It literally does not get better than this for Indiana football fans.
Monday night’s win over Miami in the National Championship game capped off a 16-0 season for Indiana, the first time since Yale did it in 1894 that a team has won 16 games in a season with out a loss.
The Hoosiers had nearly a perfect record in winning some of the sport’s biggest individual prizes. Fernando Mendoza won the first Heisman Trophy in Indiana program history. Curt Cignetti won the Walter Camp coach of the year for the second
time in a row, along with his second straight Big Ten coach of the year. Bryant Haines is a finalist for the Broyles award, given to the nation’s top assistant.
Indiana did everything a team can do in a season. It blew out ranked teams, won tough games on the road, and completed gutsy comebacks to keep the perfect season intact.
In rearranging the natural order of the college football landscape, Cignetti and company took down powerhouses of the recent past (Alabama), more distant past (Miami), and twice beat one of the sport’s contemporary superpowers, an Oregon program that’s pioneered NIL efforts, apparel deals and stacked recruiting classes over the years.
Part of why I’m writing this is to make this all feel more real.
I watched all 16 games this season, covering most of them here, just as I have every game since signing on here amidst the 2021 season that marked the beginning of the end for Tom Allen. At some point, I expect my brain to reconcile that the program that won last night is the same as the won that broke my heart for decades before, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Indiana football fans, myself included, have never been here before, at the sport’s peak. There had been good teams, but none that approached the apex of college football – winning a National Championship. Now we have a team that has achieved immortality.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it will go on forever. Fernando Mendoza will move on to the NFL, where he very well could be the first overall pick, further elevating Indiana’s status as an elite football program. Seeking more playing time, his brother Alberto also announced he’d be entering the portal Tuesday morning.
The coaching staff will be mostly intact, as Cignetti has gotten the school to pledge a continued commitment to paying the best coaches in the sport, but the Hoosiers already lost Derek Owings, who was hired away by Tennessee for the same job at a big pay raise.
Part of being at the top is knowing that you will have to come down, eventually. There’s no reason to ever bet against Cignetti, who will absolutely be aiming for a repeat next year. Still, back-to-back titles are exceedingly rare in this era of the sport, so the odds will be against him.
For now though, these problems lie in the future. Indiana is the best team in college football, with a room full of new trophies and awards to prove it.
Everyone who’s been along on this ride knows how hard it was to get here, how improbable it was that we’d be on top after being, objectively, the worst in the sport for so long. So instead of worrying about the future and what it may hold, now is the time to take it all in.
While we’re here, we may as well enjoy the view.
