The Hickory Huskers didn’t even have a football team.
The movie Hoosiers was made with Indiana’s reverence for basketball as the plot foundation. Football? Consider Indiana University, where the sport rarely made much of a to-do. Something to pass the time until the first tipoff.
Not anymore. Certainly not Monday night.
Football has joined the party with a plain-spoken coach named Curt Cignetti knocking down the door, and now look what might happen. If the Hoosiers beat Miami Monday night, IU can claim the last unbeaten national championship teams in men’s basketball and football. Both, at the same giddy moment in history. Nobody could ever say that before. The only school to have perfect champions in both is UCLA, and the spotless football Bruins were 72 years ago.
RECAP: Indiana rolls over Oregon in the CFP semifinals at the Peach Bowl
Until lately, it was rare and normally unnecessary to mention both sports at Indiana in the same sentence. They passed one another each November, one coming in and one going out, an aircraft carrier and a tugboat. But things have changed. “It’s been kind of surreal,” Cignetti was saying this week as his Hoosiers readied for the College Football Playoff title game.
Indeed. The other day when previewing Michigan State’s basketball game with Indiana, Tom Izzo mentioned, “We’re not playing their football team, thank God.” Those words may have never been uttered before by a basketball coach in the history of the Big Ten. Free from worrying about Fernando Mendoza’s passing game, Izzo’s Spartans won by 21 points. IU basketball is now 12-5, but 5-5 the last 10 games and will need a strong second half to stay off the NCAA tournament bubble. Meanwhile, the football team is the toast of the sport.
The universe has shifted in Bloomington. Take a gander at the ocean that used to separate the two programs.
Until this year, Indiana had five basketball national championships — and only three football bowl victories.
Indiana owns at least a share of 22 Big Ten basketball titles. This was the third for football.
In a 30-year run from 1973-2002, the basketball team went to six Final Fours. The football team had six winning seasons.
When Indiana won its first NCAA tournament basketball title in 1940, the football Hoosiers went 3-5 and scored 69 points all season.
Indiana’s second championship came in 1953. The Hoosiers were 2-7 in football and closed the season by losing 30-0 to Purdue.
Indiana’s perfect basketball season came in 1976 with Bob Knight’s first championship. The 1976 football Hoosiers were 5-6 and in a three-game slog against Michigan, Ohio State and Michigan State were outscored 105-7.
Knight’s second title was 1981. The football record was 3-8, the three wins by a total of five points.
His last championship was 1987. Football was in the middle of a revival then with Bill Mallory, and went 8-4.
Indiana’s most recent Final Four was 2002. Across the parking lot, the football team was 3-9, and 1-7 in the Big Ten.
So it has gone. While the basketball program had a lifetime membership in the Blueblood Club, the football Hoosiers were going 33 years without winning a bowl game. During Knight’s basketball era, there were five different football coaches.
THE RETURN: Mendoza and the Miami Hurricanes on a home-field collision course for the CFP title
The basketball team has appeared in the Associated Press top-10 at some point in 43 seasons. This year is the sixth time for football.
The IU basketball team started this season with an all-time winning percentage of .633. The football team would have to win 773 more games in a row to catch that.
But the world is a very different place in 2026. The Hoosiers could be football kings of the world, and the basketball team hasn’t been able to say that in 39 years. They could end up every bit as perfect as those immortal 1976 hoop Hoosiers.
(Odd footnote: Both teams had to beat Alabama in the postseason. The Tide were Indiana’s closet NCAA tournament call back in ’76, a 74-69 battle in the Sweet 16. For the footballers — as they have already tried to forget in Tuscaloosa — it was 38-3).
They’re even naming storm retention ponds after Indiana football players now in Bloomington. Temporarily, it’ll be D’Angelo’s Pond, after D’Angelo Ponds, who opened the Oregon bashing last week with a pick-six. “Like a great cornerback, a well-designed stormwater pond knows how to contain and protect,” the press release from the city stated. No record of anything similar before through all those basketball titles, such as Steve Alford Creek or Isaiah Thomas Lake.
It’s Monday morning and a week until we play, so do yourself a favor listen to Don Fischer’s call of the D’Angelo Ponds interception for the 50th time.pic.twitter.com/6G6baFUOmJ
— Martha the Mop Lady (@TheMopLady) January 12, 2026
They could be the first college football team to go 16-0 since Yale did it. That was 1894. Indiana’s first national basketball champions in 1940 won only four more games than that.
The moment of truth is Monday night against Miami in Hard Rock Stadium. Back in Bloomington, Indiana is opening Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall for a watch party. Concessions, rally towels, the whole package. The masses will pour into a famed basketball arena with five national titles hanging at one end and the statues of past champions in the lobby and root madly for a 15-0 football program that has never been on such a stage. A program that is 24-143-5 all-time against Michigan State and Ohio State and in one stretch in the 1980s needed five seasons to win 15 games. And now may be about to match those statues.
“It’d be a hell of a movie,” Cignetti suggested the other day. Hoosiers with shoulder pads.
Like the man said, surreal.
