Indiana vs Nebraska, behind the numbers.

I'm been doing research and really watching a lot of Indiana because I think they are a weird team that you don't suddenly expect to just pop off like they have. I wanted to see how real they are. To give a short answer they are pretty real but there is a lot of things that could lead to them being much better than expected. I wanna break down their game by game and show you how they got to these rankings by comparing numbers and why I think Nebraska truthfully has a real shot to win but not to be sad if we don't.

Indiana is currently ranked top 10 in offense and defense this year pretty impressive and while I wish I could say it's all hype and no meat. They do have some fantastic pieces but something just makes me wonder if they are really that good or maybe they are just really good at beating up on bad teams? Well, the data suggests they are not just really good at beating bad teams they are one of the best.

But just how bad are the teams they faced on both offense and defense? Are they legit and how did they do against those match ups specifically? Let's look game by game this is gonna be a long post feel free to skip around! rankings will be in parentheses while total yards will be outside.

Sorry it's not formatted better I did the best I could with the reddit tools but I believe it's still pretty readable.

The first thing you take away is that they have faced not a single "good" passing defense and the best defense they faced was 52nd and everyone else is in the 100's that 52nd team held them to 180 sadly, that same team can't defend the run and let up 234 yards on the ground.

Nebraska though is by and far the best overall defense they can defend the pass and run at a high level and have done so against good talent. We've faced 2 very good QB's this year and a couple of very good RB's and are still ranked well in both passing defense and running defense. Indiana does seem to struggle against teams that are good at specific things but they are so good at both passing and rushing that they can do either to win. Great thing is we will be the first team without a massive flaw on one or the other they will have to beat us straight up because they can't exploit us on defense.

Another thing that might be good for us Husker fans is they play a lot of Zone. Raiola is fantastic in zone vs Man where he's very bad in man…. 90 passer rating vs 44. Indiana plays Zone more than anyone. They also play spread with a lot of 10 man sets, something we tend to do very well against. Think CU if you wanna think of spread or 10 man sets. We match up VERY well against both their offense and defense something we tend to not look at.

We are the underdogs, this is the first game where there might be zero pressure on our team to actually win but instead just go out and ball. While the pressure is on Indiana they are predicted to win a game they can't cake walk through and pull away in the 4th. Indiana struggled against a bad Maryland/NW till the 4th. Not to say Nebraska hasn't done the same with bad teams because we have.

We are both the best defense(by far) that they have faced but also surprisingly the 2nd best offense they faced and we're very close to Maryland and might be better in terms of talent but not production. If we put up 28 like Maryland did against them I'm not sure I can see Indiana scoring more.

Before the bye I had Indiana winning 31-24 in a heart breaking loss but now as I've researched a lot, I think I'll be predicting Nebraska to win. 28-21 GBR.