Please Refrain From Disrespecting Indiana

Strength of Schedule slander is not welcome in this home!

Photo by Jason Ayers on Unsplash

The following things are true about Indiana football as I’m publishing this:

1. The Hoosiers have never won ten or more games in a single season.

2. The 2024 Hoosiers are 9-0.

To put that first point into perspective, only two other teams currently in a power conference share the distinction of zero seasons hitting double-digit wins: Vanderbilt and Iowa State. Perhaps you’re thinking “hey old man, who cares about ANCIENT accomplishments, what about the teams that haven’t won 10 games in more recent history?” 

First of all, rude. Second of all, if you just want the list of power conference teams who haven’t pulled this off since 2000, you’re only adding Virginia and Purdue.

Theoretically, every team, no matter their history, should have one year where overlooked talent, excellent coaching, scheduling fortune, and injury luck all come together to create their moment in the 10-Win Sun. Indiana, however, hasn’t even come particularly close that often. This season represents only the third time the Hoosiers have won nine games, and it is just their seventh regular season with eight wins. 

Vanderbilt, for comparison, has four of the former and 17 of the latter.

When Indiana gets that tenth win – and if, somehow, it doesn’t, you can absolutely blame me, Hoosier fans – it will be an achievement worthy of celebration, with no further inquiry necessary. 

Has this been one of the easier schedules in school history? Yes, and also, who cares? 

Indiana’s had light loads before; Sports Reference rates the 2007 schedule as easier than this year’s, and that team finished 7-6. Strength of schedule is a way to measure schools against one another in a sport with inconsistent scheduling practices across conferences. 

But we are not measuring Indiana against Miami or Texas or even Boise State. We are measuring Indiana against Indiana, and we’re going to do that by looking at how Indiana got to 9-0.

First off: Even if the Hoosiers had won all nine of their games by one point, surviving only when the opposing kicker missed the ball entirely while attempting a game-winning field goal from the five-yard line, 9-0 would still be 9-0. That is not, however, how Indiana has come this far. (I promise I would have told you much earlier if that had been the case.)

I reviewed every year of Indiana football since 1953, when Michigan State joined the Big Ten and brought the conference’s membership back up to its titular promise, where the Hoosiers won at least seven games. There are only eight of those years, so this was not a herculean effort. Then I looked only at the Indiana wins and calculated the total Hoosier margin of victory.

Let’s start with Indiana’s only other nine-win season, in 1967. Friends, this year was incredibly stressful. In five wins, the Hoosiers either trailed or found themselves tied in the fourth quarter, including against Michigan where Indiana blew a 20-0 lead before escaping with a 27-20 victory. In three of the others, Indiana barely hung on in the fourth quarter; Wisconsin, Illinois, and Purdue all had the ball in the red zone with a chance to take a late lead. Purdue, as one example, fumbled its chance at the Indiana one-yard line. The only comfortable win came by 35 points against Arizona.

That’s the extreme outlier, but a lot of these other good Indiana seasons bear similarities. In most of them, at least half the games are close, and they’re not always against the best teams on the schedule. The 1991 Indiana squad beat a 4-7 Purdue, a 5-6 Wisconsin, and a 3-8 Kentucky by a combined 13 points. In 2019, Indiana put a whooping on UConn and Rutgers and Eastern Illinois; the Hoosiers also narrowly beat Maryland, Nebraska, and Purdue teams that all failed to make a bowl game.

A number of these seasons also had early ceilings to them. The 2019 edition lost two games before October, leaving almost no room for error. The Hoosiers in 1979 had three losses before November, and the 1987 team had two.

Which brings us back to the current iteration of Indiana football. Seven of these nine Hoosier wins have been by at least three scores. The exceptions are 14-point wins over Washington and Maryland – and Indiana never trailed in either game. Indiana’s point differential this season is a plump +296, first in the nation, and ten points better per win than anyone on that chart above. The 419 points the Hoosiers have scored in this 9-0 start is more than they’ve accumulated in an entire year since 2015. 

For lots of other teams, you would be justified in questioning who these wins came against and whether this team is “legit.” But this is Indiana, a team that seemed cosmically incapable of this kind of sustained dominance no matter what the schedule lined up. 

You are beholding Air Bud nailing threes from the top of the arc! Don’t stop to point out that the defense is failing to rotate or ask if there’s a rule that says a dog can’t play basketball. 

Witness history and rejoice! (Unless you’re a Purdue fan, in which case, yeah, I get it.)