Could a run of bad luck completely flip the narrative surrounding IU football in 2025?
Well sure, too much bad luck can sink any ship.
How much was good luck a factor in Indiana’s 11-2 season and historic run to the College Football Playoff in 2024? A data analysis by ESPN’s resident analytics guru Bill Connelly suggests the Hoosiers were the beneficiaries of some good fortune in 2024.
In general the analysis is probably solid. It conceptually makes sense, anyway. But below we’ll tell you why Connelly’s analysis, while looking at the complete landscape of 134 BCS teams, misses the mark a bit with Curt Cignetti’s first Indiana team.
Connelly looked at three factors to determine college football’s luckiest teams in 2024 — turnover luck, close games, and lineup consistency. And his data says IU was among the luckiest teams in two of those three categories.
Connelly says on average, 50% of fumbles are lost, and about 21% of passes defended become INTs. Based on those numbers, Indiana had an expected turnover margin of 4.5, which would have been good enough for 35th in the nation, but actually finished with a margin of 15, good for fifth.
Indiana finished No. 3 in the nation in turnover margin, so there’s no doubt that played a role in the Hoosiers’ success. But IU only had one win the entire season by less than 14 points. 10 of their 11 wins were no longer in doubt late in the third quarter or very early in the fourth. Their average margin of win was 33.4 points. Turnovers were highly unlikely to flip the outcome of their games. And in one of their two closest wins — a 42-28 triumph over Maryland — IU actually lost the turnover margin 0-4.
Another factor Connelly utilized was “postgame win expectancy.”
The idea is to take all of a game’s key, predictive stats and say “with the hindsight benefit of these stats, you could have expected to win this game X% of the time.”
Indiana was middle of the pack according to this measure. The Hoosiers only had a single one-score game all season, so again, luck probably didn’t have much to do with their season. Connelly’s model seems to indicate the predictive data from IU’s 20-15 win over Michigan slightly favored the Wolverines, but overall this was a very neutral measure.
But the output begs the larger question — if a team only played in a lone one-score game all season — how much did luck have to do with anything?
The third and final way Connelly assessed luck in 2024 was injuries.
He compared (a) the number of players who either started every game or started all but one for a given team to (b) the number of players who started only one or two games, likely as a stopgap.
According to Connelly’s injury data, Indiana had 15 players who started all but 0-1 games, and just four players who started just 1-2 games. Based on those measures IU ranked tenth and second in the nation, respectively. And by-and-large, IU was a fairly healthy team for most of the year.
But this is where the micro level tells a different story. Indiana lost a starting offensive lineman (Nick Kidwell) during fall camp, and another right before the biggest two-game stretch of the regular season when Drew Evans went down before the Michigan game. The offensive line struggled mightily during IU’s two losses.
And most significant, starting quarterback Kurtis Rourke played the entire season on a torn ACL. So while Connelly’s data doesn’t take that into account, IU’s arguably most important player had a major limitation all year. Rourke had rushed for 791 yards in his three seasons prior to 2024, and rendered virtually immobile, he went for -35 with the Hoosiers.
How many teams could overcome that kind of bad luck with their starting quarterback? There’s probably no more significant bad luck in football than suffering a major injury at that position. And don’t forget, Rourke also suffered a throwing hand broken thumb, missed a game and a half during the season due to that, and played with a heavy splint and tape job in games thereafter.
So did luck have something to do with Indiana’s 11-2 CFP season? Maybe a little. But was it a meaningful factor in the outcome of games in IU’s favor? It would be difficult to conclude that was the case.
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