Indiana Men’s Basketball Bracketology: Hoosiers Can Still Salvage This

Indiana’s two consecutive 25-point losses appear to make NCAA Tournament talk a bit far-fetched, but the Hoosiers have time to repair the damage.

Indiana's Trey Galloway (32) talks with a referee during the Indiana versus Illinois men's basketball game at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025. / Rich Janzaruk/Herald-Times / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – This weekly bracketology story has become a strange exercise in how things rarely stand pat.

Two weeks ago, Indiana was just re-starting Big Ten play and had a flimsy NCAA Tournament resume despite preseason hype that pegged the Hoosiers as a Big Ten contender. Indiana only appeared on one bracket at the NCAA bracketology aggregation website bracketmatrix.com – and it was possible they were included in error.

One week later, Indiana’s five-game win streak had the Hoosiers appearing inside the NCAA Tournament field among several bracketologists and Indiana was generally among the top four teams left out of several other brackets, if not being chosen as the first team out.

Now? Indiana has been on the wrong end of 25-point losses to Iowa and No. 19 Illinois, so the NCAA Tournament seems to be the least of the Hoosiers’ problems.

The world of bracketology has largely not priced in Indiana’s heavy defeat at the hands of the Fighting Illini. ESPN’s Joe Lunardi published a bracket just as this story was published and he had Indiana in the last 10 teams out. Obviously, the Illinois defeat is not going to put the Hoosiers in good stead in the eyes of most prognosticators.

So a bracketology breakdown might seem pointless at the moment. Indiana did itself no favors and was barely in the field among those who prognosticate anyway.

That would seem to paint a hopeless scenario for the Hoosiers, but even if the mood at present is sour, the truth is that Indiana still has time to salvage their NCAA Tournament situation – all feelings to the contrary aside.

Indiana’s current NCAA tournament resume is not great, but the Hoosiers are hardly in a position where those two heavy losses were mortal blows to a potential postseason Lazarus act.

Indiana is currently 63rd in the NCAA’s NET rankings. Not good enough for a NCAA Tournament at-large bid, but not out of range from getting into a position where the Hoosiers could be in the mix.

The result-based metrics vs. the predictive metrics are at odds. Predictive metrics like Kenpom.com (57th) and barttorvik.com (61st) have Indiana floating just above their NET ranking.

Result-based metrics treat the Hoosiers kinder. KPI, one of the indexes used as a guide by the NCAA Tournament committee, still has Indiana ranked 33rd. Wins Against Bubble, a new index, has Indiana 43rd.

One thing to also consider is the mediocrity rampant among the bubble teams. Conferences that have placed multiple teams in the field recently – the Big East, the Big 12 and the Mountain West – aren’t as strong this season. The SEC is very strong, but there will be an element of cannibalism that will take out some of its bubble teams.

It’s certainly true inside the Big Ten that there is a strata of haves and have nots.

For all of its problems, Indiana is still seventh in the Big Ten standings. Michigan State, Purdue and Michigan have started to break free from the pack, and none of them have more than one conference loss. Illinois and Oregon are the closest to that group thanks to quality victories and should have no NCAA Tournament worries barring a collapse.

However, no one else in the conference lacks flaws that could sink them if things go as poorly for them as they have for Indiana in the last week.

It’s bizarre, for example, that Indiana handled Southern California with relative ease in a 13-point win on Jan. 8, but that the Trojans beat Illinois in Champaign by 10 and defeated Iowa by 10 in Los Angeles – the teams that hammered Indiana by 25. Make sense of that.

The point is that for the doom-and-gloom that Indiana’s put its fans through in the last two games, and the seeming hopelessness it generated, nothing is over yet.

Indiana has opportunities in front of it. There are still eight of the next nine games to be played that would count as Quad 1 wins. Win even four of them, and the Hoosiers are right back in the NCAA Tournament conversation … whether it feels that way at the moment or not.

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• HOOSIERS, ILLINI SCUFFLE: Luke Goode’s hard block out on Illinois’ Tomislav Ivisic ignited a baseline confrontation between the two teams late in Indiana's 94-69 loss that resulted in an ejection for Indiana’s Oumar Ballo. CLICK HERE.