One of the most anticipated games of Week 8 of the 2026 college football season went down to the wire — even if it was a bit of a slog to get there.
Thanks to a four-yard touchdown run from Josh Hoover, No. 6 Indiana held on for a 13-6 overtime victory against Michigan on Saturday, Oct. 24 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The win allowed the Hoosiers to bounce back from a heartbreaking loss the previous week against Ohio State, a setback that ended the reigning national champions’ 22-game win streak, while the Wolverines fell to 4-3.
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What stood out the most from those 60 minutes and change of play?
Here are three takeaways from Indiana’s win over Michigan:
Indiana isn’t a national championship contender … at least not right now
With precious few exceptions, even the best teams in college football history have to sweat out close games.
Last season, Indiana was no different.
On their way to a 16-0 season that completed one of the most unimaginable turnarounds in American sports history, the Hoosiers had their share of close calls. They edged Iowa on the road, 20-15. They needed one of the most miraculous catches of the season, with Omar Cooper Jr. somehow landing in bounds in the back of the end zone, to beat a 3-5 Penn State team playing under an interim coach. More understandably, they had one-possession wins in the Big Ten and College Football Playoff championship games. In each instance, coach Curt Cignetti’s team was able to pull out a win because of a veteran-laden roster headlined by the Heisman Trophy winner who seemingly always offered up a big play when his team needed it the most.
This year, Indiana doesn’t have that. With Fernando Mendoza now in the NFL, and with several other important pieces from that national title squad also no longer in Bloomington, the Hoosiers look vulnerable in a way they didn’t in the 2025 season.
Since opening Big Ten play, three of Indiana’s four games have been decided by one score – a six-point home win against Northwestern, a come-from-behind 20-17 win at Nebraska and last week’s 19-15 loss against Ohio State. Though his stats this season are impressive – he has yet to throw an interception this season, after all – Josh Hoover has been a downgrade at quarterback. Though he was playing through an injury, he completed only eight of 18 passes for 81 yards and an interception Saturday. The offense as a whole hasn’t hummed in the same way, averaging 33.6 points per game this season after averaging 41.6 in 2025. Over its past two games, it has scored just 28 points and averaged 290.5 yards.
What Cignetti has accomplished in three seasons at Indiana is extraordinary, to put it mildly. But for as much as this speaks to Indiana’s progression as a program, his 7-1 team simply doesn’t have it to this point. It may very well make the playoff – and with only one of its four remaining regular-season games coming against a ranked opponent, it likely will – but it’s difficult to envision this squad winning three or four games in a row against the country’s best teams come late December and January.
Michigan still has a quarterback issue
In what was ultimately his final season at Utah, Kyle Whittingham oversaw an offense that averaged 41.3 points per game and featured two impressive quarterbacks in Devon Dampier and Byrd Ficklin who helped power that dynamic unit.
In his first season at Michigan, he’s faced with the age-old dilemma: by cycling through two quarterbacks, he seemingly doesn’t have one.
Whittingham’s decision to move on from Bryce Underwood six games into a wildly disappointing sophomore season was understandable, especially after dismal performances against Minnesota and Penn State. But while Tommy Carr was under center for a reinvigorated offense in the second half of last week’s win against Penn State, his contributions in that second-half outburst were relatively minimal. Against Indiana, Carr looked very much like someone making their first college start, averaging 5.2 yards per pass attempt and turning the ball over twice in his team’s own territory to help hand the Hoosiers their only six points of regulation.
Carr looked more comfortable as the game went on – never more so than when he led the Wolverines on a 13-play, 53-yard drive that set up the game-tying field goal that forced overtime – but he’s still very much a work in progress. While that improvement will come with time and snaps, it showed why moving off of Underwood wasn’t some kind of cure-all for Michigan’s woes.
Because of that, a Wolverines team with an elite defense has seen its playoff dreams effectively end before Halloween.
Kyle Whittingham’s impact hasn’t been felt at Michigan
When Whittingham was brought over from Utah last December, he was widely viewed as a stabilizing force for a program that desperately needed it, between Jim Harbaugh’s scandal-plagued final seasons and Sherrone Moore’s scandal-plagued (and much less successful) two seasons.
Not only would there be an adult in the room, but the Wolverines were getting a proven winner who built one of the country’s most reliably successful programs over two decades.
So far, it hasn’t looked quite like that in Ann Arbor.
Saturday’s loss knocked Michigan to 4-3, a record that would be worse were it not for a hotly debated final second in a season-opening win against Western Michigan. The prolific offense built around a dual-threat quarterback that Whittingham and offensive coordinator Jason Beck implemented last season at Utah hasn’t come anywhere close to materializing, so much so that the program’s one-time savior, quarterback Bryce Underwood, has been reduced to a gadget player. They have struggled to run the ball effectively, including Saturday, when they managed just 57 yards on 42 carries. Against the Hoosiers, the Wolverines scored just twice in four red-zone trips. While botched field goals from mistake-prone college kickers can’t be tied entirely to the head coach, they’re the kinds of errors and inefficiencies that seldom appeared during Whittingham’s days with the Utes.
Whittingham is just seven games into his Michigan tenure, meaning he’s only had so much time to make his mark on the program, but for a soon-to-be 67-year-old coach who was very briefly retired before landing with the Wolverines, there’s really only so much time before you start expecting more.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Indiana title chances and Michigan QBs, 3 takeaways from the Hoosiers' OT win