I’ll start with the disclaimers, so that this doesn’t come off the wrong way: Bill Lynch strikes me (from afar, of course) as an honest, decent gentleman. He is not, so far as I know, a tax cheat or a fraud, and I would be very, very surprised to learn otherwise. He ran a clean ship during his years at Indiana, free from any hint of tarnish or scandal—in marked contrast to the basketball program, which was caught up in the Kelvin Sampson affair while Bill Lynch was taking Indiana to a bowl game. If I were an athletic director at an FCS or DII school, I wouldn’t hesitate to hire Lynch, and I’d know I’d be getting someone who would, at the very least, not bring disrepute upon the program.
With that throat-clearing out of the way: Kevin Wilson finds himself in the position of a hedge fund manager taking over a corporation that has been cooking the books. The manager knows the fundamentals are bad, which is why he is taking over the company, and he thinks that he can improve them. Yet he may not understand just how far the rot has spread, or that even the shoddy fundamentals are inflated by a series of accounting tricks that, while not exactly fraud, are on the outer bounds of propriety.
For example, look at the most fundamental of fundamentals: win-loss record. Indiana went 5-7 last year. That sounds almost decent; certainly not extraordinarily bad by Indiana standards, and only one game off from Indiana’s 6-7 Insight Bowl breakthrough in 2007. Yet those five wins were the most hollow wins imaginable, coming over an awful FCS school (not just awful because they are in FCS, but awful by every possible metric), two Sun Belt schools, a one win Akron team that was perhaps the worst team in FBS, and Purdue. According to Sagarin’s ratings, all four out of conference wins came over teams ranked lower than 115th in college football, and there are 120 teams in FBS; so Indiana won the equivalent of four FCS games to get to five wins. One of those wins, against Arkansas State, was by only two points. And the win over Purdue, while certainly meaningful because of the intrastate rivalry and the recapture of the Old Oaken Bucket, came over a team almost literally limping to the finish with gimpy ACLs and no quarterback.
The losses were less uniformly awful—Indiana was a dropped pass away from beating Iowa while hanging tough against Northwestern and Michigan. But the Penn State, Ohio State, Illinois, and Wisconsin losses all came by 17 points or more, including the infamous 63 point loss to Wisconsin (and despite the hand-wringing, Wisconsin wasn't running up the score. Indiana was just that bad). Unfortunately for Indiana, those are the four teams that will follow them into the Leaders Division (along with Purdue) this fall. Indiana could get two touchdowns better as compared to each of the teams in their division and still only win one game.
That improvement is unlikely, especially considering that the two most useful components of the offense (the Hoosier’s strongest unit last season) have moved on. The schedule gets a little tougher, with Virginia coming to Bloomington and a trickier-than-it-looks road game at North Texas. Nor does Indiana get a particularly easy draw in their cross-division games, going to both Iowa and Michigan State.
Indiana fans have plenty of patience, borne from decades of futility. Almost all new coaches get a honeymoon, but Wilson’s will be longer than most, simply because little is expected from him early. A Brewsteresque beginning would be a bad sign, but fielding a competitive team that happens to lose a lot of games—even a couple more games than Lynch’s final team—should be acceptable. Don’t think of it as a decline, Indiana fans; think of it as a necessary correction while Indiana converts back to normal accounting. What little profits you thought you had were probably illusory anyway.
Offense--Offensive Coordinator Brent Pease Rod Smith/Kevin Johns (1st seasons each): Indiana ran a traditional offense out of the pistol the past few seasons, which sounds about as peculiar as it looked at times. Unlike the pistol at Nevada, where the formation was born, Indiana quarterback Ben Chappell was not a threat to run the ball, and so the option capabilities were limited. You don't have to run the option out of the pistol--Alabama ran the formation quite a bit last year, for example--but never did there seem to be much of a philosophy behind the adoption of the system either. Perhaps it was as simple as Chappell preferring to work from a few yards behind center? Whatever the rationale, it was at least reasonably successful: Indiana had the 14th most yards in the country last year, and while Football Outsider's advanced metrics have Indiana's offense as coming in at a far less impressive 55th in the country, that's still at least above average (and better than Illinois, Penn State, Northwestern, and Purdue). In any event, while the offense was a level or two better than serviceable last year, the pistol is likely gone, at least as a primary set.
