For Buckeye Nation, the bigger jolt right now isn’t Michigan week - it’s Indiana.
Ohio State’s trip to Bloomington to face No. 5 Indiana has taken center stage in this week’s fan survey, and it wasn’t particularly close.
With the No. 4 Buckeyes heading into the biggest Big Ten game of the season, fans made it clear which matchup has them leaning in hardest over the final stretch of the regular season.
The poll asked two things: which of Ohio State’s last six regular-season games has fans most fired up, and how they see today’s showdown against the Hoosiers playing out. The answer to the first question surprised me a bit.
A top-five matchup against an undefeated team clearly has plenty of pull, but it more than doubled up The Game, which is still the regular-season finale and, in most years, the automatic choice. The first conference meeting with USC drew some interest, too, while Oregon didn’t receive a single vote.
On the margin question, the Buckeyes landed in a pretty familiar range for most respondents. Ohio State by 8-14 points pulled 37% of the vote, while 17% picked the Buckeyes by 15 or more.
Another 42% thought this one would be decided by a touchdown or less. Indiana got no support for a win by 15-plus, and just 4% each picked either side by one point.
That lines up with one prediction already on the books. In our Indiana game preview, I went with Ohio State 31-17, which puts that pick in the same 8-14-point window as the largest share of voters.
The market, though, has been trimming Ohio State’s edge. The Buckeyes opened as 4.5-point favorites and have moved down to 3.5.
SP+, meanwhile, has this one essentially dead even, projecting a 26-26 game but still giving Ohio State the edge by 0.2 points. If that number holds, there’s no cover coming with it.
There’s also a little more heat on this one than usual because of what happened last season. Ohio State leads the all-time series 81-13-5 and had won 30 straight meetings before Indiana broke through, a run that stretched back to 1988. Then came the 13-10 loss in the Big Ten Championship Game in December, which gives this trip to Bloomington some added weight.
That result snapped a stretch in which Ohio State had been handling Indiana with relative ease, including a 38-15 win in Columbus in 2024 and a 23-3 victory in Bloomington in 2023. This time, though, the Buckeyes are walking into a matchup between No.
4 Ohio State, No. 5 Indiana, the defending national champion, and a Hoosiers team riding a 22-game winning streak.
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Ohio State's Big Win Just Created A Julian Sayin Problem
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For Ohio State, the victory was significant, but the bigger question now is what comes next at quarterback. Sayins status remains unknown after the injury, and the Buckeyes suddenly have to balance the value of a marquee win with the uncertainty surrounding the most important position on the field. [Read more 🡒]