BLOOMINGTON - While Indiana awaits perhaps the biggest regular-season game in its history, fans fret over resumes and rankings amid a debate shaping up to be among the most contentious in the College Football Playoff's 11 years.

Indiana sits at its center. The undefeated Hoosiers are two-score underdogs this weekend in Columbus, ahead of what right now stands as their only game against a team ranked in the top 30 in ESPN's Football Power Index. With a traffic jam of two-loss SEC teams building up in the rear-view, would (or should) IU be in danger of missing the Playoff with a loss this weekend.

Allowing for the fact that our sample size remains relatively modest, it would still be unprecedented.

First, it's important to point out Indiana can win this weekend. A win in Columbus would change this conversation entirely, handing IU arguably the best win in America and a path to the Big Ten championship game next month.

For the purposes of this discussion, we need to set a basic term: Indiana loses this weekend in Columbus and then defeats Purdue at home the following Saturday to finish 11-1, and 8-1 in Big Ten play. To safely make the Playoff at large, they would likely need to finish the season in the committee's top 11, with the field's fifth conference champion potentially pulling an automatic bid from outside the top 12.

History says even finishing outside the top 10 is unlikely.

As we've discussed in recent weeks, expanded conferences have become a deeply complicating factor in these discussions.

The argument against Indiana, in this example, is its strength of schedule (No. 106 nationally, per ESPN). The Hoosiers have yet to play any of the other seven teams ranked among the top eight in the conference per FPI, and it's distinctly possible by Selection Sunday, Ohio State will be the only one of those seven IU has faced.

That's despite the Big Ten playing nine-game schedules, something the SEC has long resisted. Indeed, six of the Hoosiers' nine conference opponents were ranked No. 46 or better in Bill Connelly's final SP+ projection of the season in August, but underperformance by Nebraska, Washington, UCLA, Maryland and Michigan has dampened the value of those wins over time.

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Conference consolidation pulling the biggest brands in the sport closer together has forced more heavily imbalanced schedules, creating more situations like the one unfolding right now. This season, for example, Ohio State plays each of the other three teams in the top four in the Big Ten, and none of those three teams play each other at all.

It's also contributing to the logjam within the conferences.

As things stand, with BYU's loss last weekend and Miami's loss earlier this month to Georgia Tech, both the Big 12 and the ACC appear to be shaping up as one-bid leagues, leaving one spot for Notre Dame and a whopping eight for the Big Ten and SEC.

But if the teams involved returned to the conferences they played in last year, Texas, not BYU, would be carrying the torch for the Big 12, while Oregon, a Pac-12 team, would lead the rankings. It's obviously not so simple, but that's a basic illustration of the clustering effect consolidation has had.

This is the first year of the expanded 12-team field, but in the College Football Playoff era, the committee has always expanded its rankings out to a full 25, primarily to populate what we called the New Year's Six bowls that weren't part of the Playoff in a given year.

In that time, not counting the uneven COVID season, nine (then-)Power Five conference teams finished with one loss and did not make the four-team Playoff. If we include 2021 Notre Dame in the sample, that number comes to a round 10.

In every case, the team involved finished ranked in the top 10. In fact, not once did such a team finish lower than No. 7. And while it's a blunt-instrument comparison in some ways, now that the field is expanded, it's worth saying each of those 10 teams eventually played in a New Year's Six bowl game, roughly equivalent to making the Playoff field.

Here's a look at those teams' resumes, as compared to where IU sits today:

It's worth pointing out in that time, only one two-loss conference champion (2021 Pitt) finished as low as No. 12. Again, a function of conference consolidation as much as anything.

But the basic point is illustrated above: One-loss Power Five/Four/Two teams have historically always landed comfortably inside the top 10 in the committee's final top 25.

That includes teams the metrics didn't necessarily see as elite, like 2015 Iowa, or teams with relatively modest strength-of-schedule numbers, like both that Iowa team and 2015 Ohio State, or 2017 Wisconsin, or 2014 Baylor. None were quite so glaring in that column as Indiana, but it's worth pointing out the Hoosiers have, per ESPN, the No. 4 remaining strength of schedule nationally, so their number will climb regardless of results.

Those metrics have often been cited as reasons to keep teams out of a four-team Playoff, but will the committee stick by its history in a 12-team field. The sheer tonnage of two-loss SEC teams that don't offer many clean break points on who has lost to whom makes this an unusually difficult field to parse. But history is firmly on Indiana's side for the moment.

Ultimately, the committee continues giving Indiana the benefit of the doubt, leaving the Hoosiers at No. 5 overall through their second bye week.

IU's poor strength of schedule appears to be counterbalanced by its comfortable strength of record, its top-five ranking in ESPN's "game control" metric (a measure of how the average top 25 team would control games start to finish the way Indiana has, given its schedule) and, frankly, the Hoosiers' comfortable passage of the eye test.

Of equal importance, the committee kept all two-loss SEC teams ranked in the top 11 seventh or lower. None of those four teams (No. 7 Alabama, No. 9 Ole Miss, No. 10 Georgia, No. 11 Tennessee) would currently be in position to host, and their continued treatment from the committee would seem to suggest they are being compared more closely to one another, than being treated as part of a conference so competitive at the top end of the sport it deserves extra credit for teams with the added weight of those losses.

More plainly, the committee still seems noticeably more convinced by undefeated Indiana than it does the clutch of two-loss SEC teams in the rear-view mirror.

BYU's fall from No. 6 to No. 14 could be a warning sign for the Hoosiers. But BYU also lost at home to a 4-6 Kansas team, and flirted with defeat versus modest competition in games against Oklahoma State and Utah just in Big 12 play. A loss at Ohio State doesn't seem likely to hit IU's resume so hard.

Is it possible Indiana could suffer that kind of drop, with an ugly defeat in Columbus on Saturday? Sure. But both recent history (the committee's treatment of Indiana thus far) and a longer-lens view of existing precedent (treatment of one-loss power conference teams historically) suggest the Hoosiers are still in a robust position with two regular-season games to play.

Just like everyone else in this conversation, they simply need to take care of their own business.

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