Leading his Hoosiers against the No. 6 team in the country, head coach Tom Allen understands the “program-changing” opportunity that has been presented to him. IU has had valiant attempts going after Ohio State in recent memory, but the inevitable drop-off in the later stages of the game always has continued to plague the Hoosiers. Can Indiana’s football team finally “breakthrough” so that Allen gets his signature win as the head coach?
The Hoosiers currently live on both sides of the coin with regards to pressure. On one hand, there’s no pressure at all. Nobody is truly expecting that that Hoosiers win — a game where they are currently 16-point underdogs at the time of this article. Indiana rides on house money and has tremendous upside when you view this game in the context of the current season.
When asked about playing Big Ten East teams like Ohio State, Allen responded emphatically, “It also creates tremendous opportunity, and that’s how I look at it. Yeah, it’s tough, there’s no doubt. Your margin for error against these guys, teams like this, is right there. Every mistake you make gets magnified. They expose you in a lot of ways. That’s why you have to play so hard and so well together and have a complete offense, defense, special teams game.”
But that’s what you have, and so to me, I’ve been some places where you don’t have an opportunity to play many of those places and those teams. And it is a great chance for us to be able to take that next step as a program, as we always like to say, and those are definitely program-changing, program-defining wins that affect recruiting and affect the trajectory of your program.
Tom Allen
When you expand that view at a historical program level, there’s actually a lot of pressure and Tom Allen understands that. A win against Ohio State would mean a “program-changing” victory, snapping a streak of losses to Ohio State that extends over 30 years, and potentially ending the longest Power-Five drought in being ranked as a football program. The difference between this year and past-years is with the talent on the team. The Hoosiers are preparing to take on Ohio State with one of the deepest Indiana rosters in recent memory.
Indiana has a new starting quarterback that’s shown he can sling deep with the best of them, and he’s protected by a veteran group of offensive lineman. Indiana has a strong wide receiver core that showed its depth even more in Indiana’s 52-point victory, where Indiana’s primary star didn’t even haul in a catch. (We explored why in our Game Tape Rewind article here.)
The 16-point spread is deep, but it’s actually the most pro-Indiana line the Hoosiers have had in recent years. (The line has moved from 14 to 16 points since the timing of the below tweet.) The spread is not at all due to Vegas believing Ohio State is bad, in fact coming into Bloomington will be one of the better Ohio State teams we have seen. Oddsmakers are believing in the Hoosiers (relatively speaking) and their potential.
