If you can’t appreciate this Indiana national championship team, sports might not be for you
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MIAMI — Curt Cignetti lived it, and even he could see what everyone else should’ve seen.
“It’s probably one of the greatest sports stories of all-time.”
Indiana football, national champions. In real life, tackle football.
The team that had as many players on its 2025 roster from James Madison (7) as it had 4-star high school recruits. The team that had the most losses of any program in America when Cignetti showed up a mere 25 months ago, guns blazin’ at all who stood in IU’s way of relevance, not immortality. It wasn’t supposed to be immortality in the form of becoming the first team to go 16-0 since 1894 Yale, who, by all accounts, had a slightly easier road to achieve that feat than the one that stood in the way of a 3-9 team who needed just 2 years to become an all-time great.
Hate it if you will. If you do, sports might not be your thing.
If you didn’t like that Cignetti capitalized on a unique time in college football wherein he filled his roster with 47 players between the age of 22-25, that’s on you. You’re entitled to that take, but just know that you missed out on something beyond logic.
“Our NIL is nowhere where people think it is,” Cignetti quipped. “So you can throw that out.”
Take note, future scriptwriters. The story is better Cignetti’s way than what any remaining IU naysayer will tell you.
Surely if it were just NIL and old players, everyone could do it, right?
Nope. There was only 1 who did it en route to 16-0, AKA 19th century Yale mode.
For what it’s worth, even a Day 1 Cignetti guy like Mikail Kamara doubted that this could ever happen.
“I didn’t think it was possible, man. I can’t lie,” Kamara said. “It’s something your write a book about, you write a movie about.”
It was made possible in part because of Kamara coming up with a blocked punt that completely flipped the momentum in a 3-point game. Kamara’s blocked punt was scooped up by Indiana to make it a 17-7 game, which marked the first time in College Football Playoff history that a blocked punt resulted in a touchdown.
Sure, add that to the list of firsts. At this point, the list is too long to comprehend.
Who can write a script that well? Even the college football gods probably have been shrugging for months. Better yet, who could you possibly cast for Cignetti and Fernando Mendoza?
Imagine an actor offering up that Cignetti smirk, or in Mendoza’s case, that smile. Imagine trying to recreate the running style that gets made fun of by teammates. With all due respect to Hollywood, there probably aren’t enough cinematic camera angles that can possibly recreate the drama of Mendoza’s 4th-and-5 run into the end zone.
Hollywood screenwriters usually have to manufacture a moment like that. It’s the type of play that you see in a sports movie, but in the real life version, Mendoza didn’t pinball off a trio of defenders, and he actually just waltzed in for a touchdown. It was actually the play of a lifetime.
This was the team of a lifetime. And for all the talk about how bright the future is for the 64-year-old Cignetti in Bloomington, he knows as well as anyone that there’s no guarantee that he’ll ever have another team quite like that. You don’t always get running backs who finish runs like Roman Hemby and Kaelon Black. You don’t always get centers who get it from the jump like Notre Dame transfer Pat Coogan. You don’t always lean on Johnny-on-the-spot defenders like former JMU transfers D’Angelo Ponds and Aiden Fisher, who operated the Bryant Haines defense at championship level.
Next year will instantly be different, though IU fans will sleep well knowing that Charlie Becker isn’t even draft-eligible yet.
But Monday night wasn’t the time to spin it forward. It was the time to be present and appreciate one of the great sport stories of all-time. Even the PG-rated Mendoza let out an extremely atypical “Let’s F—– Go!” on the postgame podium. Cignetti was present enough to enjoy a Hoosier Gameday Lager from Upland Brewery (a Bloomington staple) before he even made it to the postgame press conference.
“It was the best beer I’ve ever had in my life,” Cignetti said, “and it made me want to have another.”
He earned it. If you couldn’t sit back and watch this Indiana team with a cold beverage of your choice because you wanted to gate-keep, that’s on you. Call the fans fair-weather if you must. Who could possibly fathom the program with the most losses in Division I history struggling to sell tickets? Also, ask yourself this. If the subject of “fair-weather fans” prevented you from enjoying this run, don’t you think the overwhelming Playoff support evened the scales? Like, IU fans had the crowd advantage … even in Miami’s home stadium with historic get-in prices.
Again, you can’t make this stuff up.
At some point in the postgame celebration, John Mellencamp’s “Hurts So Good” came blasting on the Hard Rock Stadium speakers, and the local hero’s song was belted out by the tens of thousands of IU fans who stayed for all the postgame celebrations. Those words felt all too real for anyone who ever experienced Indiana football. A 33-year streak without a bowl game victory isn’t “Bad News Bears.” IU wasn’t relevant enough for that.
A program so entrenched with apathy wasn’t supposed to flip the switch like IU did, and just because we saw it happen once doesn’t mean we should expect others to follow suit.
Could it open the door for other college football have-nots? Time will tell.
On Monday, Indiana became the first first-time national champion since 1996 Florida. For nearly 3 decades, doing what Indiana did felt like a pipe dream. Even a program like 2022 TCU went on a historic run to the College Football Playoff National Championship, only to get walloped 65-7 by Georgia and instantly fade back into the middle of the college football pack.
If 2025 was the beginning of Indiana dominance at the top of the sport, nobody should be surprised. If nothing like that ever happens again, nobody should diminish what 2025 was.
A movie played out in real time. Carson Beck didn’t have to be the villain, though some would put him in that role after his messy exit from Georgia. So perhaps it was only fitting that Beck threw the game-ending interception to Jamari Sharpe, who could barely get his legs under him after he clinched a national championship for Indiana. In real life, tackle football.
One day, the screenwriters will take on a nearly impossible task. Recreating Indiana’s run will almost feel too unbelievable for anyone who attempts to do so. Until then, settle for the original story.
It’s one of the greatest of all-time.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
