We are living in upside down times. Kim Kardashian advocates for prison reform as the American government spams out cartoonish memes promoting mass deportation and detention. Dave Chappelle – flaws aside – is more trusted to interpret the news than CBS’s Tony Dokoupil. The selection committee behind college football’s playoff somehow put together a compelling tournament without inciting the usual torrent of backlash, and the team raising the trophy at the end could well wind up being Indiana. And, no, that’s not a typo.
In case it’s unclear, Indiana is basketball country – the birthplace of Larry Bird, the home of the NBA’s Pacers, the inspiration behind Gene Hackman’s Hoosiers. Tier-one campus research, Bobby Knight’s tempestuous hardwood reign, 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 football season rallying around Notre Dame, a national brand that happens to reside in-state, and saved their true colors for the college basketball tipoff.
“I’ve seen more Indiana [football] games in empty bleachers than I can count,” says Eddie R Cole, who was an IU graduate student before he was an education and history professor at UCLA. “When I look at photos from 20 years ago, it’s like, We were in there? Why were we in there? I don’t have any memory of ever purchasing a ticket.”
Through nearly 140 football seasons, the Hoosiers took 715 losses – the most of any top-level program until Northwestern pipped Indiana at the bottom late last year. Of the program’s 29 previous head coaches, only seven have career winning records. Notably, the shortlist does not include Lee Corso, a garrulous showman who went on to become a much-beloved mascot head wearer on ESPN’s College GameDay set; or Sam Wyche, who managed just three wins in 1983 before bolting 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 some may be tempted to describe as 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 was tripled or because of a Donald Trump penstroke. No, the Hoosiers actually belong. They who were last are now first – in the AP poll, in the playoff seedings, in football nightmare fuel. Some say this season’s Hoosiers could go down as college football’s best-ever team, eclipsing Joe Burrow’s 2019 LSU Tigers.
Fernando Mendoza, Indiana’s pious starting quarterback, recently recalled the urgency and intensity that his defensive teammates brought to their first practices together back in the summer; he thought to himself, This is either 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 all 15 of their games by a nation-leading 31.1 points and having beaten the five top-10 ranked opponents on their schedule by an average of more than two touchdowns. They reached this stage after knocking out defending national champion Ohio State in November’s Big Ten title game, dispensing with 18-time national champion Alabama in the playoff quarter-final, and thrashing conference rival Oregon in the semi-final.
All the while Hoosiers fans have followed every step of this postseason demolition march, overrunning the playoff’s neutral venues with crimson and cream garb and ear-splitting support. At the end of the game against Alabama, as falling rose petals fell to punctuate the Hoosiers’ triumph, Cole stood inside the Rose Bowl – still three-quarters full with Indiana supporters – and thought, There are more fans here than can fit in our home stadium. “This whole season has been a daydream,” he says. “The reality is just beyond me.”
If Notre Dame’s Rudy was a charming underdog story, Indiana’s rise is sci-fi stuff. The timeline skip happened 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 through 2010, Cignetti coached receivers and handled recruiting for the Crimson Tide, helping the team to a national championship with a star-studded class that included Heisman Trophy-winning tailback Mark Ingram II and future NFL All-Pro receiver Julio Jones.
But while fellow assistants Jim McElwain and Kirby Smart swiftly parlayed their successes under Saban into coveted head coaching posts at Florida and Georgia, respectively, Cignetti’s only head coaching shots came in the lower tiers – and he slogged there for 11 seasons before Indiana hired the 64-year-old in late 2023 from James Madison, where he’d lay the foundation for their similarly improbable playoff debut this year. In 2024 Cignetti guided the Hoosiers to an 11-2 mark and a surprise playoff matchup with Notre Dame, the eventual runners-up.
Despite the dramatic turnaround, the media remained skeptical of Cignetti’s ability to sustain the momentum. The doubt wasn’t entirely without merit given that 2024 marked Indiana’s first double-digit win season in history and just the fourth above-.500 finish since Dan Quayle, another proud Hoosier, was vice-president. And yet Cignetti, an unblinking grudge holder in the Knight mould who has never endured a losing season as a head coach, takes extreme offense whenever Indiana’s sudden arrival is dismissed as a fluke.
“A lot of that negative stuff in the media fueled the guys returning from this team,” Cignetti said in a news conference before the semi-final win over Oregon. “We added some real key pieces, and the main one’s sitting right here on my left.”
He was nodding at Mendoza, a Miami native and productive starter at Cal before he joined up with Cignetti’s juggernaut this year and became 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 regarded young recruits in hopes of winning with raw talent, Cignetti fills his rosters with mercenary “super seniors” who win with solid fundamentals and sound execution. Not surprisingly, Indiana’s new way of doing business in the pay-to-play era of college sports has given rise to jealous whispers and cheating allegations. In this rogue reality, that reads as a compliment.
Ultimately, the protests just provided extra motivation. It isn’t lost on Alabama fans that Saban’s black sheep assistant beat this year’s team and Oregon’s hotshot coach Dan Lanning (a former Alabama grad assistant) to set up a showdown with Miami – another program that has been reborn under a former Alabama assistant, Mario Cristobal.
Longtime college football observers may feel a nostalgic temptation to frame this championship game as a battle between the converts in the heartland and “convicts” on the coast. But as the American government’s role in higher education has pivoted from instructor to hall monitor, the reality on the ground is stark. At Indiana, pro-Palestinian protests drew state police with rifles on rooftops, while coverage of the university’s poor free speech ranking preceded a short-lived funding cut to its 158-year-old student paper’s print edition.
Meanwhile, at Miami – aka Marco Rubio’s law school alma mater – a respected neurology professor who shared a critical tweet about 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 decrees against “wokeness”), scrubbing DEI websites and renaming affinity organizations as students called out the school for betraying its much touted “culture of belonging”.
Indiana and Miami illustrate higher education’s retreat amid conservative pressure during the second Trump era, a notion that was unthinkable years ago. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Trump himself crash Monday night’s game, given his habit of stealing the spotlight from major US sporting events and Hard Rock’s relative proximity to Mar-a-Lago. (It’s a rare home game for him.)
“This is the great American story in a lot of ways, a walking, talking contradiction,” says Cole, the 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’ve got great teams to root for. And then on the other, beyond questionable decisions happening 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 stunning rise makes the old logic feel like a sudden inversion.
