Can IU football repeat in 2026 after a fairly significant turnover of the roster?
One of the sports’ top analytical models has spoken.
IU football is ranked No. 5 in the first preseason edition of ESPN’s long-running SP+ model prepared by Bill Connelly. With no spring transfer portal this season, these preseason SP+ rankings should generally hold up through the start of Indiana’s season on Sept. 5.
This is how the preseason national top-10 looks in Connelly’s first edition of SP+ for the 2026 season:
1. Ohio State
2. Oregon
3. Notre Dame
4. Georgia
5. Indiana
6. Texas
7. Texas Tech
8. Miami
9. Texas A&M
10. LSU
Indiana’s SP+ ranking is 24.5, meaning it should beat the “average” college football team on a neutral field by that margin.
SP+ projects IU will have the No. 9 offense, the No. 6 defense, and the No. 22 special teams.
There are 138 teams in FBS this year.
We think of SP+ as the KenPom of college football. Connelly describes SP+ as “a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. It is a predictive measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football, not a résumé ranking. Along those same lines, these projections aren’t intended to be a guess at what the AP Top 25 will look like at the end of the season. These are simply early offseason power rankings based on the information available.”
In the first preseason release of SP+ in 2024, IU was No. 90, and they were No. 23 at this time a year ago. Connelly has tweaked the model due to the changing landscape in college football. Below are the four variables plugged into the model. Connelly has made an update this year with the addition to No. 4. We’ll call it the Cignetti effect, but you can decide.
1. Returning production. The returning production numbers are based on rosters, accounting for transfers and attrition. According to Connelly’s data, IU is No. 52 overall in returning production, No. 69 on offense and No. 39 on defense.
2. Recent history. How the team has performed in recent seasons.
3. Recent high school recruiting. How the team’s recent high school recruiting classes have been ranked. Connelly says this variable has been significantly downgraded in importance, in part because of stories like Curt Cignetti at IU.
4. Coaching change effects. Connelly’s data suggests in this era when an underachieving team makes a coaching change, significant improvement is likely to follow. See: Indiana 2024. The same holds when a team significantly overachieves and then loses its coach.
After the three Big Ten teams in the top-10, the next highest ranked teams from the league are USC (13), Michigan (14), and Penn State (17).
Here’s Indiana 2026 schedule, with the opposing SP+ ranking in parenthesis:
vs. North Texas (109)
vs. Howard (NR)
vs. Western Kentucky (86)
vs. Northwestern (49)
at Rutgers (62)
at Nebraska (37)
vs. Ohio State (1)
at Michigan (14)
vs. Minnesota (45)
vs. USC (13)
at Washington (21)
vs. Purdue (82)
Despite placing three teams in the top-5, the Big Ten ranks second behind the SEC in overall conference SP+.
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