Indiana Deserves The Celebration Of Every College Football Fan
Cignetti, Indiana and Pulling Off The Ridiculous
One of my best friends in the world texted me at halftime of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day to say, “Imagine waking up from a 5-year coma to find out that Indiana is whipping Alabama in the college football playoff 17-0 at halftime.”
I had to chuckle at that wit. Because anyone who went into a coma on January 1, 2021 knew that Alabama was defending national champions, current #1 and SEC Champions, and had won six titles in 13 seasons. While Indiana had, well, pretty much accomplished the opposite of that.
Yes, there have been very few stories in the history of American sports that can match the 2025 Indiana Hoosier football team. I comprehend things a lot better with numbers, especially sports, so here are a few:
–Before this year Indiana hadn’t won a bowl game since 1991 and that was the (now defunct) Copper Bowl
–Before last year Indiana had never won more than 9 games in any season in their history
–Indiana won 8 games in 2019 and you have to go back to 1993 to find the previous time they won at least 8 games. They last won 9 games in 1967. They had won that amount only twice in their history and the previous time was in the 1940s when they weren’t even in the Big Ten. They were in the “Western” Conference.
—Indiana had a losing record every year but one from 1995 to 2018 and then again from 2021 to 2023, the year before Curt Cignetti took over, a mind-boggling total of 26 times in 28 full length seasons.
—Indiana had a losing record in Big Ten play 36 times from 1980 to 2023, a total of 44 seasons. Indiana had won 2 conference games or less 21 times from 1996 to 2023, a span of 28 seasons.
—Before this year Indiana had not won an outright Big Ten Football Championship since 1945 or even a share of one since 1967. They have won exactly zero national championships, even in a sport that used to divide those three or four ways.
And the stats could go on and on. The point is simple: Indiana was a woeful and abysmal football school. Just to put a exclamation point on it for emphasis on what I’m about to write, the three years before Cignetti’s arrival they were 9-27 and 3-24 in Big Ten play.
And then, in the blink of an eye, it all changed.
Cignetti took over and Indiana not only reached the 9-win plateau in his very first season, they won 11 games (8-1 in the Big Ten, nearly three times as many conference wins as the previous three years combined) and made the playoffs in the initial 12-team field. Which is a story in itself. Any coach accomplishing that in Year One at that kind of school deserves to be recognized.
Yet, they still had doubters. Myself included. Because they only faced two formidable teams and lost to both by double-digits, maybe it was smoke and mirrors. They played an anemic out of conference schedule and avoided the two Big Ten Championship game participants in Oregon and Penn St. So I remained skeptical.
Then this year happened like a volcanic eruption. And the leap in Year One was outdone by an even bigger leap in Year Two that buried the doubters under molten lava. Undefeated. Big Ten Champs. Rolling very good teams in the playoffs by 35 and 34 points. Championship Game bound. If someone would have woken up from a 5-year coma this year, it would be too much to process.
And to me it wasn’t just that they throttled Alabama in the Rose Bowl, it was how methodical and even unsurprising it was. The game was never close. Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza had more TD passes than incompletions (which he repeated vs. Oregon in the semifinals). It was exactly the way Alabama used to regularly dismantle other upper echelon teams in the Saban era. No mistakes. Surgical execution. Embarrassing the opponent constantly on both sides of the ball.
Is this the same school that last celebrated a postseason win in the Copper Bowl? Back when George Herbert Walker Bush was president?
Yes, it is.
And here is my plea to college football fans today and the days to come, even if Indiana doesn’t finish the thing off in the National Championship vs. Miami: Pause the complaints about NIL, Transfer portal, Lane Kiffen, how overrated the SEC was, and what targeting is or isn’t just long enough to give this team their due. Their history was so bad pre-Cignetti that even teams like South Carolina couldn’t relate.
And like a wizard waving a wand, it took the man with the scowl known round the world one year to make a joke of a program Top Ten, and two to go undefeated through 15 games.
This Indiana team has a claim to being one of the greatest ever if they defeat Miami, especially if it’s another humiliation like they put on Alabama and Oregon1. And for it to happen how it did is up there with the 2016 Chicago Cubs and 2004 Boston Red Sox to me for greatest sports stories of my lifetime. There has not been a first-time champion in major college football since Florida in 1996. This is a sport that lives and breathes blue bloods dominating year in and year out.
And Indiana has put them all to shame. Even as a guy who cannot stand the Big Ten and actively roots against their schools in all sports, even I cannot be unmoved by this story.
So join me in celebrating them.
- My humble opinion on this topic: They would have earned the right to be up there with 2019 LSU and 2018 Clemson as near #1 ever, but not in the same line as 1995 Nebraska. Simply because Indiana had close games vs. teams like Penn St. Just as Clemson did vs. Syracuse and Texas A&M and LSU did vs. Texas and Auburn. Nebraska 95 had zero close games. They annihilated everyone, especially the Top 10 teams they played. Read more here. ↩
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