Indiana is bad at football.
Actually, that’s being nice.
Indiana is the worst at football.
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Coming into this season, nobody in college football history had lost more games than the University of Indiana Hoosiers; a school that sits at the big table, eating with giants, because of historic ties, its location, and a long track record of basketball success.
But being a basketball school doesn’t matter as much as it used to. The utter financial dominance of football means to mean anything in the college sports landscape, you have to be good on the gridiron.
Indiana was not, with a whopping 715 defeats in 138 years of play.
They have since lost the ignominious record as the sport’s biggest losers to conference rival Northwestern, and there are smaller schools with a worse winning percentage. But no-one ever expected anything of Indiana, and they barely did anything of note.
You could be successful there without ever being successful; long-time College Gameday host Lee Corso kickstarted his beloved TV career thanks to a lengthy run at the Hoosiers where he went 41-68-2.
But we’re not talking about a historically bad team. We’re talking about a very recently bad team; in 2023, they went 3-9, including a 7-52 loss to eventual national champions Michigan.
Heck, just last year there was a popular hashtag among fans celebrating #9WINDIANA – the idea that winning nine games in a 12 or 13-game season was a magical ceiling few believed the school could reach.
Again: nobody had lost more games in college football history than Indiana entering this season. They are now favourites to leave it as national champions.
They are the lone unbeaten team in college football, sitting 14-0 and ranked No.1, having just thrashed Alabama 38-3 in their Rose Bowl playoff quarter-final.
They are two wins away – over Oregon in January 10’s Peach Bowl, and over one of Miami, Georgia or Ole Miss in January 20’s national title game – from arguably the greatest fairytale rise in the sport’s history. We’re genuinely talking about Leicester City-level stuff here.
There is barely a comparison in Aussie sport; maybe the Western Bulldogs’ 2016 AFL flag, but even they had made the top four multiple times and several preliminary finals over the previous 20 years. Plus, any sport with a salary cap is a poor comparison to college football where the structural gaps between the best and worst teams are just so large.
College football is simply not a sport built for fairytales. There hasn’t been a new first-time national champion since Florida in 1996; since then, every title has been won by a school that has done it before.
The idea that Indiana would be the school to break the first-timer drought – not perennial modern bridesmaid Oregon, or someone like Utah or South Carolina – is frankly ridiculous. It feels like someone is playing the College Football 26 video game and forgot to raise the difficulty up from Freshman.
At the same time, anyone who has watched the Hoosiers this season shouldn’t have been surprised at how they demolished Alabama.
The mere fact the Crimson Tide had made the playoff was controversial, and while they won their first-round game over Oklahoma, the Sooners were not as good as their ranking suggested after a few special teams-powered close wins. This was not a great team.
But it was The Mighty Alabama Crimson Tide, who have either contended or been proclaimed as contenders for two decades, against those minnows from Indiana.
Heck, you even had doubters because of a weird statistic around the newly-expanded playoff; teams coming off a bye were 0-6 against teams who’d had to win a first-round match to make the quarter-finals.
This stat was very misleading, because the betting favourite was 4-2 in those six games, but questions were genuinely being asked about whether it was better not to have a bye week.
If you’re a casual college football fan who hadn’t watched how dominant the Hoosiers were this season, and just relied on your priors about what these schools ‘should’ be, or even if you just looked at the recruiting rankings which say Alabama is more talented – then of course you assumed Indiana was a fraud and would shrink on the big stage against the school that’s been there so many times before.
But these rosters are, at worst, equivalent. The Hoosiers will get roughly as many players into the NFL. That’s despite the fact they weren’t superstars coming out of high school, and many of their better players transferred up from lower-level schools or even lower divisions.
Much of the core of this Indiana team has transferred across from James Madison University, much like coach Curt Cignetti. JMU were a lower-level powerhouse, competing for national titles, before joining the top level of the sport recently and being surprisingly competitive from the jump.
Even without Cignetti and the core Indiana players who used to be at JMU, they made the College Football Playoff this past year, performing better against Oregon in their first-round loss than Big 12 champions Texas Tech did in their quarter-final.
Schools like JMU and Indiana are proof that brands are overrated in college football. If you have won before, it’s assumed you will win in the future; you are given more opportunities, and penalised less if you stumble through the season.
But things have changed. Teams can get very good very quickly, thanks to the ability to legally pay players and fewer restrictions around players transferring schools.
In the past if you were a coach who knew how to recruit, you locked down the best players out of high school and with only a few exceptions, had them locked in for three or four years at your college. That’s no longer possible.
Coaches are now constantly recruiting not just rival players but their own players. Breakout stars are renegotiating their deals with their teams through the season, and it’s expected that anyone who shows talent at lower-level schools is going to be poached by someone higher up the food chain.
It has created a bigger gap between the haves and have-nots, with the power conference schools having huge physical advantages, but it has also created more haves.
Schools like Indiana, who have decided to take football seriously over the last few years, are cashing in. And their players are doing so quite literally.
Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza has added an estimated $US1 million to his value across the 2025 campaign, signing a deal with Adidas after leading Indiana to the Big Ten championship game.
A likely first-round NFL Draft pick, and potentially the No.1 selection in a few months’ time, Mendoza is likely being compensated around $US2-3 million this season alone.
It’s great to see players being paid closer to their true value after years of amateurism being forced upon one of the most popular sports in the US, but Mendoza is probably worth even more than that, given what he is doing for Indiana’s brand.
Dominating Alabama like this, to the point where the human victory cigar – his brother and backup Alberto – got into the game might’ve added another zero.
It was magical when the Hoosiers made the College Football Playoff last year – but it was one of those ‘just happy to be there’ kind of seasons. After all, taking the leap from worse-than-an-also-ran to the playoff was massive.
This is even bigger. They are genuinely elite, and now sit just two wins away from history.
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