Hoosiers v. Buckeyes

What’s supposed to be a massive college football Saturday is, for me, a college basketball card day. The football slate is loaded with storylines, but not necessarily with clean betting edges. The biggest example: Ohio State–Indiana. On paper, it screams Buckeyes, but the motivational math gets tricky. If Ohio State had three goals this season, you’d guess they were: win the national title, beat Michigan, and then, win the Big Ten. They just checked the Michigan box, and the playoff looms. How dialed in are they for Indy?

For Indiana, this is the mountain. A Big Ten title is the ceiling for the program and this environment has all the ingredients for a full-on Hoosier surge—crowd energy, nothing to lose, every trick in the bag. That could be enough to drag Ohio State into a sloppy, uneven performance where the Buckeyes never fully separate. But it’s also completely possible Ohio State just reminds everyone they’re better at every position and wins by three touchdowns without breaking much of a sweat.

From a futures and big-picture perspective, the dream setup is actually an Indiana upset now, followed by a rematch in a national semi-final where we’d get a discounted number on Ohio State. The Buckeyes and Notre Dame still look like the two teams most capable of actually winning the national championship. There’s a real chance the Irish get squeezed out, and if that happens maybe Oregon or Georgia becomes mildly interesting at the right price. But the pool of teams that can truly run the table and lift the trophy is small. That’s another reason I’m content to let the football narratives play out today—and hunt cleaner edges on the college hoops board instead.