College Football Morning: What Indiana's Demise Says About the Big Ten

Answer: Not a whole lot.

After three months spent wondering whether Indiana was good, we got our answer. Good? Yes. Great? No. Indiana faced its second top-tier opponent of the season, and the result was the same: Only through a galling refusal to play for the win was Curt Cignetti able to keep the final score respectable.

This was a great year for Indiana football, and last night’s result doesn’t change that. It should have been more expected than it was. As we mentioned yesterday, Notre Dame was the more physically talented football team, bigger and stronger and faster than the Hoosiers, and while Marcus Freeman might not feel the need to personally convince every college football fan of his legitimacy via television and social media, he—like Cignetti—is a very good coach. This was Notre Dame’s game to lose, and Notre Dame didn’t lose it.

Within the national championship picture, movement was minimal, at least in the eyes of our model. Here’s how our model saw each playoff team’s national title probability move:

• Oregon 29.9% to 30.3%

• Notre Dame 29.1% to 25.0%

• Ohio State 14.6% to 15.4%

• Penn State 8.5% to 9.5%

• Texas 8.0% to 8.6%

• Georgia 7.2% to 8.2%

• Tennessee 0.9% to 1.1%

• SMU 0.5% to 0.7%

• Arizona State 0.5% to 0.6%

• Clemson 0.3% to 0.3%

• Boise State 0.2% to 0.2%

• Indiana 0.3% to 0.0%

Why did Notre Dame’s probability drop, even with a win? It wasn’t because of the injuries to Rylie Mills, Rocco Spindler, and Bryce Young, all of which are of mostly unknown severity at the time I write this. Our model is rather simple. It doesn’t consider injuries. Instead, Notre Dame’s probability dropped because the Irish didn’t beat Indiana by more. Movelor, our model’s rating system, relies on final scores to make all of its in-season adjustments to teams’ power ratings. Movelor had Notre Dame beating Indiana by 16.3 in an average outcome, and by another couple points in an average Notre Dame win. This was out of line with the public consensus, but that’s not new. Movelor has been out of line with the public consensus on both Notre Dame and Indiana. Last night, that wasn’t a bad place to be.

I’d expect some of you are bothered by this reaction from Movelor, and in frankness, it highlights an underwhelming aspect of the model. Notre Dame beat Indiana more soundly than the final score indicated. Final scores are extremely useful data—Movelor does a pretty good job of predicting future results—but they don’t tell the full story. That said, given just how high Movelor was on Notre Dame, and given it still has the Irish rated as the second-best team in the country, and given those injuries are piling up again in South Bend, I’d personally guess that 25.0% is a more accurate national championship probability for Freeman’s team than 29.1% was. Betting markets are more accurate than Movelor, and they have Notre Dame vs. Georgia as nearly a tossup. Movelor has the Irish favored by a handful.

Regardless, Notre Dame is a national title contender, as we thought they were heading into the night. They took care of business against a physically overwhelmed in-state challenger. They earned the right to play another of college football’s big boys. It was a triumph for what Freeman has built, a complete outclassing of Cignetti’s vaunted upstarts and a tidy presentation on why Al Golden and Mike Denbrock are the best offensive/defensive coordinator combination in the land. Whether the Irish are better than Georgia remains to be seen. Whether the Irish will beat Georgia is even harder to know. But Notre Dame was a lot better than Indiana, as we all should have expected.

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As the final minutes played out and rooms full of college football fans released their collective bothered-ness with Cignetti’s hubris, ESPN’s broadcast turned to an unfamiliar topic: The strength, or weakness, of the Big Ten. Sean McDonough and Greg McElroy criticized Indiana’s regular season body of work, questioning the narrative that the Big Ten is closer to the SEC than it is to the ACC and the Big 12.

It's impossible to know whether McDonough and McElroy received any provocation to say this from their ESPN bosses. A weak Big Ten is a good narrative for ESPN, given the network’s partnership with the SEC and ACC. Whatever their motivation, McDonough and McElroy were both right and wrong. Going by average Movelor rating, the Big Ten is about halfway between the SEC and the ACC/Big 12. The key difference is that the Big Ten probably has the best team in the country right now, and it might have the second-best team as well. Conferences shouldn’t be judged solely based on how good their best team is. They are routinely judged on that, though, and while the SEC might not benefit from the practice this year, it benefited from it enough during Peak Saban at Alabama that any complaints have no grounds.

Indiana’s exposure says nothing about Oregon, and it says next to nothing about Ohio State. Ohio State pounded the Hoosiers. Even if you completely disrespect Indiana, reducing that game in Columbus from a top-15 victory to a pounding of a Big Ten also-ran doesn’t change how good we should think Ohio State is. Ohio State’s reputation was not hinging on perceptions of Indiana. Nor should it have been.

Still, it’s worth diving into this Big Ten vs. SEC thing, because there’s a good chance it becomes the defining debate of the ongoing College Football Playoff. For a few years now, the college football world has talked about the New Big Ten and the New SEC as a unit. They’re the superconferences. They have the best teams. (Twelve of the top thirteen right now, again per Movelor.) Their current programs have won 17 of the last 20 national championship games, and while we again caution against judging conferences by their best teams and their best teams alone, twenty years of football is a more meaningful sample than one if you are going to incorporate championships into the argument. The thing is—and McDonough and McElroy pointed this out—that 14 of those titles were won by current SEC schools. The Big Ten is a stronger business than it is a football conference. And here’s where we get back into Indiana:

The reason Indiana was able to dominate so many Big Ten foes is that there were a lot of Big Ten foes this year capable of being dominated. While the top of the Big Ten was likely stronger in the regular season than the top of the SEC (I specify “regular season” because Georgia and Texas could still get better before this thing’s all over), the middle of the Big Ten was not. Per Movelor, six SEC teams are better right now than the Big Ten’s fourth-best. Nine SEC teams are better than the Big Ten’s sixth-best. Six Big Ten teams are worse than the SEC’s second-worst. Four Big Ten teams are worse than the SEC’s worst. Indiana played all four of those worst Big Ten teams.

This isn’t some argument that Indiana’s 11–1 record is illegitimate, or that Indiana shouldn’t have been in the College Football Playoff. Indiana was probably one of the twelve best teams in the country this regular season. Indiana handled business, and handled it emphatically. By all accepted playoff selection standards, Indiana deserved to make the field.

But.

If faced with an SEC schedule, Indiana would not have gone 11–1.

This is the crux of the Big Ten vs. SEC debate. The SEC offers a tougher conference schedule. If Oregon and Ohio State don’t get worse (and Georgia and Texas don’t get better), the Big Ten has the better best teams.

It’s possible that Tennessee will upset Ohio State tonight and the Big Ten pileup will accelerate. In the doomsday scenario for the Big Ten’s league offices, Penn State could theoretically lose to SMU as well, which would really hasten the aggression. More likely, though, Ohio State and Penn State will win without a terrible amount of drama, and the Big Ten will put more teams into the playoff’s second round than the SEC does, with a guaranteed semifinal berth between the Ducks and the Bucks. If today goes chalky, Big Ten fans (golly do I hate that conference fandom is a common thing now) will point to their quarterfinal market share as evidence that they’re better than the SEC. This will be a silly argument. It will therefore be very common.

The bottom line, if you’re willing to be reasonable with us here, is that the SEC is the better conference than the Big Ten, that the Big Ten is the better conference than the ACC and Big 12, and that the Big Ten has at least one and quite possibly two teams playing better right now than the SEC’s best. Indiana going to South Bend and doing exactly what should have been expected doesn’t change any of that.

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This post was also published at www.thebarkingcrow.com, where you can always find all of Joe Stunardi, Stuart McGrath, and NIT Stu’s work.