Crimson Crank: Nitpicking Indiana football’s 55-0 win over Howard

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On a college football Saturday that saw then No. 1 Ohio State blow a 20-point second half lead, I should have felt relief that Indiana had coasted through week one so easily. A single loss in a college football season can be devastating, so no win should be taken for granted.

While this isn’t exactly the blog to hash out everything from TV deals, conference affiliations, and all financial (dis)incentives that make the College Football Playoff what it is, it is worth acknowledging why Indiana’s schedule looks the way it does.

Ohio State’s loss to Texas, another likely playoff team, puts them in the unenviable position of needing either a win in Bloomington or a Conference Championship to safely make the Playoff field. Indiana’s non-conference schedule would, plausibly, allow them to lose to Ohio State at home and still have a viable path the the Playoff.

It’s not fun to acknowledge, but non-conference games against power conference opponents are simply not worth the risk under the current Playoff structure, given what we know about team selection. The Committee could change that, but playing an easy non-conference schedule has been the recipe dating back to Michigan’s 2023 title.

All of the above can be true, and I still want a little bit more from Indiana’s non-conference schedule.

I’m not going to make blanket statements about FCS and FBS or delineate which conferences Indiana should choose opponents from, but it’s clear that Indiana’s first two opponents represented different ends of the competitiveness spectrum.

After a hard fought loss, North Texas went on to whoop UNLV, making my prediction that the North Texas win would age well look good already. Old Dominion last year was a similar story. This year’s Howard team, on the other hand, does not inspire confidence.

It’s hard to say that playing a team of Howard’s caliber will hurt Indiana definitively down the stretch, especially since Indiana had a similar win over Indiana State before finishing undefeated last season. Even from the perspective of a warm-up game, though, the contest against Howard felt like it was lacking.

One example would be the extremely small sample size from the pass game. Josh Hoover didn’t look great, but only attempted 11 passes because the running game was so dominant. It’s hard to see how so few reps could benefit Hoover and his receivers, even with small stuff like timing.

Comparing it to last year’s 73-0 win against Indiana State, Hoover attempted a little over half the attempts that Fernando Mendoza against the Sycamores. As with this past Saturday against Howard, Indiana went three deep into its quarterback rotation that day, but still found a way to get Mendoza enough reps to be statistically significant.

Complaining about the schedule and how the limited game reps are used can be tricky, as the staff obviously sees these guys every day and have a better idea of what needs work than I do. I would like to know a little more about the team through eight quarters, but Curt Cignetti does not owe me that and the less Indiana’s opponents know, the better.

Having a schedule that is competitive while not being a true threat is a tight rope walk that every staff and athletic department is trying to pull off anyway, but games like this past week’s give the impression that nobody has perfected the art of non-conference scheduling in the College Football Playoff era.

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