Indiana football embarked on one of the greatest seasons in the history of college football in 2025, finishing 16-0 and winning the program’s first national championship.
The Hoosiers won just about every trophy they had a shot at including the Big Ten Championship, Rose Bowl, Peach Bowl and, of course, the national championship with Fernando Mendoza’s Heisman Trophy doing the heavy lifting for individual honors.
As expected, debate ensued once Indiana won it all. How do the 2025 Hoosiers stack up
against some of the greatest teams in the sport’s history? One team kept coming up in these debates: the 2019 LSU Tigers.
Now, that team deserves all the respect it gets. The offense was overpowering, the defense was ferocious and those Tigers, like the 2025 Hoosiers, won every award they could have with a few more added for good measure. Joe Burrow cemented his status as a legend of the game with his Heisman Trophy while he and others like Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson have gone onto star in the NFL after lighting up college.
Given all the future NFL players on the roster and the Indiana of it all, most seemed to side with 2019 LSU as the superior team and victor in a hypothetical matchup.
Then Game on Paper, an advanced analytics site for college football, released Matchup Builder, which relies on said analytics to predict the outcome of a game between two teams. Said two teams can come from just about any year, including 2025 and 2019.
Matchup Builder’s result for a game between 2025 Indiana and 2019 LSU favors the Hoosiers by 1.9 points on a neutral site, with the Indiana offense proving too much for the LSU defense to handle.
This is, of course, just one model’s view of the situation. What do you make of the Hoosiers’ chances? Let us know!
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