Joel Klatt defends Indiana against strength of schedule criticism

Joel Klatt is hearing all the strength-of-schedule talk regarding Indiana, and he’s not interested in any disparaging remarks from the national media pertaining to the Hoosiers and their College Football Playoff standing.

During the latest episode of The Joel Klatt Show, the FOX Sports analyst took anyone trying to belittle Indiana’s season to task. While he didn’t necessarily defend the schedule the Hoosiers have played, he believes it’s a little more nuanced than the way the media is making it seem, and you can’t deny their domination.

“I think that they’re much better than people realize,” Klatt stated, regarding Indiana. “Everybody is focused on their strength of schedule. And yet, and listen, it’s not great. I’m not here to defend their schedule. But what I am gonna defend are two things. One is that if you looked at that schedule in August, it looked vastly different. Or even if you go back to minutes after the National Championship game, the day Curt Cignetti is hired, any of these moments back in the offseason, you look at their schedule and it did not look easy.

“They had Ohio State, Michigan and Washington on their schedule. That was three of the top seven teams in the country from the end of last year, right before the bowl games. Nobody thought that Nick Saban was gonna leave, which was gonna prompt Kalen DeBoer to leave Washington and go down to Alabama, and Jim Harbaugh gets the Chargers job, and then all of a sudden the transfer portal is crazy and all the teams change. When we were sitting here back then, no one was complaining about Indiana’s schedule. They’re complaining about it now.”

Klatt makes a good point regarding the external factors that contributed to the Hoosiers’ schedule taking on a different life. Even though it’s certainly been a bit easier than originally expected, Cignetti’s squad still dominated almost every team they’ve played, and that should mean something.

“What should a good team do against, let’s call it, a bad schedule, an easy schedule? They should be dominant. They should be dominant. They shouldn’t be eking out wins by three. They shouldn’t be going to overtime with teams that they have no business being in overtime with. They should be dominant in those games. That’s exactly what Indiana has done,” Klatt added. “The team, the players, the coaches, they have this schedule put in front of them. They prepare themselves to go and be as dominant as they can against the schedule in front of them. They have no control over what’s going to happen with those teams. … Nobody has a better margin of victory than Indiana this year. Their average margin of victory is up there with the best in the country. They have been dominant.

“… I don’t care how the (Ohio State) game goes. I think Indiana has done enough to this point where if they’re an 11-1 team, they’re probably going to be in the College Football Playoff and should be. This notion that they have to somehow prove something just because their schedule is not great, I think, is laughable. I really do. I think it’s laughable. That is not their problem. It is not their problem. And again, they’ve been dominant against that schedule. If they’ve been beating this schedule by three every week, then it’s a different conversation, but they haven’t. They have been a dominant team over their schedule.

“… If this was a different brand, we wouldn’t be doing this. And do you know how I know that? Because there are bad resumes all around them, all around them with teams that have lost football games, which Indiana has not done.”

Indiana can certainly ease some concerns with a win over Ohio State this weekend. However, Joel Klatt isn’t removing them from the College Football Playoff with one loss. Time will tell if the College Football Playoff Selection Committee feels the same way.