Real football

 Look, I don't blame Paul Finebaum, .poor confused SEC shill that he is. It does look weird. It is a hard thing to wrap your head around.

Indiana University, playing real big-boy football? Like, virtually overnight?

Surely not.

Surely these are the same old Hoosiers, whiling away the fall in preparation for the glories of winter and basketball. Surely they're still the welcome mat of the Big Ten (Come on in and sit a spell on our windpipe, y'all!), the pratfall artists, Dick Van Dyke eternally tripping over that eternal footstool.

Surely Paul and the rest of America didn't wake up Sunday to see THAT Indiana at No. 2 in the nation. 

Surely the Hoosiers are grotesquely overrated, a smoke-and-mirrors magic trick, a cupcake-fat fraud who, any second now, are going to go back to being  ... well, Indiana.

And so when Curt Cignetti came to Bloomington last year and took the Hoosiers on an 11-1 ride that ended with a berth in the College Football Playoff, Paul and everyone else decided it was the biggest joke ever. And when they lost big to Notre Dame in the first round (which meant their only two losses were to the two teams that played for the national title), Paul 'n' them practically smirked: See, they didn't belong. 'Cause they didn't beat ANYBODY.

Fast forward to Saturday morning, when Finebaum once again declared Indiana -- 6-0 and ranked third in the nation this time around -- a paper tiger.

Yes, the Hoosiers had beaten the dog out of a decent Illinois team, 63-10. Yes, they'd gone out to Oregon and taken the Ducks by 10 when Oregon itself was unbeaten and ranked third. But the Hoosiers just weren't that good against Oregon, Finebaum said. Struggled, in fact. Which is why a pretty beige Michigan State team was going to jump up and expose them in Indiana's homecoming game.

So what happened?

Indiana 38, Michigan State 13 happened.

Miami losing to Louisville happened.

And suddenly there Indiana is, 7-0 and now ranked second in the nation.

Must be driving Paul Finebaum and the rest of the-SEC-is-so-much-better-than-the-Big-Ten crowd right up a wall. 

And I get it. I really do. 

You can't erase decades of muscle memory in the relative flick of an eyelid, and the muscle memory says this is Indiana, where Saturday afternoons in the fall go to die. Even now, it's fair to wonder if Indiana really is the second-best team in the nation. And it's fair to wonder, looking ahead to Saturday, if a resurgent UCLA team might be trouble in combat boots for the Hoosiers.

Because that is college football, see, and it's what makes it great. Upsets happen. The mighty fall. And now that Indiana is clearly among the mighty, the Hoosiers are no less  susceptible to that than anyone else.

Last weekend, for instance, four of the top ten teams in the nation went down. Nine of the top 25 did. SEC welcome mat Vanderbilt is ranked in the top ten for the first time since 1947. It's a weird year -- or maybe just a reflection of how radically the landscape has changed in the era of the NIL and the unrestrained transfer portal.

In which case, Indiana ranked second in the nation makes perfect sense.  

In which case, it also makes perfect sense that an Indiana loss at this point would be regarded as a huge upset.

Beating Indiana, an upset?

Paul Finebaum's head just spun around like Linda Blair's in "The Exorcist." As did a few others'.