‘Cinderella has a chainsaw’: Whoever wins, it’s college football’s least likely champ ever

We need to make it clear just how crazy this year’s college football national championship game is.

Because it’s really crazy.

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For a start, Miami’s story is a football fairytale.

Two upset losses appeared to have destroyed their season. They meant that, a bit over a month ago, they were snubbed from their own conference’s championship game – which was then won by a clearly inferior team.

For weeks it had been unclear whether Miami would even make the 12-team playoff, and they weren’t in the field… until they were, at the very last moment, on Selection Sunday.

This was a fallen titan of the sport, who defined almost two decades of it, returning to the upper class for the first time.

‘The U’ was a dominant force in the 1980s and 90s, both culturally and in a footballing sense; but it’s been so long since they were any good. That awesome 30 for 30 doco reminiscing on their glory years came out eight years after their last national title… and it came out 16 years ago.

At the helm is Mario Cristobal, who has the most Miami story possible – the son of Cuban immigrants who starred for the Hurricanes, and then returned home as coach to help them stop dwelling on the past.

The last team into the field, Miami wasn’t supposed to do anything as the No.10 seed – plenty of experts have decried the 12-team format because of the idea there aren’t 12 teams good enough to win the national title every year.

Turns out that’s nonsense, with Miami winning three straight games including a stunning upset of title favourites Ohio State, and then a thrilling back-and-forth semi final over Ole Miss where Cristobal overcame his arch nemesis – his own terrible in-game decision-making and clock management.

(This is a coach who lost a game, recently, because instead of kneeling out the clock to ice the game he called a run play… and the defence forced a fumble and quickly scored a game-winning touchdown. He failed the type of test a 10-year-old Madden player can pass.)

All of this earns Miami an unlikely shot at winning the national title in their home stadium, which just so happens to be hosting the contest. Incredible, right?

Nobody cares.

OK, maybe not nobody, but Miami is the least interesting, least unexpected and least romantic title game participant. They are not the team for the neutral.

Because Indiana exists.

We can put it pretty simply: the school that entered this season with the most losses in college football history may now have produced the greatest team in college football history.

A typical good season for the Hoosiers in the past would be winning as many games as they lost – something they did just twice between 2008 and 2023.

In a football sense, they were a joke; a non-entity. Now they’re unbeaten and genuinely in contention for the title of best team ever.

While it’ll be hard to match the 2019 LSU team, led by Joe Burrow with Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson as his receivers, the 2025 Hoosiers are similarly dominant and have had to do it one additional time.

This season the Hoosiers have outscored their opponents by 473 points – that’s more than 31 points, or four touchdowns and a field goal, per game.

In the process they’ve gone 15-0. Beating Miami would make them the first team since 1894 to go 16-0 – though admittedly this is mostly because college teams haven’t had the ability to play 16 times in a season until recently.

But having to play 16 games to win a national title only adds to the degree of difficulty. The offence, led by future NFL players like QB Fernando Mendoza and receiver Elijah Sarratt, has scored at least 27 points on 13 occasions – and scored 55 points or more seven times.

Meanwhile the defence has been stifling, allowing 10 points or fewer nine times, including against then-No.1 Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game and Alabama in the Rose Bowl.

They’re not the typical sporting fairytale. This isn’t a March Madness Cinderella, pulling upset after upset in the college basketball tournament. They’re destroying opponents.

As college football writer Rodger Sherman put it in his newsletter Sports!: “Cinderella has a chainsaw”.

“Every play unfolds exactly as it was supposed to when the coaches drew it up. They don’t commit turnovers. They don’t commit penalties. They don’t miss tackles. They don’t drop passes. They don’t have miscommunications. They don’t take plays off. Their quarterback hits four NFL throws on you against tight coverage and then asks you to connect with him on LinkedIn after the game,” he wrote.

“They dole out the worst beating of your season, perhaps your entire football career … and their coach is furious, looking like the damn auto repair shop guy just quoted him $600 for a job he knows he can do himself for $79 in parts.”

It’s almost become a cliche while talking about the Hoosiers but it’s genuinely like Curt Cignetti is playing dynasty mode on College Football 26 but has the settings stuck on Freshman. Like, c’mon man, at some point it’s not even fun when there’s no challenge!

Cignetti himself has become an instantly iconic figure, not just because of the turnaround he has engineered, but because he has one facial expression – annoyed.

Even when they’re dominating teams, when the cameras cut to Cignetti on the Indiana sidelines, he appears unhappy.

The contrast with the ever-excited Mendoza has seen the college football world agree: they are the kid and the old man from Up in real life.

Mendoza, by the way, makes this title game even more special. He’s not just from Miami – he grew up a Hurricanes fan, within walking distance of their campus, winning a high school state championship at their coach’s alma mater.

But he chose Indiana over Miami when he was in the transfer portal (aka college football free agency) after last season, which perfectly tells the story of Indiana’s rise.

As we explained after their dominant Rose Bowl win over Alabama, the Hoosiers have made all this happen by mastering the new rules around paying players and free transfers between schools across seasons.

Legal payments and excellent scouting have turned them from a 3-9 also-ran just two seasons ago into… this.

It may sound simple but it isn’t. College football is classist; upward movement isn’t supposed to be possible. The best players go to the best schools, which makes them the best schools, which draws the best players, and so on.

The only remotely similar sporting story this century would be Leicester City winning the Premier League – though that was still less likely given they went from relegation certainties to champions in the space of 12 months, in a more restrictive situation.

But we’re painting with the same colours. Theoretically, all 136 teams enter each season at the top level of college football with a shot at winning the title, but a very small percentage of them are realistic chances of doing so.

For over a century, Indiana has not been in the class of schools that could realistically win it. Now they are 60 minutes away from becoming the sport’s most unlikely national champion.

And if they lose… we’re getting the sport’s most unlikely national champion anyway, because the Miami storyline – both the backstory, and winning it as the 10 seed – is ridiculous too!

That’s the beauty of this title game. We’re getting a magical result either way, it’s just the extent of the magic.

One’s cutting someone in half. The other is someone making the Statue of Liberty disappear.