Indiana had a special 2024, huh?
Yes, the losingest program in the history of major college football won 11 games during Curt Cignetti’s first year in Bloomington and made it all the way to the College Football Playoff.
Externally, it was a cute story about a “basketball school” rallying around a surging football program making history every Saturday. At least, that was the sentiment at first. Then the wins started becoming too numerous and it was clear the Hoosiers would stand between multiple SEC
teams and said inaugural 12-team playoff.
Then Indiana became this vile, fake team propped up by a soft schedule. The Hoosiers weren’t some feel-good story anymore, they were interlopers who needed to be discredited at every chance.
You could hardly turn on ESPN, holders of the broadcast rights to such things as College Football Playoff rankings reveals, the College Football Playoff games themselves and uh, oh yeah just in case it’s relevant the SEC’s games, without some pundit dragging the Hoosiers through the mud.
When a team goes on an expected run in college basketball it earns the Cinderella label as that sport’s media apparatus rushes to fit them into the slippers they’ve worked to earn. When that happens in college football, the media shoves them down the stairs outside the castle.
In the wake of the lengthy, ongoing media-driven campaign against Indiana, the SEC publicly lobbied for the playoff’s selection committee to weigh a program’s strength of schedule more heavily.
Here’s SEC commissioner Greg Sankey endorsing further emphasis on a team’s schedule just last month:
This push for further emphasis on analyzing a team’s schedule drew results last week when the College Football Playoff announced the following in an official release:
“Changes for the upcoming season include enhancements to the tools that the selection committee uses to assess schedule strength and how teams perform against their schedule. The current schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents. An additional metric, record strength, has been added to the selection committee’s analysis to go beyond a team’s schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule. This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team. Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team.”
Note that additional metric, “record strength,” for a moment. Good news for the SEC, right? Being in such a strong, deep conference, surely you’ll be able to excuse a few losses in conference play, right? Well there’s an existing “strength of record” tool on ESPN’s website and, funny enough, it likes 2024 Indiana quite a bit.
The 2024 Hoosiers finished 8th nationally in that metric. Indiana was competing for its at-large playoff bid with teams like Alabama, Ole Miss, South Carolina, SMU and Miami, among others.
Every single one of those teams finished below the Hoosiers in ESPN’s strength of record metric. Even Tennessee, an SEC team which earned an at-large bid of its own, finished below Indiana in strength of record.
The playoff’s record strength metric “rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team.” You’ll recall Indiana suffered just one loss in the regular season, to eventual playoff team and national champion Ohio State.
ESPN defines its strength of record metric as “the probability that an average top-25 team could achieve a team’s record given the particular schedule that team has faced.”
Indiana lost to a playoff team. Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina lost to non-playoff teams. Indiana blew out non-playoff teams with the exception of Michigan, which was still a win. Seems simple enough.
So, after all of this schedule grousing from the SEC and its media partners, the playoff’s brand new metric… would’ve favored Indiana.
Oops!
