Will Indiana reach 8.5 wins in 2025?

The books have the Hoosiers hinged at 8.5 wins. What does recent ESPN SP+ data think of this?

Some might remember when Indiana’s win-total line for the 2024 season was a consensus 5.5 among sportsbooks. At the time, this was actually an encouraging line, as noted in the BSB last offseason, because Indiana had gone 9-27 in the previous three seasons combined, meaning someone was taking notice of the institutional and personnel changes in Bloomington after a very rough 2023 season. But for any educated IUFB fan, it was clear that line was far too low – even my own projection of 7 wins was too low!

Suddenly, the books are taking notice, and they aren’t ready to write off Indiana yet, like many pundits seem eager to do. Here are the win-total lines for 2025, as set by FanDuel (bolded teams are on Indiana’s schedule):

• Ohio State — 10.5 wins

• Oregon — 10.5

• Penn State — 10.5

• Indiana — 8.5

• Michigan — 8.5

• Illinois — 7.5

• Iowa — 7.5

• Nebraska — 7.5

• USC — 7.5

• Washington — 7.5

• Minnesota — 6.5

• Michigan State — 5.5

• UCLA — 5.5

• Wisconsin — 5.5

• Maryland — 4.5

• Northwestern — 3.5

• Purdue — 3.5

This seems to match expectations for the Hoosiers this season, at least closer than last season’s line. That’s not because there is any expected regression from the 11-win 2024 team – in fact, maybe the opposite due to gained talent in the portal and ranking 38th in retained production (according to ESPN) – but because of the schedule.

According to ESPN’s SP+ ratings just released this week, Indiana’s strength of schedule ranks 31st nationally. While I don’t believe strength of schedule should be boiled down into a single value, it does highlight the fact that two expected championship-level teams (Oregon and Penn State), two legitimately high-tier teams (Illinois and Iowa), and three more teams that could easily over-achieve (MSU, Wisconsin, and UCLA) are on this schedule. You don’t need to travel too many deviations from the mean for this schedule to be extremely difficult.

In the face of that, it’s entirely reasonable for this Indiana team to be both more talented and win fewer games. Of course, Curt Cignetti would not be content with that, but it’s a helpful perspective for watching this program in 2025.

Speaking of ESPN’s SP+ ratings, this metric is particularly useful for projecting win probability. It does most of the heavy lifting statistically, based on the formula, and Bill Connelly – the creator of SP+ ratings – continues to refine that formula. For these post-Spring preseason ratings, he noted a few emphasized contributing variables. The resulting data is a predictor in the form of points per game better or worse than the average team. This all makes my job much easier!

The chart below shows the probability of Indiana achieving any number of wins from 4 to 12, based on 20,000 simulations of the season. The percentages represent the percent of those 20,000 seasons that resulted in the corresponding number of wins. Since wins 0-3 aren’t shown, it means zero seasons among those 20,000 resulted in 0-3 wins.

According to this SP+ data and my (simple) win probability model, Indiana’s most probable win total is 8.25, slightly above Connelly’s projected 8.1. Before 2024, Indiana’s probable win total was 4.81.