Indiana Football: Big Ten to go to conference only schedule for 2020

The Indiana football team will be playing only Big Ten teams this year as the B1G announced a conference only schedule for 2020.

On Thursday the Big Ten announced that all fall sports would be going to a conference only schedule. For football fans, this hopefully is not just the first step to canceling the whole season.

The thought of keeping games in conference is partially to limit travel but to also be able to control how each team is tested. The Big Ten can put together a mandate for testing and if schools are only playing other conference schools they know they are all in the same boat.

The Hoosiers actually travel further to Rutgers than having Ball State and Western Kentucky come to Bloomington, but the Big Ten can’t control how those teams are testing.  Plus eliminating two games can allow the conference to delay the start of the season a few weeks to make sure everything is working out correctly.

The Big Ten did say that they were looking at now having each team play 10 conference games instead of the normal nine. This would have each team just lose two games instead of three.

For Indiana, they will lose their non-conference games against UConn, Western Kentucky, and Ball State. It wasn’t a very exciting slate of games, but it should have been three wins for the Hoosiers in a season where they had a legitimate shot to reach nine or ten wins.

The good news for Indiana in adding a conference game is that they play in the Big Ten East and Wisconsin out of the West, so they will play a lesser opponent than what they already have on their schedule. Not saying that playing Iowa or Minnesota will be easy but it won’t be anything like playing Ohio State and Penn State.

The Hoosiers currently don’t have the aforementioned Iowa and Minnesota along with Nebraska, and Northwestern. If we had to guess, we would say that Indiana will play Northwestern. There are already rumors swirling around about the other three schools hosting different Big Ten East teams.

Whoever the Hoosiers play it will be on the road as they already have five home games scheduled and only four road games. Heading to Northwestern wouldn’t be an easy game but one the Hoosiers could definitely win.

The schedule is still up in the air and it will be interesting to see if they keep the order the same or if it gets switched around. We have also heard they may play the Big Ten East games first in case the season gets paused and they can still declare a division champion.

Again all of this is speculation and we probably won’t know until later in the month or early August. While this is not ideal, if it means we can have a college football season and see Michael Penix Jr.throwing touchdown passes to Whop Philyor then we are all for it.