Three years later, the 2020 college football season is even crazier than you remembered

Top-10 Indiana. Cellar-dwelling Michigan. Pac-12 coach of the year Karl Dorrell. It makes even less sense now than it did back then

Before we get going on the newest newsletter, a quick note:

My apologies on there just being one newsletter last week. My son and I were both battling gnarly and persistent colds, which made sitting down to write beyond my day job that much more of a challenge. The good news is we’re all feeling better and we should return to something resembling a more normal publishing schedule.

I appreciate the patience and understanding. And, as always, if you’ve ever got a note, comment, criticism or suggestion, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at bycraigmeyer@gmail.com.

Indiana football is in a bad place.

It’s a sentence that could have been typed, written or expressed at countless points over the course of human history, but at this moment, it feels particularly apt.

A 2023 season that came with low expectations has been a slog. The Hoosiers are 2-3, with one win coming against an FCS opponent and the other requiring four overtimes to get past an Akron team that’s now 1-4. Last Saturday, they suffered their most lopsided defeat yet, a 44-17 trampling at Maryland. A day later, the program fired offensive coordinator Walt Bell after it managed just 34 total points in its first three games against major-conference opponents.

It’s a sudden shift, even if the Hoosiers’ history as a program probably should have warned us about this.

Fewer than three full years ago, Indiana was one of the most enthralling, heartwarming stories in college football, the perpetual loser of a program that had found a way to win behind a head coach whose cheery demeanor came with an equally catchy motto – LEO, an acronym for “Love Each Other.” The Hoosiers went 7-2, climbed into the top 10 of the Associated Press poll for the first time in a half-century and beat teams they could only previously dream of toppling.

If that feels like a memory so faint that it just might be a dream, you can be excused for thinking so. After all, the season in which they did it was profoundly and increasingly weird.

Indiana is one of several programs whose successes or failures during the pandemic-altered 2020 campaign stand as statistical outliers and oddities. Embedded within those numbers are valuable lessons about not overreacting to the results of a single season, particularly one played in empty (or mostly empty) stadiums, with shape-shifting rosters based on the results of COVID-19 tests and schedules that had the stability of a Jenga tower.

The season didn’t devolve into total chaos. By the end of the season, Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Notre Dame were the College Football Playoff teams, with the Crimson Tide, those plucky little underdogs, winning its sixth national championship under Nick Saban. But whatever sense of normalcy there was when the metaphorical dust settled wasn’t reflective of the three months that preceded it.

It wasn’t quite 2007 levels of anarchy, but it wasn’t terribly far off from it.

With some semblance of order seemingly restored in the world of college football three years later, let’s take a look back at some of the most eyebrow-raising results of a season truly unlike any other.

Indiana

2020 record: 6-2

Record three years before 2020: 18-19

Record since 2020: 8-21

We might as well start with our poster child.

The Hoosiers’ success wasn’t totally out of nowhere – they had finished the previous season 8-5 and made the Gator Bowl – but what transpired over eight games in 2020 was a revelation for the program. Their .750 win percentage was their best in a season since 1967, when they made their first and only trip to the Rose Bowl (where they lost to USC and a running back named O.J. Simpson, who, at the time, was merely a beloved player with a promising future). Along the way, they climbed as high as No. 7 in the AP poll, which was also their best mark since 1967.

As excellent as the season was, it was very nearly better. Indiana’s lone loss that year was by seven on the road against Ohio State. Had they won that game against the eventual national runner-up, it’s very likely it would have advanced to the College Football Playoff. In the months after the season ended, coach Tom Allen, an Indiana native whose sunny personality drew more than a few Ted Lasso comparisons, signed a reworked contract that increased his pay by $1 million a year.

With their coach signed and their star quarterback, Michael Penix Jr., back, it seemed as though a hopeless program competing for decades in a league in which it was comically overmatched had found a winning formula, right? 

To quote a former Hoosiers coach, not so fast, my friend.

As Penix battled injuries, the team’s roster shortcomings became much more apparent. After beginning the year ranked 17th in the AP poll, Indiana finished 2-10, lost all nine of their Big Ten games by an average of 24.7 points – including a 35-point beatdown against **Rutgers** – and averaged just 17.2 points per game, a drop of nearly 12 from the previous season.

Since then, Penix transferred to Washington, where he has blossomed into one of the top quarterbacks in the sport and a front-runner for the Heisman Trophy this year, and the deal meant to secure the school’s coveted coach has now become an albatross. If Allen is fired before Dec. 2023, he’s owed an astonishing $20 million. 

The Hoosiers are not only bad, but they’re caught in a conundrum. If you fire Allen, you’re forking over a yacht’s-worth of money to try to fix something that has seldom truly worked. And if you don’t, you’re effectively admitting you don’t care about your football program.

Penn State

2020 record: 4-5

Record three years before 2020: 31-8

Record since 2020: 23-8

The respective fates of Indiana and Penn State in 2020 came down to fractions of an inch – if even that.

Indiana’s first of six wins that season came against Penn State, which entered the season ranked seventh nationally. Trailing 36-35 after a touchdown in the first overtime, the Hoosiers opted to go for two and the win rather than kick an extra point to take the game into a second extra period. Penix was flushed from the pocket, rolled to his left and, with a Nittany Lion chasing him down from his right, dove from the three-yard line, stretching his arm out like Michael Jordan in the final seconds of Space Jam. In the closest of all calls that I’m still not entirely sure is correct one way or the other, the referee ruled the ball touched the pylon before Penix was down or the ball was out of bounds and Indiana had pulled off the upset.

While the Hoosiers used the euphoric moment as a springboard to win five of their next six, Penn State unraveled. It lost each of its next four to fall to 0-5, the worst five-game start in the history of a program that began play in the 1880s. The Nittany Lions oddly rebounded and perhaps returned to form once their season was already lost, winning their final four games for a more respectable record, but even then, the 4-5 mark was the school’s first and only losing season since 2004. Even in the two years immediately following the Jerry Sandusky scandal, they managed to go 8-4 and 7-5. It was the lowest win percentage coach James Franklin has ever had in a season – and remember, he coached for three years at Vanderbilt.

After a frustrating 2021 season in which it went 7-6, Penn State has since resembled the program it had been under Franklin from 2016-19, when it made four consecutive New Year’s Six bowls. Since the start of the 2022 season, the Nittany Lions have won 16 of their 18 games.

Making their stumbles in 2020 all the more befuddling is the amount of NFL talent that was on that roster. In the past three NFL Drafts, Penn State has had 20 players selected, ranking it among the top five FBS schools. Though within that number is at least one explanation for why 2020 wasn’t slightly better for the Nittany Lions – Micah Parsons, the transcendent linebacker now in his third season with the Dallas Cowboys opted out of that season. Had he played, perhaps one or two of Penn State’s closer contests might have gone their way. At the very least, with Parsons on the field, Penix probably isn’t getting to that pylon.

Colorado

2020 record: 4-2

Record three years before 2020: 15-21

Record since 2020: 8-21

When Karl Dorrell was hired as Colorado’s coach in 2020, the move was widely derided.