You're listening to the back home network. Presented by home field, apparel, Happy Thanksgiving week, folks. Galen klaviyo. Here it is Friday. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and The second to last day of the IU football season as the Hoosiers, enter into this last game of the year. The old Oaken Bucket game going to Purdue and frankly at this point needing some miraculous turnarounds in several phases of the game to put up a good showing maybe even pull off a
victory. We're going to talk a little bit about that and there's not a whole lot else to talk about beyond that. It's been a rough season everybody. I think is Worn out at this point. And we're looking forward to talking more about the basically, the breakdown of what happened with this season and where Indiana goes from here as
a program. But we're going to save that for after the bucket game because we really need to focus on the bucket game because it is important and it's one of those games where you just you have to take it as almost an entity unto itself. So we're going to talk about that. But first, I want to talk about our presenting sponsor on the Back home, network home-field
apparel. If you know us, you know that we do a lot of home field apparel ordering and wearing both Scott and myself and really pretty much everybody else that's on this podcast. On a regular basis, big fans of home-field apparel, Ultra Soft, Ultra stylish, Ultra, retro. A variety of different types of apparel. Whether it's t-shirts or three-quarter, length, long sleeve shirts or hoodies or crew, necks or stickers. They've got a little bit of everything.
And if you're listening to this right now, before the Purdue game before, the Indiana game starts against Purdue, you've got an opportunity to get 20% off anything on the home field.
Apparel website. I placed my order earlier today, picked up a few things that I've been keeping an eye on but haven't purchased yet and you can do the exact same because the sale goes all weekend goes all the way through to Cyber Monday and basically while supplies last, there's going to be plenty of great stuff on there.
A wonderful place to shop for the sports fans in your life or just people that want to be stylish which they should and maybe if they don't want to be stylish you might go ahead and buy them something from home field anyway because it might push them down the stylish Road just slightly, it couldn't hurt anyway, go to home field, apparel.com and you'll find their entire stock 20% off Place some mortars.
Make some people happy make yourself happy get your Christmas shopping or holiday shopping done early. And you don't even need a code. The Just twenty percent off everything. Anyway, let's go ahead and dive in to the football as Indiana. Comes into this game, to a 90 on the season, coming off, another disappointing loss. At home this time to Minnesota, meaning that Indiana only won one game at home throughout this entire season, and that was against FC. S opponent Idaho, in the first
home game of the year. So Indiana currently on a seven-game losing streak and in That time they've only broken 15 points on offense once. And that was of course, in the loss to Marilyn back on the 30th of October. This has been a season that has been circling the drain. Now, basically, since October started. And if you watch that Minnesota game, we talked about it quite a bit. Obviously, in the postgame press conference, there's just not much to take out of this team's
performance. That would make you think. Oh yeah. I you, they'll be able to figure it out. Bucket game against a motivated, Purdue team, the offense has just continued to be frankly, just an Abomination. I mean it's I said this before. I've said it for several weeks now and I hate saying it because it sounds like I'm being over-critical. I'm not when I say that Indiana. At this point has one of the worst Power 5 offenses, I've ever seen.
I mean it like it's you know we talked about this in the podcast on. And a this past week. But Indiana has managed to assure itself of not having the record for the worst scoring offense in the nine-game, Big Ten Conference season ERA but just barely and they still have to score a couple of touchdowns to get themselves out of the second-worst scoring offense in the nine-game conference season Big Ten era. That's a real bad offense all
the way around. And, you know, when you dive in and look at individual numbers, Just it's hard to find a lot of positive things to talk about with this offense and I think we finally saw Tom Allen really to some degree kind of hit the wall when it came to his patients on talking about this offense and what's going on you look at Pro Football Focus which as you know we're want to do here because I think they do a good job of helping to quantify things in college football.
There's there's 130 teams in division one FBS and you have to scroll all the way down to 119th to find Indiana's overall offensive ranking. They are only ahead of two other power 5 schools. One of them is Vanderbilt, who is of course, to a 9 on the season and the other one is Arizona, who's 1 and 10 on the season?
So, you're talking about a really bad, Indiana offense, not just in terms of scoring, but in terms of just, Overall performance, you know, and, and really, for Indiana it's hard to nail down a single area where you would point to and say, well, that's the absolute worst, but really, it's the passing game has probably been the, the part of the overall offense that has been the worst for Indiana. Surprisingly, it's not the worst
by itself. Like, you look at the overall rankings and it's again, it's 119th in the country. There are some schools that have worst passing a tax right now. In fact, three of them are in the Big Ten, Rutgers Northwestern and Illinois, who are, of course, the Gabriel Byrne, Benicio, del Toro and Kevin Pollak of teams, you know, when you talk about that offenses. But Indiana, I guess is filling the Stephen Baldwin role in this
instance. I'm not sure who Kevin Spacey would be in this metaphor, maybe well, this year, it's Wisconsin. Weirdly enough will anyway, but bad passing offense. This is not Category. We've seen Indiana in as much over the course of time and unfortunately that has been the real Bugaboo and what makes Indiana's offense.
So bad is that there's not really a counterbalance elsewhere that you can point to and say, hey at least they've got this going for them because it just it doesn't exist right now within the Indiana sphere and you can really just kind of throw a dart in the general direction of the IU offensive board as we know, and you're just, you're going to hit something that is problematic. When it It comes to how this
team is playing offense. Now they play a team in Purdue who has been a bit up and down, like you look overall, I mean produce offense is pretty good in general, their overall offensive rating is 42nd in the country which again, is not a bad rating. This is not a particularly good Purdue team, from a defensive perspective.
In fact, this is the one area where Indiana over the course of the season has outperformed, Purdue Purdue is ranked only 105th in defense in terms of overall ranking on Pro Football, Focus Indiana's 83rd which is nothing to write home to Mom about but is at least better than their opponents. The problem for Indiana and this has really been the case in the
last few games. Is that even if you get some good individual series out of the defense early, the combination of the number of injuries that this team has suffered and the number of issues that Indiana Anna has on offense creating opportunities for the opposing team's offense over. And over again has eventually rendered this defense kind of impotent when it comes to doing what we expected to do. You still got some good individual control contributors out there?
Mike McFadden has certainly continued to do what he does out on the field pretty well. But by and large, this defense has kind of been dragged down, not just by injury. But I think to a large degree by the Stark reality. Whatever they do out there is probably not going to matter because the offense is eventually going to stop moving the ball and it's going to put the defense in positions that they just can't ultimately stopped down the line.
That's really what happened in that Minnesota game defense started out pretty well, and really played well, I thought through most of that first, half up until that interception return, that put Minnesota in a position to score their third touchdown of the day right before half. And at that stage, it's hard to ask the defense to do a whole
lot else. But you know, as you go through the season and you look at what this Indiana defense is done, it's hard to say they've been bad, they've been they haven't been great. And certainly, you know, they you haven't seen the turnovers being generated and things like that. There's been some regression in that area, but it's hard to blame the defense for the problems that the offense is had when the offense is problems.
And the Special Teams problems to some degree, are directly creating additional issues for the defense. So, Purdue team that Indiana plays has been a little bit Jekyll and Hyde in terms of its overall performance has this season, you know, the Purdue has had only one loss that I would really point to and say, well, that's a peculiar one and it's the loss that they suffered earlier on in the season, to
Minnesota for whatever reason. PJ Flex seems to have Jeff Brahms. Number Minnesota, winning that game. Actually dropped Purdue to 3 and 2. And with Purdue at that point having to Able to Iowa, this was right around the beginning of October. Like a lot of people thought that produce season could really go downhill but instead returned around beat Iowa, like a drum and really killed off, whatever chances in Iowa, had of maintaining even a top 10 ranking for the rest of the season.
They kind of got exposed in that game. Purdue did get beaten pretty soundly by Wisconsin and I think you could say that was their worst overall effort of the year. And then, of course they lost it. In order to aim, they lost it, Ohio State. But I think you'd be hard-pressed in either of those games to say that Purdue it played as badly as Indiana has played in some of their losses at least offensively. I mean Purdue put 31 points up
against Ohio State on the road. Indiana could only put seven points up at home against Ohio State, so I think it's dangerous to look at this Purdue team and draw a lot of equivalencies with IU. You know, Purdue has managed over the course of this season to pick up a lot of really impressive wins. They stand seven and four on the
season, going into this game. And, you know, even the defensive numbers that I talked about earlier are a little bit misleading when it comes to Purdue because Purdue is really been a feast or famine team from a defensive perspective. And as we dive into those numbers, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about another one of our sponsors here on the back home network and that is the power rank.
You know, if you not use the power rank before, they have a free newsletter, Which gives you sports betting, advice with a PhD Edge. Also if you're not a better, you can just help get, you know, some better understanding of sports from an analytical level, Ed Fang. Who's the guy that is the, the brains behind the power rank uses data and analytics to make accurate football and college
basketball predictions. Both, he writes an incredible March Madness guide, every year and we'll have a special offer on that coming up later on this basketball season. But But still good for football and particularly with the bowl season rolling around here within the next month or so you want to get as much analytical info as you can. So, check out the power rank.com / AC and you can subscribe to that newsletter again. That's the power rank.com /.
AC be sure to check it out. Get yourself smarter in these areas, get some angles and thought processes that perhaps you hadn't thought of up to this point. Again, the power rank, be sure to check them out. You look at produced performances over the course of the season when it comes to their defense, their defense, as I mentioned, this pretty low rank but for the most part they've had consistent outings from their defense. In terms of the areas that we would most be focusing on how
well are they stopping the Run? How well are they tackling? How well are they getting pressure on the quarterback? How well do they covering receivers the problem for Purdue has been when they've played teams that have been able to overwhelm, Well, name them from a, an offensive perspective, for one reason or another, they really struggle in those games. And certainly that Ohio State game was probably the biggest
example of that. That was their worst overall defensive performance of the year and really, it was in the running game that they really struggle, but they also struggled covering receivers. And you know what, you ended up with all of that was an Ohio State team that almost hung 60 on Purdue now, they've run into trouble and a couple of other games in order to aim was certainly able to take advantage of Meanwhile, Notre Dame, did not throw a ridiculous number up
on the board. It was clear that Notre Dame was the better team that day and then that Minnesota game. And that's the one I keep coming back to Purdue was just incapable of stopping the Run, consistently in that game and that helped to lead to the defeat even though they didn't give up a tremendous number of points. You look overall on the season and produce averaging 26 points scored and only giving up 21.7 points on The season but they're rushing attack, surrendered per game.
There's they're giving up 4.4 yards, a carry while only picking up two and a half yards, a carry themselves.
So you look at that and you say well is there a chance that Indiana might be able to take advantage of that a little bit and that might end up being the one route that Indiana could focus on and say, look, we know that Purdue has struggled at times, not just to run the ball themselves, but to stop the run and You know, if Indiana can figure out a way to get there running blocking together and pick up four yards and attempt in the running game. They have a lot of the pieces
that you would want for that. Yes, you don't have, you might have Stephen Carr. We don't know for sure, I'd be surprised if you play, but Tom Allen was trying to leave the door open for car, as well as several other Hoosiers. I mean, he mentioned an ex he mentioned Tuttle, I'd be surprised if any of those players ended up playing, but I guess I wouldn't be shocked because it got mentioned during
the press conference. But you do had, you know, no, David Ervine Poindexter. You've got some other backs that Indiana has tried to use and then you've got about a McCauley who has not passed the ball very well or enough.
I guess if we take the commentary from Tom Allen himself and the Monday press conference, but he has shown an ability to run and especially going into this last game of the year you do get these sorts of situations where sometimes anything goes as far as your offensive plan is concerned. And while Indiana has Certainly struggled mightily with being able to pass the ball, they have shown a commitment For Better, or For Worse to trying, to run the ball on a regular basis.
And and using that as their primary methodology of getting
the ball down the field. I don't know if that's actually going to work against Purdue, but I don't think it's completely out of the question that Indiana could keep this competitive for a bit simply because that particular aspect of, I use offensive game if they dedicate themselves to it has shown somewhat of a consistent ability to at least pick up some yards early on most of the problems Indiana's running to whether it was against Rutgers or Minnesota and certainly
against some of the bigger teams is that the opposition was eventually able to figure out what Indiana was doing.
Make adjustments accordingly and then Indiana had no plan B to go with the other question ends up. Being how much of Grant Grumble do we see Of this Indiana team and The more I've thought about it, the more I'm saying to myself for whatever reason, Nick, Sheridan and the offensive coaching staff seem to feel more confident in Grant Grumble, to throw a variety of routes than they do Donovan McCully. And I think that's been obvious in the couple of times we've seen grumbles so far this
season. He gets the ball out relatively quickly. He's pretty good about finding targets and I think you might end up seeing Like a true dual quarterback approach here, where you've got McCulley in for running downs and maybe a little bit of passing and then grandma Lynn for, you know, passing the ball. I would hope that they won't do it play-by-play. Like we've seen in some of the series and would instead do it series by series just so they're not too terribly predictable.
But I think there's a possibility there and you know, if Indiana can figure out some kind of a rhythm on offense, where they can at least gain some yards and put themselves in scoring position. It's not inconceivable that Indiana could At least keep this within a touchdown or two heading into the second half. All that said, I really don't
see Indiana winning this game. So Purdue, you know, just with a lot to play for just in terms of Bowl positioning, and putting themselves in a better higher tier bowl. And they've got a really good shot at that. They probably don't have a realistic shot at getting to the Big Ten title game. But they have a realistic shot of going 6 and 3 in conference and they have a realistic shot of you know potentially getting a Florida Bowl.
Not too different from the situation that Hannah's been in the last couple of years and for a Purdue team that certainly struggled the last couple of years, this has been a nice bounce-back for Jeff brohm. Now we've seen in bucket games, Indiana teams with chances to go to bowls, get derailed by Purdue we've seen Purdue teams, you know, your struggle in important games, because of the way Indiana's played.
I just really worried about whether this Indiana team has anything left in the tank and whether they've, Basically gotten to the point where they can see the finish line and they just want to get across the finish line and try to regroup. It's a peculiarity to me trying to evaluate exactly what the mentality of this team is going to be heading into this final game because there's just, there's so many opportunities for Indiana from a mental perspective.
To say, you know what, we, this was the season didn't work out. And at this point we just don't have any fire left in us. We've seen that happen in past games. I mean, and it's not one of those situations where I'm saying Indiana is going to quit. But when you have two teams that are on very different motivational spectrums you end up with a situation where the game snowballs. Yeah, I remember very clearly that game in 2000. Indiana had a very disappointing season.
They came into that game, three, and seven, really didn't have a lot to play for. Meanwhile, they played a Purdue team that needed to win that game to secure a rose. Bowl bid and not only, did they win that game but they annihilated Indiana. I was at that game. I broadcasted that game for student radio, when I was a student and it was one of the more mortifying football experiences, I think I'd ever seen just give, just because of how fired up Purdue was, and how not fired up.
Indiana was, you know? And then certainly there have been examples going the other direction as well. 2007 was a good example of that although that one wasn't a blowout by any stretch of the imagination. 2015 was a great example of that kind of thing, though. Indiana needing to win to go to a bowl. And not only did they win? They won at Ross Aid and they won very convincingly.
So, you have to think that the motivational factors and the intangible aspects, all of those elements really do add up in favor of Purdue for this game. It's been interesting though because, you know, as I've been keeping an eye on the betting lines for this game, it's They'd right around 15.
It was 15 and a half for a little bit and I was very surprised about that because if you look at Indiana and the way that they played and their inability to really get anything going on offense, you would assume that given how well produce offense has played in general that they would have been a much bigger favorite. Maybe a three touchdown favored but they're barely a two-touchdown favor. And in fact, the line is dropped from 15 and a half back down to 15. So I don't know.
Vegas knows something or if they're just trying to In that spot where they can get enough people betting on Indiana to keep the rhythms of the bets, right?
About equal either way. But when I look at this in general I you know I think the Indiana can probably come out will probably score maybe on that first drive since they seem to do pretty well on those scripted drives and then you have to if you're going to look for Indiana to try to do any more damage beyond that they got to force some turnovers which is something They really have been able to do all year and they've got to try to get Purdue in a situation where they start to
feel a little bit nervous. You're not going to fully get that here because like the worst that will happen for Purdue is that they'll finish 7 and 5, which is still a perfectly good season, that probably sends them to the Music City Bowl, or the Las Vegas Bowl that, you know, certainly nothing to sneeze at in either case, but it just, it feels like one of those games were produced got a lot to play for.
They don't have a whole lot, that would be negative if they lost, so they can kind of go. Out there with a minimum of pressure Indiana to some degree has to win this game to keep their whole season from looking like a complete failure. And you know, this is the one thing that I think that Tom Allen on this coaching staff could do to try to redeem a little bit out of the Season, would be to win the bucket game. It's important to remember that Alan has only won one bucket
game so far. Yes, they didn't get to play last year, but they lost those first two bucket games in his first two years as head coach. And these are the Kind of games where if you can essentially galvanized your forces and get everybody to forget about what's happened up to this point and figure out a way to get everybody excited enough that they can win against a superior opponent.
Just based on record that goes a long way towards taking a little bit of a bitterness of the taste of the Season out of people's mouths and getting them at least a little bit excited for the offseason that said, I don't see it happening. I think this game might end up looking very similar to what happened in the Minnesota game. Close early, as both teams, find their sea legs. And then the team that's playing
better. In this case, Purdue gradually pulling away as it gets a little bit further in. So I'm going to give it a similar score. I'm going to say, Purdue 38, Indiana, 10, and that would be it for the season for Indiana. Will have a lot to talk about afterwards, one, way or the other on this one. So my thanks to all of you for tuning in throughout the course
of the season. On these preview podcast, it's been a lot of fun just to talk about IU football, even if the results certainly haven't been much fun. But we've always appreciated the input and the thoughts that you folks have been kind enough to send in, whether it's via Facebook or whether it's via Twitter, sometimes we'll get DM, sometimes we get email messages, but it's always gratifying to know that there are people out there listening and is a long
time. I a football fan, it's exciting to know that there's enough people out there that care about IU. Football that they're willing to at least, spend some time, listening thinking and occasionally, contributing to the podcast. So thanks to all of you for a great season. Be sure to tune in this weekend as we will have our recap podcast, where we talk about, what happened in the bucket game. We talked about some of the things to think about going into the offseason.
Some of the things that Tom Allen is going to have to do to get this program back on track after a disastrous 2021 and we'll do some forecasting as As what next year would look like. And how Indiana navigates the spring and the summer heading into fall of 2022, that will wrap it up for us today. My thanks again to the power Rank and the home-field apparel also wanted to remind you all go to dark canvas.
Design company on Etsy. They've been sponsoring us throughout the course of the Year, some great prints, some great things to buy for the IU fan in your life. Some of them are Athletics related, some of them are not But some great individual prints, check them out on Etsy, dark canvas, design company, and I use the code Crimson you get
some money off. I think you'll, you'll enjoy that as you will find a bunch of interesting things that you can put in your cart and hopefully get up on your walls and the walls of your friends and family this holiday season my thanks to that my thanks to the power Rank. And also my thanks to home-field apparel is always and thanks again to all of you folks for listening in throughout the course of the Season. We will catch You on the flip side, for Crimson cast, I'm Galen klaviyo.
Bring back the Bison so long, everybody. You on the flip side, for Crimson cast, I'm Galen klaviyo. Bring back the Bison so long, everybody.