Developing Indiana's 22-Game Streak Ended on a Left Foot. Ohio State's Season Was Repriced by a Right Arm

Indiana had not lost in 22 games. It had not lost at home in 19. It had not lost a fumble in 1,487 snaps, a run that started on the first day of the 2025 season. It lost two of them in the first few minutes of the third quarter on Saturday, and then it lost the game by a foot, and the foot is what everyone will remember. On fourth-and-4 from the Ohio State 27 with 1:02 left, Josh Hoover threw to the left front pylon and Nick Marsh caught it with several feet of open turf in front of him. His left foot was on the chalk. Gus Johnson got as far as "TOUCHDOWN!" before he got to "NO!" Ohio State 19, Indiana 15, and the two longest active winning streaks in the sport are over on the same afternoon.

That is the story Bloomington will tell. It is not the story that changes what Ohio State is worth. That one happened with about eight minutes left, on a first-and-10 sack at the Indiana 38, when Julian Sayin fumbled, his team recovered, and he did not get up the same. He came back to the sideline with his right arm in a sling. "Obviously, that was a big blow to us," Ryan Day said. By the time he spoke to the Associated Press the estimate had a number attached: "I don't have a ton of details, but it looks like Julian will be out several weeks." Fox Sports heard "a couple weeks." Nobody has said what is wrong with the arm.

What the market had, and what it got

DraftKings opened this game at Ohio State -1.5 and closed it at -3, after touching -3.5 midweek, with a 50.5 total. The public was on the favourite in the way the public is on a favourite at Indiana: 68 percent of spread tickets and 76 percent of spread money, 82 percent of moneyline tickets and 84 percent of moneyline money. Kalshi's traders, on $2.6 million of volume, had the Buckeyes at 58 percent to win and 54 percent to win by more than 2.5. Ohio State won by four. Every one of those positions cashed, and every one of them cashed on a foot.

Indiana came in 1-5 against the spread, the worst mark in the country, and 0-4 at home. That is a strange line for a team on a 22-game run, and it is the honest description of what the run had become: a team winning games it was expected to win by more, then winning games it was expected to lose, and never once beating the number at Memorial Stadium. On Saturday it played a game to the number again. It got Hoover back from an arm injury of his own for a 75-yard drive that made it 19-15 with 10:30 left, and it got Charlie Becker nine catches for 165 yards. What it did not do was hold the ball. Both fumbles came early in the third quarter, on a team that had not lost one in fourteen months.

The under hit comfortably at 34 points, which was the only position the money actually agreed on: 76 percent of the total handle was on it. Ohio State has now gone 9-1 to the under in its last ten games as a road favourite, and its defence held an offence averaging 40.2 points to 15. That is the number in this game that was not luck.

Why the foot is not the headline

Marsh's foot settled a game and a spread. Sayin's arm reprices a season, and the reason is the calendar.

Before kickoff Kalshi's season markets had Ohio State at 56 percent to win the Big Ten and 16 percent to win the Playoff; Indiana was 26 and 8. Those prices were built on a quarterback who entered the week with 60-of-84 passing for 933 yards and 12 total touchdowns in conference play. He finished Saturday 15-of-29 for 235 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions, both to Amare Ferrell, one of them returned to the Ohio State 7 to set up Indiana's only touchdown of the first half. It was his second straight game with two picks. The 38-yard throw to Jeremiah Smith on fourth-and-1 at 12:46 of the fourth, the one that made it 19-7, was the best ball he threw all day. It was also the second-to-last.

The replacement is Luke Fahey, a true freshman and a three-star recruit from Mission Viejo, California, whose season to date is 9-of-11 for 203 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions, nearly all of it in garbage time. The AP's word for his first real action on Saturday was "sped up." He gets a bye week, which is the only good news. Then he gets USC in Los Angeles on October 31, Oregon at home on November 7, and a November that ends with Michigan. If "several weeks" means three, Fahey starts at USC. If it means six, he starts against Oregon too. Nobody at Ohio State has said which, and we are not going to guess.

The 16 percent was a price on Sayin and the defence. Half of that is in a sling.

The case that this changes less than we think

The strongest version of the other side is that Ohio State's title case was never its quarterback. The defence allowed 13.1 points a game coming in, seventh in the country, and it held Indiana to 15 on a day the offence gave it two interceptions and a fumble to work with. "We had to win the game on defense at the end," Day said, and that was the plan before Sayin was hurt, not after. Smith was held to four catches for 68 yards and still produced the game's decisive play. A unit that can win a top-five road game with its quarterback throwing two picks can win November games with a freshman handing off.

The second part of the argument is that the bye is not nothing. Fahey gets two weeks of first-team reps before USC, and Ohio State's play-caller gets two weeks to build a game plan around a quarterback who has thrown eleven competitive passes. That is more than most teams get when a starter goes down in mid-October.

We think the defence argument is right about the Big Ten and wrong about the Playoff. A 56 percent Big Ten price survives a freshman quarterback if the defence holds, because the conference's other contender just lost at home and has to go to Ann Arbor next week. A 16 percent national price does not, because the Playoff is a tournament of offences and Fahey has not yet thrown a pass against one. If Sayin is back for Oregon, this paragraph is wrong. If he is back for Michigan, it is right.

Indiana, which lost nothing it had not already lost

The counter-intuitive reading of Saturday for the Hoosiers is that they are a better team than their streak made them look and a worse one than their ranking did. Trailing at halftime at home for the first time under Curt Cignetti, they came back from 19-7 to a one-score game and had the ball at the 27 with a minute left. "We had it, we just didn't make it happen," Cignetti said of the blitz check on the final play, and then: "The sun comes up tomorrow and we've got to get ready for Michigan." That is the right register. Indiana's first home loss in three seasons came by four points to a top-five team whose quarterback it intercepted twice. Its 1-5 against the spread was already telling anyone who looked that the margins had been thinner than the record.

Marsh did not speak to reporters afterward. The social-media verdict ran from "That's going to haunt Nick Marsh for many years to come" to a Fox clip that simply says "BUT HE'S OUT OF BOUNDS," and none of it is the point. The pass was thrown to a spot where the receiver had to catch it at the pylon with his feet underneath him. Marsh needed to come down in bounds and Hoover needed a better throw, as one bettor put it on Saturday night, and neither is the thing that decides Indiana's season. Michigan, which benched its quarterback at halftime on Saturday and won anyway, is the thing that decides Indiana's season. The Hoosiers have not beaten the Wolverines in consecutive years since 1958-59.

"We remember what happened Dec. 6," Smith said, meaning the Big Ten title game Indiana won in Indianapolis last December. On Saturday Ohio State got its memory back. What it lost in the process will not be clear until Day says a word more specific than "several."