A huge battle between top-five ranked Big Ten teams kicks off as No. 2 Ohio State welcomes No. 5 Indiana on Saturday. Here’s how the oddsmakers are predicting the game right now.

Ohio State moved to 6-1 in Big Ten play but still sits in third place in the standings thanks to that 1-point loss at Oregon earlier this year, and this game will determine second place in the league.

Standing in the Buckeyes’ way is arguably the surprise team in college football this season: undefeated Indiana, playing its first-ever 10-win season behind the nation’s second-ranked scoring offense under first-year head coach Curt Cignetti.

What do the wiseguys expect will happen as the Buckeyes host the Hoosiers this weekend?

Let’s check in with the early predictions for Ohio State vs. Indiana in this Week 12 college football game, according to the oddsmakers.

Ohio State is an 11.5 point favorite against Indiana, according to the lines at FanDuel Sportsbook.

The book lists the total at 52.5 points for the game.

And it set the moneyline odds for Ohio State at -465 and for Indiana at +350 to win outright.

Ohio State: -11.5 (-110)
Indiana: +11.5 (-110)

Over 52.5 points: -104
Under 52.5 points: -118

Ohio State is 5-5 against the spread (50%) overall so far this season …

Indiana is 8-2 (80%) ATS in ‘24, the third-best mark nationally …

Ohio State is 3-3 against the spread at home this year …

Indiana is 3-0 ATS on the road …

The total went under in 6 of Ohio State’s last 7 games …

Indiana is 5-0 ATS in its last 5 games on the road …

Ohio State is 8-4 against the spread in its last 12 home games …

Indiana is 6-1 ATS in its last 7 games on the road against Ohio State …

Ohio State is 4-2 against the spread in its last 6 games in November …

The total went over in 7 of Indiana’s last 9 games …

A plurality of bettors expect the Hoosiers to give the Buckeyes a good scare this weekend, according to the spread consensus picks for the game.

Indiana is getting 66 percent of bets to either win outright in an upset, or to keep the margin under a dozen points in a loss.

The other 44 percent of wagers project Ohio State will win the game and cover the big spread.

The game’s implied score suggests a comfortable win for the Buckeyes against the Hoosiers.

When taking the point spread and total into consideration, it’s implied that Ohio State will defeat Indiana by a projected score of 32 to 21.

Our early pick: Indiana +11.5 … Ohio State hasn’t performed well against the spread and its defense has been prone to exposure by aggressive passing offenses. Buckeyes by 10.

When: Sat., Nov. 23
Time: 12 p.m. Eastern
TV: Fox network

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Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.

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Desperate family and friends of a pregnant mother of four who disappeared in Indiana last month are hoping to rally support to bring her — and her possibly newborn child — home.

Emma Baum, 25, was last seen at her boyfriend’s house in Gary, Ind. on Oct. 10, her family said. She was heavily pregnant at the time and likely due in just days.

“We are looking for my sister. She was one centimeter dilated on October 4. She has been missing since October 10,” Baum’s sister, Abigale Smith, said at a press conference on Friday.

“At this point, we have done everything we can, and now we ask the public to please help us.”

Jamie Baum, Emma’s mother, believes her daughter’s boyfriend had something to do with her sudden disappearance.

“I would like my daughter home. We miss her. Her babies need her. Her family needs her,” she said at the press conference.

Emma’s boyfriend has since been taken into custody, but in connection to an unrelated case for a failure to appear warrant, Gary police Commander Jack Hamady said.

A missing persons report wasn’t filed for Emma until Oct. 28 — 18 days after she was last seen at her boyfriend’s house.

Police say that they have dedicated their search efforts to the three primary locations that have come up during the investigation and are pivoting to scour old video footage in the areas where Emma was last seen.

The young mom is approximately 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs about 136 pounds. She frequently wears wigs and different hair pieces but is naturally a brunette.

“We love you, Emma. And if you can hear us, there is nothing that you have done to make any of us stop loving you. We trust that somebody knows something and we want her home,” Smith said.

When her son was taken from her by gun violence at 28 years old, Crystal Walker felt the anger first. She said she wished the person responsible would die.

But after a few weeks, Walker, who’s now a chaplain at the Indiana Women’s Prison, realized that would mean another parent would have to go through what she went through. And that felt wrong, she said.

“Even if that person is a mass murderer and murders other people, we don’t have the right to figure out when, where, how someone else dies,” she said on the steps of the Indiana Statehouse Sunday afternoon, where dozens gathered to protest Gov. Eric Holcomb’s decision to resume state executions in Indiana after a 15-year hiatus.

“That’s God’s business, right there,” Walker said.

Holcomb and Attorney General Todd Rokita announced in June that they were seeking to resume executions in Indiana state prisons, starting with Joseph Corcoran, who was convicted of murdering four people in Allen County in 1997. The Indiana Supreme Court scheduled Corcoran’s execution for Dec. 18.

President-elect Donald Trump had also signaled during his campaign that he would not only resume federal executions but expand who is eligible for them.

The Indiana Abolition Coalition and Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty organized the rally to urge Holcomb to stop Corcoran’s execution and end capital punishment in Indiana, arguing that it’s undignified, morally wrong and, in an appeal to Hoosiers’ practicality, expensive for taxpayers.

Bill Breeden, a minister emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington and a longtime anti-death penalty activist, called on Holcomb to go to the death chamber and witness Corcoran’s execution, if he won’t stop it.

“There is no other premeditated, cold-blooded murder like that in the world,” he said. “None.”

More: Indiana ‘Death Row’ holds 8 killers, no executions are scheduled

In their announcement, Holcomb said the Department of Corrections had recently acquired a lethal injection drug called pentobarbital, “after years of effort.”

Speaking to reporters days after the announcement, Holcomb would not divulge details about the source or cost of the drug ― information state legislators have made confidential under state law. Holcomb said he thinks executions are “appropriate in these rare cases of heinous crimes,” the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported.

“When such evil is on display, I personally believe in this,” he said.

Rokita, who ran successfully for reelection this fall, said in the news release that the death penalty is a “means of providing justice for victims of society’s most heinous crimes and holding perpetrators accountable.”

In September, Rokita filed another motion seeking an execution date, this time for Benjamin Ritchie, a man convicted in the shooting death of Beech Grove police officer William Toney in 2000.

Matthew Wrinkles, an Evansville man convicted of killing his wife and two of her family members in 1994, was the last person to be executed in Indiana, in 2009.

Joseph Corcoran’s case had many twists and turns

In 1997, 22-year-old Joseph Corcoran was living with his brother, James Corcoran, his sister, Kelly Nieto, and her fiancé, Robert Turner.

On July 26, according to Corcoran, he was upstairs and overheard his brother and Turner talking about him with some friends ― Timothy Bricker and Doug Stillwell ― in the living room. He put his 7-year-old niece in an upstairs bedroom, grabbed his semiautomatic rifle and fatally shot the four men downstairs. Then he went to a neighbor’s house and asked them to call the police.

A jury convicted Corcoran on four counts of murder in 1999, and the trial court sentenced him to death.

Corcoran’s mental health has been a recurring issue through his case. Before his trial in Allen County, his defense initially filed a notice that they would assert an insanity defense. But after court-ordered doctors evaluated him, the defense withdrew the notice, and the court found him competent to stand trial.

The Indiana Supreme Court initially threw out Corcoran’s death penalty sentence over a concern with the trial court’s process but later affirmed the sentence after the trial court reinstated it. When at first Corcoran wouldn’t sign a petition for post-conviction relief in 2003, his defense requested another psychological evaluation to determine whether Corcoran was competent to make this decision. While the experts found Corcoran suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, the court determined Corcoran was nonetheless competent to waive his relief because he demonstrated that he clearly understood the status of his case and the consequences of his decision.

In 2005, Corcoran changed his mind and tried to file for post-conviction relief, but it was too late. That year, he also filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the federal District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, claiming the state violated his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial during pre-trial negotiations. The district court granted the petition, but a federal appeals court reversed it.

Corcoran exhausted his appeals in 2016. He’s one of eight people on Indiana’s death row.

Corcoran’s legal team makes mental health argument

In a statement Indiana Abolition Coalition president David Frank read on the statehouse steps Sunday, Corcoran’s legal team argued that this death penalty sentence would not have happened if not for Corcoran’s mental illness.

Corcoran’s refusal to accept either of the prosecutor’s plea bargains ― a guilty plea in exchange for life without parole or a bench trial without the death penalty ― was a “product” of his mental illness, they wrote. They described intense delusions and hallucinations they said he experienced as a result of his paranoid schizophrenia and said friends and neighbors noticed “strange behavior” long before his trial, including seeing him talking to himself and nodding his head.

“He views his execution not as a punishment but as a means to escape his constant suffering,” the statement read. “This is a product of his irrationality, not an indication of his competency.”

Two of Indiana’s neighboring states, Ohio and Kentucky, ban capital punishment for those who had a serious mental health condition at the time of their crime.

Protesters receive a message from another inmate on death row

Rejon Taylor, a prisoner on federal death row in Terre Haute, had a message for Sunday’s protestors that Laura Lasuertmer, his minister of record, read aloud.

Taylor wondered if Corcoran, like himself, goes back and forth between wanting to live in bleak conditions or hasten his own death to put an end to it. He wondered if Corcoran also ponders the “absurdity of people protesting his looming death a little too late,” when the help he needed most was during childhood.

“If we as a society fail to embrace our children, including the marginalized and disadvantaged, when they grow older, they will burn society down to feel its warmth,” Taylor wrote. “And your protests at state capitols, or wherever you hold them, will continue in vain, the root issue still unaddressed.”

After the rally, participants lined up to ring a large bell that was originally made in 1992 for the Delaware Citizens Opposed to the Death Penalty, who would ring the bell every time there was a state execution. In September this year, the state of Delaware repealed its death penalty, freeing up the bell to travel to other states.

On Sunday, the bell’s clang echoed over and over across the lawn of the Indiana Statehouse.

Contact IndyStar state government and politics reporter Kayla Dwyer at kdwyer@indystar.com or follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @kayla_dwyer17.