A foot. The whole afternoon came down to a foot.
Box Score: Ohio State defeats Indiana 19-15
Fourth-and-4 from the Ohio State 27. Sixty-two seconds on the clock. Josh Hoover drops back, finds Nick Marsh all alone in the left corner of the end zone, and for one glorious second, Indiana has the go-ahead touchdown against the No. 4 Buckeyes.
Then the officials look down. Marsh's left foot came down on the white paint. No touchdown. Turnover on downs. Ohio State kneels it out, 19-15, and the longest winning streak in college football is dead.
The autopsy: three self-inflicted wounds
Indiana didn't lose this game on the last play. They lost it on the dozen plays before it. Start with the kicking game: Nicolas Radicic missed two field goals. That's six points left on the turf in a game you lost by four. Do that math however you want — it never stops hurting.
Then the turnovers. Julian Sayin threw two interceptions and got strip-sacked by Mario Landino with about five minutes left — the hit that knocked Ohio State's quarterback out of the game with his throwing arm in a sling. Sayin is now expected to miss several weeks, which is its own mushroom cloud over Columbus (more on that in a minute).
And then the cruelest one: Marsh beats his man clean, Hoover puts it where only he can get it, and the pass drifts six inches too far left. A toe on the line. Ballgame.
What the sims got right — and what they whiffed
Let's be honest about our own call sheet. The model ran Ohio State at Indiana 1,040 times and came out Indiana 31.5, Ohio State 31.3 — a coin flip. The coin-flip part? Nailed it. Four-point game, last-minute ending, exactly the rock fight the numbers promised.
The winner? Wrong. The total? Laughably high — both defenses spent the afternoon making the sims look silly. Some days the model sees the shape of a game perfectly and still can't tell you who walks out. This was one of those days, and we'll own it.
The streaks that died in Bloomington
Understand what just ended. Indiana's 22-game winning streak — the longest active run in the FBS — is over. The Hoosiers hadn't lost since Notre Dame beat them in the playoff on December 20, 2024. In between: a 16-0 national championship season, the most absurd turnaround in the history of American sports. Their 19-game home winning streak? Gone too. It was the first time a Curt Cignetti Indiana team trailed at halftime at home.
All of it, ended by a foot on a paint stripe.
The fallout
Ohio State (6-1, 4-0 Big Ten) gets the road win it desperately needed — but at what cost? Sayin, a 2025 Heisman finalist, watched the ending from the sideline in a sling, and Ryan Day says he'll miss several weeks. The Buckeyes' next month: at No. 19 USC, Oregon, No. 25 Northwestern, at Nebraska. With freshman Luke Fahey (0-for-2 in relief, two punts) holding the clipboard. Good luck.
Indiana (6-1, 3-1) now has to get off the mat with only one ranked opponent left on the schedule. The dream of back-to-back unbeaten seasons is dead. The playoff dream isn't — but the margin for error just went to zero.
Game of the year? It lived up to every bit of the billing. It just needed one less inch of white paint.
