If you’ve been at all plugged into the National Discourse around the coming Big Ten title game you’ve probably heard some variation of the take that it doesn’t matter.
Well, no. It does.
The crux of this opinion is that the game’s outcome won’t have too much of an impact on the coming College Football Playoff. The winner gets the No. 1-seed and the loser gets No. 2, just a simple flip (or not) in the current rankings.
Well, for one, that probably does matter. Those seeds will have different paths in
the playoff and Indiana and Ohio State have enough differences as football teams that it’d change the makeup of the games they play/paths at play.
For another, the College Football Playoff isn’t everything. I know we’re rapidly moving toward “playoff or bust” mentality around the sport’s top programs, but that doesn’t mean every other possible team achievement in the sport should fall on the wayside.
Take Indiana, for instance. The Hoosiers have been in the sport’s basement for just about the entirety of their existence as a football program. Up until this season, when they were passed by Northwestern, nobody in the sport had recorded more all-time losses than the men in cream and crimson.
Indiana was just a team that existed, marked as an auto-win on Big Ten schedules by opposing fanbases and administrators. For many Hoosiers fans the football team has been overshadowed by a venerated men’s hoops program just a parking lot’s walk away for just about the duration of its existence.
But there were a select few diehards that grew in numbers as the decades went on. Fans who showed up and sat loyally to watch their beloved Hoosiers literally lose like nobody ever had before. There were would-be program saviors and countless stars coming through Bloomington whose efforts went underappreciated. To say they didn’t have fans would be a lie, there’s enough photographic evidence and oral tradition of how Indiana almost pulled off this or that.
Indiana hadn’t won 11 games until last year. It hadn’t won 12 games until this year. It still hasn’t won just 10 games.
Do you think it just wouldn’t matter to those fans? To see those same cream and crimson jerseys with the trident on the helmet and a big ol’ No. 2 next to “Indiana” take on the country’s best team and come out on top? To see this program finally hoist a Big Ten championship trophy for the first time since many have been alive? I think it would.
As for Ohio State, the Buckeyes’ three goals are the same every year: beat Michigan, win the Big Ten, win the national championship. They went 1/3 last year and haven’t even played in this game let alone won it since 2020.
Big Ten football championships are as Ohioan as the idea of flight. There’s a select few programs that can claim to compete for the conference crown on a yearly basis and Ohio State’s the only program that’s been true for… pretty much forever.
Sure they won the national title last year, but there’s plenty of empty room for some missing hardware they’d rather have.
This sport, at the end of the day, is regional at its best. Indiana and Ohio State have clashed countless times, the two know what the other is and what this is all about. That regionality is starting to weather away with conference realignment and broadcast dollars flowing in, but it’s what made the sport what it is and shouldn’t be cast aside. It means something to the people in and outside of these programs.
Winning hardware matters to them, no matter the kind.
