Is Indiana a lovable Cinderella or a College Football Playoff nuisance?

The College Football Playoff Committee released its most recent rankings Tuesday evening. The top 5 consisted of Oregon, Ohio State, Texas, Penn State and … Indiana.

Which one of those teams is not like the others?

It’s Indiana. The Hoosiers are not a historically great football program. They don’t have a huge, iconic football stadium. They don’t have a bunch of NIL money. They don’t have a long track record of sending players to the NFL. They don’t have a history of success, as they haven’t won the Big Ten since 1967. They, frankly, aren’t usually even a thought in the national championship discourse. Indiana is a basketball school.

But not this year. Not under first-year head coach Curt Cignetti. From the day he stepped foot in Bloomington, Cignetti promised to shift the paradigm of the sport. He told Indiana faithful the Hoosiers should not only be beating Purdue, but they should also be beating Ohio State and Michigan. He wasn’t just saying that to rile up an Indiana basketball crowd and win over a fanbase. He meant it. Indiana, now 10-0, is rocking the boat and challenging the notion that you have to be a program with a certain past or NIL budget to ever compete on this sport’s biggest stage.

At first, people loved it. At 5-0, it was fun. At 6-0, it was exciting. At 7-0, it was real. At 8-0, things started to shift. That’s when November rolled around and Indiana’s success started to threaten the legacy fanbases. Sentiment changed.

So the question has to be asked: Is Indiana still college football’s lovable Cinderella? Or has it become a College Football Playoff nuisance to the majority of America? What do people want?

The 12-team College Football Playoff idealists would tell you this is an awesome system because teams not typically in the picture now get to be apart of the conversation. They’d tell you it was made for teams like Indiana. But now that Indiana is going to Ohio State in late November for a huge game as an undefeated team, it’s starting to feel like a large contingent is rooting for the Hoosiers to get blown out of Ohio Stadium. It feels like it was cute for a while, but now college football fans have had enough. They want to see the giants play the giants, never stopping to consider that Indiana is one of them.

It reminds me of the NCAA Tournament. Everyone loves a Cinderella, but most people still want to see North Carolina and Duke in the Final Four.

What’s actually happening is Indiana is a threat to the SEC getting a fifth team into the Playoff. That’s when the fun stops. That’s when it’s not cute anymore. So now we’re hearing a lot of “Indiana hasn’t played anyone” comments, which have overwhelmingly replaced the fake cheers from expansionists who pretended to want this.

Indiana has absolutely been a beneficiary of an easy schedule. There is no question about it. So what the Hoosiers lack in quality wins, they’ve replaced with blowouts. They have beaten everyone on their schedule by 14 points or more except for Michigan, who they beat 20-15 two weeks ago. Indiana has looked so impressive all year that it could still get in the Playoff if it loses to Ohio State in a respectable manner.

An 11-1 Indiana with no quality wins may get in over a team like Tennessee.

Rage.

“But Tennessee beat Alabama!”

“What would happen if Indiana played the SEC schedule?”

“Indiana would get dump-trucked by Georgia!”

Play the hits.

Should Indiana apologize for its schedule? Should it feel ashamed it got an incredible draw in an 18-team conference and Michigan turned out to not be very good? After years of playing in the Big Ten East and having to play Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State and Penn State every year, Indiana got a great draw. It took advantage of that great draw, just as Texas has done in the SEC. Penn State’s draw, though undeniably more difficult, was pretty advantageous, too.

But the discourse is all about Indiana being a fraud. Why? Because it isn’t a traditional power.

It’s important to understand how we got here in the first place. It’s a combination of having a 12-team field in the first year we have 18- and 16-team conferences. The non-sensical conference realignment resulted in West Coast teams in the Big Ten and ACC. Oklahoma and Texas are in the SEC. With leagues that big, it’s not even possible to have fair and equitable schedules. Everyone can’t possibly play everyone. Some years, teams are going to get screwed. Some years, teams are going to have an easy path.

Oh, and when geography isn’t apart of the league identities anymore, more teams in the same conference can be good at the same time. Teams used to recruit the same states/regions for players. Now you have teams in California going up against Midwestern powers, resulting in rosters made up of players from different parts of the country. Throw NIL into the mix, and you have more competitive rosters in geographically unbalanced leagues.

The SEC’s tiebreakers are so convoluted and confusing you need a professor at MIT to figure them out. The Big Ten’s tiebreakers are so complex the conference itself didn’t even realize Oregon clinched a spot in the conference title game with a win over Wisconsin on Saturday.

It’s a mess. Add in a new 12-team CFP field where 10-2 and 9-3 SEC teams feel like they deserve a spot, and the little guy we’re all supposed to be rooting for gets kicked in the butt.

That’s the sport we have now as television executives roll around in piles of cash at our expense.

“It’s hard as we look at all of these teams,” College Football Playoff Committee Chair Warde Manuel said Tuesday evening. “They’re playing different schedules. It’s not the fault of one team who doesn’t have a stronger schedule who they’re playing in their conference opponents. These conferences have increased in size, and so there are less match-ups where you are matching the top teams in the league each weekend. So it does make it difficult to assess the teams even with the strength of schedule.

“We have to rely on how the teams are playing and who they’re playing as well as how the other teams, regardless of strength of schedule, are playing their opponents. We take a look at it holistically. Strength of schedule is a component. It’s an important data point to us and for us. But it is not the only assessment that we make.”

The Committee is doing the best it can. The system is broken.

But we can’t live in a world where we ignore losses in the SEC and discredit what Indiana has done with its Big Ten schedule with hypotheticals of what may or may not happen had it played down south. You play the schedule you were given. Indiana has played their schedule better than Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, or Ole Miss has played theirs. That’s a fact.

At the end of the road, Indiana is in real danger of being left out of the Playoff field if it finishes 11-1 with a loss to Ohio State. There are so many people who are confident Indiana is in at 11-1 no matter what, but go ask yourself what you think the Committee will do if Indiana is being compared to Texas or Tennessee at the end of the year. Think about it.

It’s going to be solved in a boardroom with hypotheticals and projecting forward on who people think would win in the future. That, of course, is the Cardinal Sin for the Committee. They can’t project forward, but they will anyway.

So look yourself in the mirror and be honest with what you really want. What side are you on?

Do you want Indiana to lose to Ohio State by 30 so it can get out of the SEC’s way?

Or do you really want a more inclusive system that rewards teams like the Hoosiers for actually winning the games on their schedule?

You can’t have both.