Burying Indiana

 The Blob is not a big conspiracy guy, so you won't get much from me about killer vaccines, 5G eating our brains and the public schools turning our kids gay and transgender. I leave those dark fantasies to the brainiacs who see nefarious plots in virtually everything, even when they're easily explainable by saner folk.

However.

However, there's a persistent notion buzzing around in my head right now, and I can't quite common-sense it away.

It involves Indiana University's football team, currently 10-0 and headed for a great big mega-humongous showdown against Ohio State two days from now.

It also involves what I've been hearing for the last week or so, and at a volume that seems to increase exponentially by the day.

It's that Indiana is a 10-0 poser who shouldn't be included in the 12-team College Football Playoff, even though the Hoosiers are ranked fifth and seeded seventh right now in the latest CFP mock bracket. This makes me suspect that the handful of people who are saying this are trying to influence whoever votes in the CFP poll, and might in fact be speaking in proxy for some of them.

This in turns makes me suspect something else: That the CFP voters can't wait for Indiana to lose Saturday so they can bury the Hoosiers without a funeral.

Now, the Hoosiers might not actually lose Saturday, because as the Blob has noted before, this is unlike any other Indiana team that's trundled down the pike. They're good. They're legit good, with an elite quarterback and an elite wide receiver corps and a bunch of good running backs, and interior lines that are everything IU's interior lines have rarely been, which is big and strong and physical.

So, yeah, the Hoosiers could win, and then go on to run the table against a godawful Purdue squad. They probably won't, because Saturday's game is in Columbus and Ohio State for once will be taking the Hoosiers very seriously. So let's say, I don't know, the Buckeyes win by a couple of scores.

Watch what happens in next week's CFP poll. Watch Indiana freefall from No. 5 to 13 or so in one mighty plummet, and miss out on the playoff of which a few talking heads say they're unworthy.

At issue for those folks is Indiana's strength of schedule, which isn't great. The Big Ten  indisputably is down this year, and the Hoosiers didn't exactly plow through a murderer's row in the run-up to conference play. It was a pinch of Charlotte and a dash of Florida International and a soupcon of Western Illinois, none of whom would ever be mistaken for Alabama or Georgia or Texas.

Here's the thing, though: They've beaten everyone who's been put in front of them, and usually by a lot. It's hardly their fault the teams that were put in front of them turned out not to be very good this fall. You play who you play, and that's all you can do.

Indiana has done that. So has Notre Dame, for that matter. So has, say, Boise State.

The Irish are 9-1 and ranked sixth right now. Boise State is also 9-1, and if the playoff began tomorrow, the Broncos would get a first-round bye. Hardly anyone is uttering a peep about that, even though both schools haven't exactly waded through a pile of 'Bamas and Georgias and Texases, either.

With the exception of 15th-ranked Texas A&M and then-unbeaten Navy, N.D.'s schedule has been six shades of beige, and of course the Irish lost to Northern Illinois, a middling MAC school. Boise State, meanwhile, has played all of two ranked teams since its only loss to No. 1 Oregon.

One is Washington State, currently ranked 25th. The other is 23rd-ranked UNLV.

Yet the Broncos are a shoo-in, and the Irish are too if they win out as expected. But if Indiana loses to Ohio State and then makes Crabby Patties out of Purdue, some say the Hoosiers should miss the show even though they'd be 11-1.

Let me say this about that, as Dick Nixon used to put it: A College Football Playoff that leaves out an 11-1 Big Ten school is a College Football Playoff unworthy of being taken seriously. It is, in fact, a damn joke.

Best get the laugh track warmed up, in that case.