The 3 biggest issues for Indiana and Ohio State after earning first-round Playoff byes

The best 2 teams in the Big Ten and, frankly, the best 2 teams in the country, at least during the regular season, will get a chance to rest on their laurels for about a second or 2 as the lull before their postseason runs hit this week.

Since late August, it’s been Ohio State and Indiana, in that order. But last Saturday night in Indianapolis, the upstart program from in-state took down the blue blood program from Columbus, so right now for our purposes it’s Indiana and Ohio State, in that new order. However you want to frame it, the Hoosiers and Buckeyes earned the top 2 seeds for the upcoming College Football Playoff, which starts next week for 8 teams and a much longer time after that for the 4 programs who have first-round byes.

Indiana and Ohio State headline that elite quartet of college football, and so after clashing in Indy for Big Ten supremacy on Dec. 6, these 2 teams won’t play again for quite a while. For the defending national champion Buckeyes, it’ll be New Year’s Eve night in Arlington, Texas. And for the now Big Ten champion Hoosiers, it’ll be New Year’s Day afternoon at the Rose Bowl.

Of course, neither team knows who they’ll be facing when they do finally return to action in pursuit of everything, and that’s just 1 aspect of the next few weeks that’ll throw off their stringent routine from the regular season. That’s OK, because it means they’ve done something special to earn that much time off, but it doesn’t mean there won’t be an adjustment, even for a program like Ohio State that’s done this a time or 2. 

For now, as Playoff preparations slowly crank up in Bloomington and Columbus, Indiana and Ohio State have issues to deal with to keep them busy and motivated. There are a slew of them for each team, but we’ll narrow it down to the 3 biggest issues right now: 

Indiana

Yes, even the undefeated Hoosiers have issues.

1. All that confetti — and all that time off before the Playoff

Yes, Indiana did do this last year, too, but everything was so different about it. The 2024 Hoosiers were a 10 seed in Curt Cignetti‘s first season, crashing the first 12-team Playoff party but not staying for too long. Indiana was unceremoniously shown the door and told “thanks for coming” by Notre Dame in a rather ugly first-round exit in South Bend. This time around, the Hoosiers don’t just have a first-round bye, they’re the 1 seed after toppling Ohio State last Saturday for their first outright conference title since 1945. 

Some 80 years later, that euphoric championship confetti fell on IU’s players in Indianapolis, which checked off a historical box and also made sure these Hoosiers wouldn’t be playing another game for about the next month. Technically, Cignetti’s 13-0 wrecking crew won’t play until 26 days after its Dec. 6 triumph, taking on the survivor of the Alabama-Oklahoma first-round game on New Year’s Day afternoon at the Rose Bowl.

How will these players and this program that hasn’t traveled this exact route handle the extreme highs of feeling that confetti fall on them in Indy and then harnessing that feeling, that temperament, the right mentality, for the next roughly 4 weeks?  This will be a big-time challenge for Cignetti and his staff, because going that long between football games after doing nothing but winning for the past 3 months is about as tough of a scheduling curveball as you’ll ever see.

Can Indiana overcome that long gap between games plus manage those postseason distractions to close in on its first national championship in program history? For Cignetti, it’ll provide a mental long game like no other and it’ll test the patience of his players, who plan to stick around this Playoff for a little bit longer than last year.

2. Get Omar Cooper Jr. healthy amid loss of Stephen Daley 

The Hoosiers appear to have suffered a massive blow to their defense for the Playoff run in the worst way possible, with Curt Cignetti confirming on Wednesday that star defensive lineman Stephen Daley is expected to miss the postseason. 

It’s bad enough losing a key piece to your defensive front during what’s supposed to be a dream season. But Daley’s particular injury situation takes on a nightmare quality because he apparently suffered a leg injury after the Hoosiers beat Ohio State in the Big Ten title game. Daley was making the rounds with celebrating IU fans and trying to bask in the glow, but there was video showing him dealing with the apparent leg injury amid what was supposed to be 1 of the greatest moments of his football life.

While Cignetti deals with trying to replace Daley’s presence and production for however long the Playoff run lasts, it appears Indiana dodged a major bullet on the other side of the ball with 1 of its main weapons. Star wideout Omar Cooper Jr., who led IU with 58 catches and 804 yards this season to go with 11 touchdown receptions, suffered an apparent right leg injury in the first quarter against Ohio State.

But not only did the Hoosiers still win the game and the Big Ten title without Cooper. They got what looks to be great news the following day, when Cignetti told reporters that the team doesn’t believe Cooper will miss its Playoff quarterfinal game on New Year’s Day at the Rose Bowl. With Indiana having the benefit of a first-round bye, it can bring the 2nd-team All-Big Ten wideout along slowly and cautiously in the leadup to the quarterfinal.

So, the Hoosiers will deal with the Daley disaster while they breathe an apparent sigh of relief regarding Cooper.

3. Make sure Heisman isn’t the only first this postseason

We live in a really weird world right now where Indiana is in position to rule college football, but that’s for January. In December, the Hoosiers are hell bent on attaining another football first, and that’s finally bringing a Heisman Trophy back to Bloomington. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza can forever be the answer to that trivia question, and he was well-positioned for just that going into the final days before Saturday night’s announcement in New York.

That really weird college football world includes an Indiana player likely beating out a Vanderbilt player for the Heisman, like everybody envisioned back in August, right? All signs point to Mendoza raising that iconic trophy, which would be yet another sign of Indiana’s arrival as a national powerhouse under Curt Cignetti. If it happens, or more likely when it happens, the program should celebrate it with shouts from the mountaintop, because it’ll be an enormous accomplishment and a historic one, too.

It would be another notch in a dream season, but it wouldn’t be the ultimate accomplishment, of course, and Cignetti’s players would be forced to come down off yet another high and focus on a football game on New Year’s Day. The Hoosiers need to make sure Mendoza’s expected first isn’t the only first, because they’ve come too far now not to complete the dream. An undefeated regular season, the first outright league title in 80 years and almost certainly the first Heisman in program history.

A program bereft of football hardware is quickly getting drunk on football hardware and trying to go the distance as the front-runner will present a treacherous path. It’s now 16-0 or bust in Bloomington, hard as that is to believe, and Mendoza might not say that when he likely steps to the podium to accept his award on Saturday night, but he’ll know it to be true.

Ohio State 

The defending champs finally have some adversity.

1. Treating first loss in over 12 months the right way

Sometimes the agony of a loss is canceled out by the heroic way a team bounces back from that loss. Sometimes, losing can be the best learning experience there is. The great problem that Ohio State had over the previous 12 months was that it never had to go through the exercise of coming back from a loss, since there were no losses to speak of since the Michigan disaster in late November 2024.

The Buckeyes treated that stunning home setback in the best way imaginable, using it as motivation in steamrolling their way through the Playoff bracket on the way to a national championship. That rampaging postseason run was followed by 12 straight wins without a loss in 2025, before Ohio State finally suffered its first setback in over 12 months in last Saturday night’s Big Ten Championship Game. Indiana did the honors and took the No. 1 seed in the Playoff, too. 

Maybe finally losing and not carrying the double burden of being an undefeated defending national champion will be just what Ryan Day‘s team needed. Maybe Ohio State had been living a little too charmed of a life since last December, and maybe the reality that it might not even be the best team in its own conference is the wakeup call needed for a run at a repeat.

National titles come in all shapes and sizes, especially when you’re trying to go back-to-back, because repeating as champs in any sport is so darn difficult to do. The Buckeyes can look at what happened last year for precedent. They lost their last game, to Michigan, before the Playoff began, and they managed to do that again this year, only in the Big Ten title game. And life went on for them last season after not winning their conference title, which they failed to do again this year.

See that? Ohio State’s unbeaten burden is gone. It’s Indiana’s burden now. And the humbled Buckeyes can go about the business of just trying to win their next 3 games.

2. Assessing offensive failures in Big Ten title game

Brian Hartline has his head coaching job, taking over at South Florida in 2026. But it’s still the 2025 season, and so Hartline is still invested in his alma mater as its offensive coordinator. And he knows that the Big Ten title game performance wasn’t good enough in any way, not from the offensive line, which allowed Julian Sayin to be sacked 5 times, and not from a production standpoint, with the Buckeyes managing just 10 points and being shut out in the 2nd half.

The 58 yards rushing and 322 total yards weren’t good enough either. It was ugly, and that’s OK, because while the Big Ten trophy was at stake, it wasn’t a Playoff game, and so the 2nd-seeded Buckeyes still earned their first-round bye and can use that extra time to reset before their quarterfinal matchup on New Year’s Eve. 

Hartline is staying in that fight. He’s not heading to Tampa until he sees this through. And there is plenty to work on over the next 3 weeks or so.

3. What happened to that secondary at key moments?

While the Ohio State offense was failing in Indianapolis, its secondary was faltering when it mattered most, which can make the difference in a 13-10 game that comes down to a play or 2. 

Matt Patricia has had an outstanding first season as defensive coordinator in Columbus but, like Hartline, he’ll be busy the next few weeks trying to fix what went wrong on the Buckeyes’ back end. There were key errors made by mostly everybody in that secondary on Saturday night, whether they were younger or older players, including freshman Devin Sanchez, senior Lorenzo Styles Jr. and junior Jermaine Mathews Jr., who was beaten multiple times in big moments.

Patricia will surely have a ton of quality teaching moments, and the good thing for Ohio State is that he’ll have plenty of time. The Buckeyes aren’t Big Ten champions, but they can still be national champions again when this whole thing is over.