I’m an Indiana graduate who still can’t find the words to describe this season
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I’ve always had the same response ready to the follow-up question when someone asks me what I do for work. In the 10.5 years that I’ve been writing/talking about college football year-round, I’ve been asked something more times than I can count, both by those who are genuinely interested in college football and by those who aren’t interested but at least want to keep the conversation going.
“Oh, so who’s your team?”
After all, even the most buttoned-up journalists/media personalities in this field went to school somewhere. If they didn’t go to a Power Conference school, chances are they rooted for some team with a national fanbase that garnered their attention from an early age. And yet, my default response never fell into 1 of those 2 buckets.
“Well, I went to Indiana, and we didn’t have a football team.”
Seeing that typed out, it borders a bit more on “harsh” than “self-deprecating.” In my defense, you’d say the same thing if you not only never saw your team in a bowl game during a 13-35 stretch with 1 victory vs. an FBS bowl team while in school (2008-11, graduated in May of 2012), but you also knew that, up until Curt Cignetti showed up, nobody in college football history had more losses than IU.
The irony is that Northwestern now holds that dubious title, and growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, that was my first college football experience. I could dig up old photos of my brother and I wearing a bunch of Northwestern gear during that 1995 Rose Bowl season, but I’d be lying if I said I rooted for the Wildcats after my baby teeth fell out.
You get it. None of what’s unfolding in Bloomington seems real. It’s a movie playing out in real time.
(Many have already pointed out that “Undaunted” makes sense for the future movie title, as long as the tagline is “Hoo, Hoo … who?”)
For those of us who lived IU football first-hand, this is an out-of-body experience
Watching IU fans turn Mercedes-Benz Stadium into Bloomington South in a blowout victory to clinch a national championship berth was beyond surreal. And while I knew that the massive alumni base meant there would be plenty of the Hoosier faithful in Atlanta — I once made that manageable 8-hour drive from Bloomington to the Georgia Dome (RIP) for the 2012 Sweet 16 matchup vs. Kentucky — seeing that on a “neutral” site compared to virtually all the pre-Cignetti iterations of Memorial Stadium crowds was mind-boggling.
When the program became a national lightning rod for its rise with a favorable Year 1 schedule under Cignetti, I would get weekly in-stadium videos sent to me from my cousin, Grace, who was a senior at IU, that felt like I was watching AI. What IU grads like she and I knew was that, before Cignetti’s arrival in 2024, there were some dirty little secrets about the student experience at football games. Or rather, call them unwritten rules.
One was that only freshmen went to IU football games. That was something I refused to believe upon hearing that … as a freshman who initially went to games.
Why? It certainly wasn’t a pricing issue with $5 or $10 student tickets available when I was in school — that’s slightly cheaper than the current get-in price for the national championship of over $4,000 — that even the brokest of broke college students could afford. The tailgate was just better than going into the stadium and inevitably leaving during the halftime band performance instead of battling an imminent hangover while hoping that IU could somehow overcome a 28-7 deficit. Nobody would mistake IU’s tailgating lots (located a short stumble across 17th St.) for “The Grove” at Ole Miss, but having experienced both, I can confirm that they weren’t as far apart as one would think, especially considering how depressing the in-stadium atmosphere always was in Bloomington.
When I wasn’t covering IU football for the student newspaper in 2010, the vast majority of my fall Saturdays with a home game followed a similar pattern. Wake up, rally the troops in our college house, tailgate, walk home, nap and turn on “SEC on CBS.” My roommates and I would watch places like “The Swamp” or “Death Valley” and fantasize about going to a school that had an actual football program worth showing up for. We obviously had that elite atmosphere in basketball at Assembly Hall, though my college career unfortunately coincided with the worst 3-year stretch in program history all because Kelvin Sampson texted recruits too often for the NCAA’s liking (not that I’m bitter).
Another dirty little secret/unwritten rule I learned about IU football came when I started covering the team in 2010. At that point, those who spent any time walking around the facility or looking at the program’s media guide would see a promotional photo of a packed Memorial Stadium with a sea of red. To the average eye, it sold a vision of a team that had a true Big Ten atmosphere. To the more skeptical eye, it was a bit misleading. Those promotional photos? They weren’t photoshopped, but they were heavily reliant on the biennial visiting Ohio State fans who gobbled up their cheapest tickets of the year to pack Memorial Stadium.
There’s a not-so-secret story about the time that former IU coach Lee Corso, who was responsible for 1 of the 3 pre-Cignetti bowl victories, took a timeout in the first half of the 1976 game vs. Ohio State so that he could take a picture of his team under the scoreboard that read “Indiana 7, Ohio State 6.” It was IU’s first lead against the Buckeyes in 20 years — it proved to be a smart photo taken in the eventual 47-7 loss — and perhaps best encapsulated the program’s seemingly perpetual uncompetitive state.
Needless to say, Corso probably had a different reaction to watching the 2025 Big Ten Championship when IU beat the Buckeyes for the first time in 37 years.
As odd as it sounds, IU grads and others might’ve still had some lingering doubt going into the Playoff
Yes, it was fair to still be slightly skeptical of IU, even as the No. 1 seed after the program’s first outright conference title since the Harry Truman administration. IU might’ve been worthy of being a touchdown favorite against Alabama, but it went into the Rose Bowl just trying to win a bowl game for the first time since 1991. And while we had seen Cignetti take aim at the SEC‘s scheduling philosophy unlike any IU ever coach ever had, it was still Alabama. Like, the program who had spent 141 weeks as the AP No. 1 team before IU finally got to that level for the first time in 2025 with its 13-0 start. As in, the program who had won 7 national titles since IU last won a bowl game. The only thing those programs shared historically was the color crimson.
Then, of course, the only thing those programs shared in Pasadena was a field … and even that might be a stretch.
I say that not to gloat. The weird part about all of this is that even as an IU grad, I’m not sure that I have the right to do such a thing.
Let’s be clear here. IU football has never ruined a fall Saturday for me. When the default feeling is “apathy,” it’s hardly crushing to watch Denard Robinson lead Michigan to a thrilling victory in Memorial Stadium like he did in 2010. It would be revisionist history for me to say that I’ve dealt with decades of suffering with IU football. At some point, plenty of us accepted that IU was too irrelevant to hurt us. Hence, why we could always casually poke fun at our alma mater’s often failed attempts to field a Big Ten football program.
But as the days count down to when I’ll make the 3.5-hour drive from Orlando to Miami to watch IU take on the Hurricanes in the College Football Playoff National Championship, I’ll speak about my school with tremendous pride. Of all the emotions that this 15-0 start has brought on, “shock” and “disbelief” are still prevalent, but I’ve never experienced sports pride quite like this. It isn’t just that IU has turned its fortunes around with this meteoric rise under Cignetti; it’s that more times than not, the Hoosiers demolish teams by making all the right plays. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to watch a team that’s seemingly always 1 step ahead when for so long, it was 10 steps behind.
I won’t pretend to have a crystal ball and tell you what awaits IU football. Lord knows I would’ve laughed you out of the room if you told me that the “Google me” guy who took over a 3-9 program was going to field a Year 2 team that’s suddenly in graphics alongside 2019 LSU. That’s where we are, though.
One day, I’ll have the right words to truly process IU’s rise under Cignetti. For now, I’ll just settle on tweaking my default response.
“Well, I went to Indiana, and none of this seems real.”
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.
