The Indiana Hoosiers have come close to making a bowl game in recent years. They won five games last season, but that wasn’t good enough to get to a bowl. If Indiana can move forward just a little bit this season and get to six wins, the people near the program will feel that progress is occurring at an acceptable rate. If the team stays stuck at five wins and doesn’t pack its bags to a bowl in somewhere such as Arizona or Florida, it will feel as though this season will have been a waste, and that coach Kevin Wilson really isn’t doing what he said he’d do when he took over the program a few years ago.
Strengths
The basic outline of the Indiana program should be similar to what it was last year. The offense on this team should be fantastic, with quarterback Nate Sudfeld leading the way. Indiana, under Wilson, who had been an offensive coordinator at the University of Oklahoma under Bob Stoops, is an offense-based team. Wilson knows how to teach the passing game and put offensive players in position to succeed. Indiana knows how to spread the field and get the matchups it wants with receivers against defensive backs. This is not the problem for the Hoosiers. They can and do score. They did score a lot last season, rolling up big numbers against Navy and Penn State and Illinois and Minnesota. Indiana’s offensive point totals would have won a lot of games for a lot of teams last season. There is an accepted view that in football, if you’re scoring in the 30s or better, you should be winning. However, Indiana didn’t always allow that statement to hold up. The focus, though, comes back to this: If Indiana can continue to score in the mid-30s and get just a few timely plays from its defense in the red zone, it should be set up well for the coming season. The offense just has to keep plugging away and trust that the defense will be able to hold up its end of the bargain, at least a little better.
Weaknesses
The defense never rested for Indiana last season because it was so often on the field, getting torched by an opposing offense. Indiana was run over by a Michigan offense that wasn’t even that good in 2013. The Hoosiers were decimated by Michigan State and many other Big Ten teams. This defense was as helpless as any unit in college football, and that’s not exaggerating by much if anything at all. So many other offenses got healthy against Indiana’s defense or put out some of their best performances of the season. Indiana has to find some way to stem the tide in 2014, or it won’t go bowling.
Schedule
The schedule has a few key games if Indiana is going to make a bowl. The road game at Bowling Green in week two is one. The home game against Maryland in week four is another. The home game against North Texas in week five is another. Wins there will set up Indiana to beat Rutgers on the road and Purdue at home in November. That could do the trick.
Outlook
The Hoosiers’ defense is going to make it hard for the team to win six games. There’s a lot of hope around Bloomington, but bad defense squelches hope a lot these days. Take the under.
Pick: Under 5.5 at -125
