Unthinkable to reality: Indiana’s rise is a fitting tale for our upside-down times | College football
WWe live in upside down times. Kim Kardashian advocates for prison reform as the US government spreads caricatured memes promoting mass deportations and detention. Dave Chappelle – faults aside – is more reliable at interpreting the news than CBS’s Tony Dokoupil. The selection committee behind the College Football Playoff has managed to put together an exciting tournament without provoking the usual torrent of negative reactions, and the team that hoists the trophy in the end may well end up being Indiana. And no, that’s not a typo.
In case it’s not clear, Indiana is basketball country – the birthplace of Larry Bird, home of the NBA’s Pacers, the inspiration behind Gene Hackman’s Hoosiers. Top-tier campus research, Bobby Knight’s tumultuous reign on the hardwoods and Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban are Indiana University’s claims to fame; football rarely, if ever, entered the chat. Before the NFL’s Colts snuck in from Baltimore and blended into Indiana’s sports tapestry, Hoosiers fans spent the football season rallying around Notre Dame, a national brand that resides in the state, and saved their true colors for college basketball.
“I saw more of Indiana [football] “When I look at photos from 20 years ago, it’s like: Were we in there? Why were we in there? I have no memory of buying a ticket.
Over nearly 140 football seasons, the Hoosiers suffered 715 losses — the most of any top program until Northwestern put Indiana at the bottom late last year. Of the program’s 29 former head coaches, only seven have career winning records. Notably, the shortlist does not include Lee Corso, a talkative showman who became a popular mascot head wearer on ESPN’s College GameDay set; or Sam Wyche, who had just three wins in 1983 before fleeing weeks after a season-ending loss to Purdue (the middle child in the state’s three-way college football rivalry) for the NFL.
But in a twist that some might be tempted to call miraculous, the Hoosiers will face 10th-seeded Miami at Hard Rock Stadium (the Hurricanes’ home field) for the chance to win their first national title in school history — not because the selection committee felt sorry for them or because the number of eligible teams tripled or because of a stroke of Donald Trump’s pen. No, the Hoosiers actually belong. Those who were last are now first — in the AP poll, in the playoffs, in football nightmare fuel. Some say this season’s Hoosiers could become the greatest college football team of all time, eclipsing Joe Burrow’s 2019 LSU Tigers.
Fernando Mendoza, Indiana The pious starting quarterback recently recalled the urgency and intensity his defensive teammates brought during their first practices together this summer; he thought to himself, Either this is the best defense in the country or I’m not as good as I thought I was.
The Hoosiers enter Monday’s championship game having won their 15 games by a national-leading 31.1 points and having beaten all five opponents ranked in the top 10 on their schedule by an average of more than two touchdowns. They reached this point after knocking off defending national champion Ohio State in the Big Ten title game in November, disposing of 18-time national champion Alabama in the playoff quarterfinals and beating conference rival Oregon in the semifinals.
All the while, Hoosiers fans followed every step of this playoff demolition march, invading neutral playoff sites with purple and cream outfits and jaw-dropping support. At the end of the Alabama game, as the rose petals fell to punctuate the Hoosiers’ triumph, Cole stood inside the Rose Bowl — still three-quarters full of Indiana fans — and thought: There are more fans here than our stadium can hold. “This whole season has been a waking dream,” he said. “Reality is beyond me.”
If Notre Dame’s Rudy was a charming underdog story, Indiana’s rise is science fiction. The time jump occurred when the Hoosiers hired Curt Cignetti, the black sheep of Nick Saban’s august coaching tree. Part of Saban’s inaugural Alabama staff from 2007-2010, Cignetti coached receivers and managed recruiting for the Crimson Tide, helping the team win a national championship with a star-studded class that included Heisman Trophy-winning fullback Mark Ingram II and future NFL All-Pro wide receiver Julio Jones.
But while fellow assistants Jim McElwain and Kirby Smart quickly parlayed their successes under Saban into coveted head coaching jobs at Florida and Georgia, respectively, Cignetti’s only head coaching shots came at the lower levels — and he worked there for 11 seasons before Indiana hired the 64-year-old in late 2023 from James Madison, where he would lay the groundwork for their equally improbable playoff debut this year. In 2024, Cignetti guided the Hoosiers to an 11-2 mark and a surprise playoff matchup with eventual runner-up Notre Dame.
Despite this dramatic turnaround, the media remained skeptical of Cignetti’s ability to maintain his momentum. The doubt was not entirely unfounded given that 2024 marked Indiana’s first double-digit winning season in history and only the fourth above .500 since Dan Quayle, another proud Hoosier, was vice president. And yet Cignetti, a die-hard grudge holder in the Knight mold who has never endured a losing season as a head coach, is extremely offended whenever Indiana’s sudden arrival is written off as a fluke.
“A lot of negative things in the media have fueled the returning guys on this team,” Cignetti said in a news conference before the semifinal win over Oregon. “We added some real key rooms, and the main one is right here to my left.”
He was nodding to Mendoza, a Miami native and productive starter at Cal before joining Cignetti’s juggernaut this year and becoming the only Heisman Trophy winner in Hoosiers history and the first-ever Cuban-American recipient of the award. While the established powers hoover up highly prized young recruits in hopes of winning with raw talent, Cignetti fills his roster with “super senior” mercenaries who win with strong fundamentals and good execution. It’s no surprise that Indiana’s new way of doing business, in the era of paid college sports, has given rise to jealous whispers and allegations of cheating. In this rogue reality, that reads like a compliment.
Ultimately, the protests only provided additional motivation. It’s not lost on Alabama fans that Saban’s black sheep assistant beat out this year’s team and Oregon’s star coach Dan Lanning (a former Alabama graduate assistant) to set up a showdown with Miami — another program resurgent under former Alabama assistant Mario Cristobal.
Longtime observers of college football might be nostalgically tempted to frame this championship game as a battle between heartland converts and coastal “convicts.” But as the U.S. government’s role in higher education has shifted from instructor to hall monitor, the reality on the ground is stark. In Indiana, pro-Palestinian protests drew state police with guns on rooftops, while media coverage of the university’s poor free speech ranking preceded a short-lived cut in funding for the print edition of its 158-year-old student newspaper.
Meanwhile, in Miami – aka Marco Rubio’s law school alma mater – a respected neurology professor who shared a tweet critical of Charlie Kirk was forced to resign amid conservative outcry, while the university rushed to comply with a 2025 executive order targeting race and gender studies (among other anti-‘wokeness’ edicts), cleaning up DEI websites and renaming organizations affinity as students called out the school for betraying its vaunted “culture of belonging.”
Indiana and Miami illustrate the decline of higher education under conservative pressure during the second Trump era, a notion unthinkable a few years ago. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Trump himself fail in Monday night’s game, given his habit of stealing the show at major American sporting events and the Hard Rock’s relative proximity to Mar-a-Lago. (This is a rare home game for him.)
“It’s the great American story in many ways, a real and speaking contradiction,” says Cole, a UCLA professor and author of The Campus Color Line, a history of the role college presidents played in shaping 20th-century civil rights reforms on and off campus. “On the one hand, you can support great teams. And on the other hand, look beyond the questionable decisions that happen on campuses.”
Since its inception, college football has asked fans to compartmentalize: How much can you love the team without fully embracing the institution behind it? In these topsy-turvy times, Indiana’s meteoric rise makes old logic seem like a sudden reversal.
