Joel Klatt defends Indiana against the force of schedule criticism

Joel Klatt hear all strength-of-scheme talk about Indianaand he is not interested in any disparaging remarks from the national media regarding the Hoosiers and theirs College football playoff standing.

During the latest episode of The Joel Klatt Showthe FOX Sports analyst took anyone who tried 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 makes it out to be, and you can’t deny their dominance.

“I think they’re a lot better than people realize,” Klatt stated regarding Indiana. “Everybody’s focused on their strength of schedule. And yet, and look, it’s not great. I’m not here to defend their schedule. But what I want to defend is two things. One is that if you on that schedule in August, it looked much different.Or even if you go back to minutes after the NM match, the day Curt Cigetti is employed, any of these moments back in the offseason, you look at their schedule and it didn’t look easy.

“They had Ohio State, Michigan and Washington on their schedule. Those were three of the top seven teams in the country from the end of last year, just before the bowl games. Nobody thought so Nick Saban had to leave, which would promptly Kalen DeBoer to leave Washington and go down to Alabamaand Jim Harbaugh gets the Chargers job and then suddenly the transfer portal is crazy and all the teams are changing. Sitting here then, nobody was complaining about Indiana’s schedule. They’re complaining about it now.”

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

“What’s a good team going to do against, let’s call it, a bad program, an easy program? They’ve got to be dominant. They’ve got to be dominant. They shouldn’t be winning three games. They shouldn’t be going into overtime with teams that they don’t mind being in overtime. They should be dominant in those games,” Klatt added. “The team, the players, they’ve put this schedule in front of them. They prepare to go and be as dominant as they can with the schedule in front of them. They have no control over what happens to those teams. … No one 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 somehow they have to prove something just because their schedule is not good. I really do. It’s not their problem. It’s not their problem. And again, they have been dominant on that schedule. If they’ve beaten this schedule by three every week, it’s a different conversation, but they haven’t. They’ve been a dominant team on their schedule.

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

Indiana can certainly ease some worries with a win over Ohio State this weekend. However, Joel Klatt won’t eliminate them from the College Football Playoff with one loss. Time will tell if the College Football Playoff selection committee feels the same way.