It will be tempting, as the years go by, to minimize the Indiana Hoosiers’ incredible accomplishment in winning the school’s first-ever national college football championship Monday night. This is, after all, how sports works: Over and over, they transform the impossible into established reality.
The minute something incredible happens, immediately after we collectively gasp and scream, we start the process of encasing it in amber, of making it history — of making it make sense. When Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson in 1990, it may have been the most stunning upset in sports history. But now, looking back, it seems inevitable. But that’s because it has been absorbed into history, becoming a pivot point that, in retrospect, feels like it was always going to happen. Which makes it not feel like an upset at all.
So let it be stated as plainly as possible: What Indiana did this year — going 16-0, trouncing one college football blue blood after another, compiling a 3-9 record as recently as 2023 to take its place two years later as one of the best college football teams in history — is absurd, insane and unprecedented. Putting “Indiana” and “football national champion” together makes as preposterous a phrase as “mathematical aardvark” or “bilingual celery.” And yet here we are.
Do not let it glide over you. Do not let it start to make sense. It is glorious madness.
We can provide certain context for what Indiana has accomplished. The sport has changed dramatically in the past few years, with players making millions from “name, image and likeness” contracts and wealthy donors (like Indiana alum Mark Cuban, it should be said) and having the freedom to transfer from one school to another without restriction. It is easier for someone like head coach Curt Cignetti, who came to Indiana from James Madison University just two years ago, to bring in a new roster and overhaul an entire program in a short period of time; there certainly wasn’t any other period in Indiana’s checkered football past when it had access to a quarterback like Fernando Mendoza, who came over from the University of California at Berkeley and was such a perfect fit he instantly won a Heisman Trophy. Cignetti has had access to opportunities, and money, that past Indiana coaches did not.
Then again: Every school and coach has more access to those opportunities than they once did, but it was Cignetti and this Indiana team that broke through. This is a sport in which the established powers — Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, LSU — have dominated for decades, very much by design, to the point that some in the sport have worried that they might someday form their own NFL-like super-conference, leaving schools like Indiana behind. Indiana became the first school to win its first title since Florida in 1996, but Florida winning wasn’t surprising; the surprise was that it took it that long. (They’ve won two more since.) Indiana not only isn’t supposed to win a title; it’s not even supposed to dream of such a thing. Again: Here we are.
And it’s not like the Hoosiers just caught a bunch of lucky breaks. They were clearly the best team in college football all season by just about every advanced metric; college football writer Rodger Sherman nailed this perfectly in his excellent newsletter, where he observed that “Cinderella has a chainsaw.” The Hoosiers had the best of every possible world: They were both a surprise and not a fluke.
It’s no wonder every Indiana alum I know has been walking around in a daze for months. The Indiana Hoosiers — Indiana! In football! — just blitzed through a football season like they were playing a video game on too-easy mode. It is unreasonable for any program or fan base to expect a season like this. I have no doubt, nevertheless, that Cignetti’s success will lead their rivals, when they hire a new coach themselves, to start to demand it.
But that’s the beauty of this, and that’s why Indiana’s run will live on forever as one of sports’ most enduring stunners. Heading into this season, Indiana was, seriously, the losingest program in the history of major college football. The season it just had cannot be made sense of, but that won’t stop anyone from trying. But sports are wonderful, unpredictable and irresistible precisely because they don’t make sense, because when you send a group of (large) human beings out to a field with an oddly shaped ball against another group of (large) human beings, strange things are going to happen.
The strangeness is the feature. It’s why we keep coming back. No one could have seen this coming. But just in case: We’ll never stop watching. There may never be another Indiana. But there will be something else — we just don’t know what.
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