Hoosiers Drop South Florida, Add Home-and-Home With FIU

Indiana will play host to the Florida International Golden Panthers in 2015

Written By Sammy Jacobs (@sammyj108)

Fred Glass may have finally wised up about scheduling for Indiana football.  After getting burned in 2013 by a very difficult non-conference schedule, which included three bowl teams, Glass cancelled the upcoming series with South Florida and traded it for a home-and-home with Florida International in 2015 and 2016.  The move gives IU seven home games for the 2015 season.  The Golden Panthers are a team that has won just four games in the last two years.

Glass, the Indiana athletic director, according to tweets from Dustin Dopirak of the Bloomington Herald-Times that the Hoosiers will pay a whopping $1 million to get the Golden Panthers to make the trek up north in 2015, however IU will receive $200,000 to travel down to the Sunshine State.  The move will also cost the Hoosiers another $500,000 for canceling their series with the South Florida Bulls.  The Indiana Athletic Director mentioned that the Hoosiers would bring in about $550,000 from playing FIU at home (sounds low).  Glass also added that he has been trying to get another home game in 2014, but that was not possible.

The rational behind the changes make perfect sense and some people having been clamoring for years that the Hoosiers need to schedule easier non-conference opponents to try and get that elusive sixth win.  The question is why now?  The thinking behind a difficult schedule was to bring in more fans and get people excited to come out to The Rock, but it backfired as the Hoosiers lost early season games to Navy, whom the Hoosiers should never have scheduled in the first place, and Missouri, a team that lost in the SEC Title game a year ago and a game that makes very little sense in terms of draw.  If Glass wanted to make the schedule easier why did he not get out of the Navy game last year?

Some Hoosier fans will disagree with this line of thinking, but the only way to get the more casual fans interested in this program is to get to a bowl game, even if it has to be with a cotton soft schedule.  The only issue with this schedule change is that the Hoosiers are playing yet another road game against an inferior opponent.  This has been a pattern under Glass as the Hoosiers have travelled to such schools as UMass, North Texas, Western Kentucky, Ball State (Moved to Indianapolis), and Bowling Green to name a few.