and that had to be what the naysayers were feeling. And to be honest, as a long-time Indiana fan, I had a hard time believing we were really that good as well.
To change that perception, Indiana has to have another good year in 2025. The good news is people don’t need to see another 11-1 regular season to believe in Indiana. The Big Ten this year showed they were really good so I am thinking an 8-4 season would show 2024 was not a fluke. 9-3 would definitely change their perceptions but that could be difficult given the tougher schedule they have.
If Indiana doesn’t at least make a bowl though, unfortunately the same old perception of Indiana will remain. 2024 will be looked at as a miracle year and nothing more. You get respect by consistently winning. That is the task for coach Cignetti and his staff, and I believe he will get it done.
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