Winning a national title usually buys you endless respect. In Bloomington, though, all Indiana got was a media circus. Analysts are roasting head coach Curt Cignetti and the Indiana front office, claiming they’re hiding behind a laughably soft non-conference schedule to guard their playoff spot. On The Brandon Walker Show, the Barstool Sports insider put the Hoosiers on blast for ducking real competition.

“My gut says no,” Walker said when asked if this would finally be the year that Cignetti and Indiana get humbled. “They schedule like cowards. They’re national champs, and they scheduled nobody out of conference because they schedule like p—–. Or will they get humbled? No, they will not. Because there’s no more than two losses on that schedule. They’re going to the playoff again.”

When his co-host tried to defend the Hoosiers by pointing out that non-conference slates are locked in years ahead of time, Walker cut him off. He told the panel to stop making excuses for the administration, stressing that Indiana has made a conscious choice to wipe elite opponents off its future calendars.

The stats back up Walker’s frustration. Indiana enters the 2026 season with a Strength of Schedule ranking near the bottom of the Big Ten elite, sitting at No. 33 nationally, as per ESPN’s Football Power Index. Why? Because their September schedule features North Texas, Howard, and Western Kentucky, not a single Power Four program in sight.

Get the Essentially CFB Newsletter. Rivalries, rankings, recruiting, coaching moves, and game action nationwide — your complete college football briefing.

You have to trace all the way back to September 2023, when they lost to Louisville, to find the last time the Hoosiers lined up against a marquee out-of-conference opponent in the regular season.

The paper trail shows this was a deliberate strategy. To clear their path, Indiana paid a hefty $500,000 buyout to ditch a series with Virginia, backed away from Louisville, and recently scrapped their marquee 2030–2031 home-and-home series against Notre Dame.

As a result, the Hoosiers don’t have any regular-season Power Four opponents on their non-conference schedule for the next seven years. Cignetti and the athletic department are leaning hard into the strategy of coasting through September to save their energy for the grueling Big Ten gauntlet.

This brings to light a pretty sad reality in modern college football, where winning ugly matters much more than playing brave football. In the new playoff system, a 10-2 or 11-1 record gets you into the tournament, and nobody on the playoff committee cares if you beat up on weak teams in September.

That is what makes the media backlash so intense. Indiana proved they can beat anyone when they blew out Alabama and edged Miami during their legendary 2025 national championship run. They have the talent to stand toe-to-toe with the elite. But by choosing to play host to sub-par programs every September instead of testing themselves against Power Four rivals, Curt Cignetti and the Indiana front office are trading respect for guaranteed wins.

So, yeah, they definitely aren’t strangers to elite competition when the trophies are on the line. But that brings up the question: why snub them when you know you could beat pretty much every Power Four program?