MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Indiana announced its college football arrival a year ago, but even then, it felt hard to believe the losingest program in FBS history would have much staying power. Critics ripped their schedule, called them a fluke, debated whether they even deserved to make the College Football Playoff and dismissed them after an opening-round loss to Notre Dame.
Cute story, those Hoosiers. But see! They should leave the real football to the real blue bloods.
Cue the Curt Cignetti staredown.
Google him again, just for reference. The man simply does not lose.
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Indiana might have been pooh-poohed as a one-year wonder, opening 2025 ranked No. 20 and picked to finish sixth in the Big Ten preseason media poll.
Fueled by the perceived disrespect, desperate to prove it would not become a bottom dweller again, Indiana produced the football version of “Hoosiers,” completing one of the most improbable turnarounds in sports history — winning its first national championship while becoming the first major college team since Yale in 1894 to go 16-0.
“It’s a great story, tremendous story,” Cignetti said. “Most people would tell you that are in the know, it’s probably one of the greatest stories of all time.
Indiana might not have won by 30, the way it did in previous playoff victories. But the Hoosiers played with the same confident flair, punctuated by the call of the game: On fourth-and-4 from the Miami 12 and the Hoosiers up three points, Cignetti called a quarterback run for Fernando Mendoza. He pushed up the middle, and bullied his way through the Miami defense, busting multiple tackles to stretch over the goal line.
That play summed up the season: Cignetti banking on himself and his players and Mendoza delivering in the clutch.
Asked before the game whether Indiana qualifies as a “Cinderella story,” given its success last year, Cignetti answered in the most Cignetti way, wryly saying in return, “Define ‘Cinderella story’ in the context of Indiana. I’m not quite sure what you mean by that.”
Because Cignetti is a Google fan, go ahead and Google “Cinderella story.” This is what comes up:
Noun. Used in reference to a situation in which a person, team, etc., of low status or importance unexpectedly achieves great success or public recognition.
In 2022, Indiana became the first Division I college football team to lose 700 games. Indiana is now a national champion after defeating Miami in its home stadium 27-21.
Provided the definition, Cignetti finally answers.
“I think that’s a fact. If you look at the record since Indiana started playing football and relative to the success we’ve had the last two years, we’ve broken a lot of records here in terms of wins, championships, postseason games, top-10 wins,” Cignetti said.
“It’s been kind of surreal.”
Though there might still be a “pinch me, I’m dreaming” vibe to this title run, Cignetti told the world when he was hired to coach the Hoosiers in 2023 that they would win, then trash-talked the best teams in the Big Ten when he took the mic at a basketball game the day after he was hired.
Hey, look, I’m super fired up about this opportunity. I’ve never taken a back seat to anybody and don’t plan on starting now. Purdue sucks! But so does Michigan and Ohio State! Go IU!
Though others might have rolled their eyes, the people inside the football program, athletic department and Bloomington, Indiana, charged ahead.
Cignetti made sure of that.
WHEN INDIANA FIRED coach Tom Allen in 2023, university leadership was prepared to take the next step with football. School president Pamela Whitten had laid the groundwork.
When she was hired two years earlier, Whitten was tasked with a long to-do list, including elevating Indiana athletics. This was during a revolutionary time for collegiate sports, with the transfer portal and NIL evening the playing field in a way that would allow more than the same handful of programs to compete for championships.
“We had to raise a lot of money to have the resources, both financial as well as the physical infrastructure,” Whitten said. “So, when we were ready to bring in a coach, he needed that ecosystem to be successful as well.”
She and athletic director Scott Dolson — an Indiana lifer who worked as a student manager for Bobby Knight — talked about what they wanted in their next coach. When they met with Cignetti, Whitten said, “It wasn’t so much like an interview as it was a melding of the approach and values and goals that we had. It’s almost like merging successfully on a highway.”
Though Cignetti did not guarantee a national title in two years, he refused to put any limitations on what he thought Indiana could do.
Dolson thought back to a conversation he once had with his brother-in-law, who played football at Indiana in the 1980s under Bill Mallory, who led the Hoosiers to six bowl appearances during his tenure.
“He said to me, ‘Why don’t we ever think big enough? We should think about championships. We shouldn’t just think about bowl games,'” Dolson recalled. “He instilled that in me. It is important to have a plan to build a winning program across the board. Don’t put any limitations there. It’s what Coach Cig said from the minute I talked to him.”
Cignetti famously left his job as an Alabama assistant after the 2010 season to take his first head coaching job at Indiana University Pennsylvania, where his dad once coached, accepting a massive pay cut in the process. But he bet on himself. Now, he was betting on Indiana.
Cignetti got to work building the program in his image, the same way he built programs and won at Division II IUP, Elon and then James Madison — where he made the FCS playoffs in his first season as head coach. In fact, he made the respective playoffs at all three programs within the first two years.
Forget about four- and five-star players and highly touted prospects. Cignetti valued character and production above all else. He was looking for not only hard workers but players who would put team above self. He approves every personnel decision. His first team had 23 people who either coached or played for him at James Madison.
In 13 seasons as a head coach, Cignetti had never had a losing record. Now, at the losingest program in FBS, something had to give. It wasn’t going to be the stubborn coach.
GOING 11-2 AND losing to Notre Dame in the first round of the 2024 College Football Playoff served as the launching point to this season. Cignetti knew Indiana could go further, so he went back into the transfer portal to make his team even better.
One of his first phone calls went to Mendoza, then the quarterback at California. He had the intangibles Cignetti sought. An overlooked recruit out of high school who was set to go to Yale before Cal offered at the last minute, Mendoza had worked through multiple quarterback competitions and setbacks to have a career year in 2024. After leading a 98-yard game-winning drive to beat rival Stanford, he went viral after getting emotional and proclaiming, “I’ll remember going 98 yards with my boys.”
Team above self.
Mendoza had fielded plenty of other calls from interested schools. But he remembers that first conversation with Cignetti, who told him, “If you’re going to come here, you’re going to develop into a hell of a quarterback.”
Mendoza was one of 22 players Indiana added in the portal, including running back Roman Hemby, receiver E.J. Williams Jr., center Pat Coogan, right tackle Kahlil Benson, defensive tackle Hosea Wheeler and defensive backs Louis Moore and Devan Boykin. Those players arrived to find a team that did not take too kindly to the narratives that dismissed them after the playoff loss.
“There was a lot of skepticism after last year, that we were a fluke,” Cignetti said. “That team did a lot of great things and got it all started. I think a lot of that negative stuff in the media fueled the guys returning from this team.”
As the quarterback, Mendoza knew how important it was to become a part of the team from the jump. His first order of business was to learn the name of each of his teammates. To help, he kept roster photographs with him.
“If I didn’t get them the first try, I got them the second try,” Mendoza said. “No matter if you’re the star linebacker or you’re a walk-on, I’m going to care about you because I want to help this team and be a leader of this team.”
Leaders emerged in different ways, particularly during offseason workouts. Tight end Riley Nowakowski recalled receiver Elijah Sarratt urging teammates to do one more rep after their work was done for the day. Soon, others followed. “One more rep,” became a calling card. The Friday before the national championship game, Sarratt screamed to his teammates during a lifting session in the weight room, “One more rep!”
“Finishing how last season finished, losing to Notre Dame, when we came back, we were like, ‘What’s the next step?'” Sarratt said. “For me, I decided to put in that extra work. If you’re doing a little bit more than everyone else, it has to help. I was doing it by myself at first. Then, I told one receiver, and now the whole offense is doing it.”
“That’s reflective of guys wanting to pay the price to be the best they can be and pushing themselves, understanding it takes a little bit more to be the best,” Cignetti said. “There’s good and there’s great, and what does it take to be great? It takes a special discipline, work ethic and focus. Those are guys trying to find the edge and improve every single day.”
They were eager to show off all that work when the season opened Aug. 30 against Old Dominion.
“Although social media before the year was like, oh, ‘Cinderella story,’ we all had the internal belief in the facility, behind closed doors,” Mendoza said.
RANKED NO. 20 TO start the year and beating Old Dominion, Kennesaw State and Indiana State to open the season was one thing. The first test would come in Week 4, with No. 9 Illinois coming to town.
Scratch that — Illinois wasn’t much of a test, either.
Indiana overwhelmed the Illini 63-10, as Mendoza threw five touchdown passes and just two incompletions, for its first top-10 win in five years. Afterward Cignetti said, “We’ll get people’s attention with this one.”
“The thing that we said in the locker room beforehand is, ‘This game does not have to be close,'” defensive lineman Mikail Kamara said. “Like, even though everyone’s saying it’s going to be a close game, we understood we could win this game by like 30, 40 points. We started the game off fast, and even though that was not our biggest opponent, we slayed a dragon.”
Indiana got even more attention after going on the road to beat No. 3 Oregon 30-20 on Oct. 11. With the score tied early in the fourth quarter, Indiana had the contest’s final 10 points — taking the lead for good on an 8-yard touchdown pass from Mendoza to Sarratt with 6:23 to go. Indiana had been winless (0-46) in road games against top-5 opponents in its history. Not anymore.
This team was not a fluke.
This team was better than last year.
An unofficial motto soon took hold: “Make a team quit.”
Then, James Franklin got fired. The Nittany Lions were the preseason choice to win the Big Ten, but they fired their coach in mid-October after a disappointing 3-3 start. Once that happened, speculation swirled that Penn State officials had locked in on Cignetti as their top choice.
Dolson immediately went to see Cignetti in his office.
“I wanted him to know our commitment to him,” Dolson said. “It wasn’t just, ‘OK, we hit one there last year. I told him, ‘We know what the market is. We know your value. We know how coveted you are, and we’re willing to do what we need to do to make certain you feel that.'”
Four days after Franklin was fired, Indiana announced a new eight-year contract with Cignetti worth $11.6 million a year, making him one of the highest paid coaches in the country.
When Indiana went to State College, the Hoosiers were ranked No. 2 and Penn State was reeling, having lost six straight.
Playing its most inspired football of the season, Penn State took a 24-20 lead with 6:27 remaining. Then came more Mendoza Magic. Indiana got the ball with less than two minutes to go, and Mendoza started rolling, firing one completion after the next to get Indiana down to the Penn State 7-yard line with 36 seconds left.
On third-and-goal and time running out on its undefeated season, Mendoza threw for Omar Cooper Jr. in the back of the end zone. Cooper leapt and leaned back to make the catch, seemingly defying gravity and the laws of physics to tap his left foot inside the end zone before falling out of bounds. Touchdown, Indiana.
Eighty yards, with his boys, to get Indiana’s first win at Penn State.
“Fernando put it in the perfect spot,” Cooper said. “So, I just went up and tried to make a play. I caught it, and the next thing I had to do was try to keep my feet in bounds. I knew how far I was from out of bounds, and I knew the defender was also pushing me. It happened so fast that I was just hoping that my foot was in bounds. When I looked and saw the ref’s reaction, it was just a rush of excitement and joy. I don’t know how to explain it.”
That play kept Indiana’s undefeated season alive, but also provided a powerful reminder about resilience and trust.
“The Penn State game, what that did for this team, I can’t measure,” Cignetti said. “When we were down and out and all the odds were against us, second-and-17, running clock, a minute 30, and all of a sudden we recomposed and found a way to get that done. That was incredible.”
Though Indiana appeared to be an unstoppable force, so did No. 1 Ohio State. The two met in the Big Ten championship game, their CFP spots secured, but Indiana had not won a conference title since 1967.
With two of the best defenses in the country squaring off, points were at a premium. Once again, it was Mendoza who delivered in the clutch, with a 17-yard touchdown pass to Sarratt in the third quarter that ended up being the game-winning score in the 13-10 victory to take down the Buckeyes and reinforce Indiana’s inevitability as champions.
A week later, Mendoza became the first Heisman Trophy winner in school history. Now, he looks back on that initial phone call with Cignetti as a pivotal moment.
“I’ve been able to develop into that quarterback and made that exponential jump this year that I was aspiring to,” Mendoza said. “I really am thankful that he sold me on developing Fernando as the quarterback. That’s one of the things that made me decide on this school.”
CIGNETTI HAD A message he needed to deliver at the news conference the day before Indiana played Alabama in the College Football Playoff quarterfinals at the Rose Bowl. Citing disruptive travel, Cignetti said their first practice in California “didn’t meet the standard” and there were a lot of “loose ends” his team had to tie up before facing the Crimson Tide.
Since the CFP expanded to 12 teams, not one team that had a first-round bye won in the quarterfinals.
Indiana became the first, embarrassing Alabama 38-3. Then in the semifinals, Indiana crushed Oregon 56-22. The blowouts were so thorough that they made Indiana the first team to win multiple CFP games by 30 or more points.
“I wouldn’t say it’s completely out of the ordinary for us, to be honest,” receiver Charlie Becker said. “Coach Cignetti told us we’re going to win, and we all bought in. It’s a standard at this point.”
The Hoosiers may have emerged as the favorite to win the national title by the end of the season, but they did it with a coach who waited four decades for an FBS head coaching opportunity, with players mostly undervalued and overlooked. Only eight four- or five-star players are currently on the roster.
Being overlooked and continuing to find new ways to surprise has become a way of life for both Cignetti and his players. So, with the national championship on the line, Indiana did what it had done throughout the course of the entire season.
“A big constant that we’ve really had this year is always bet on ourselves, whether it’s preseason no one thinks we can make it, whether it’s figuring out in situations like Oregon, Penn State, and Iowa, we always figure it out,” Mendoza said. “Whenever they called that play, we knew, ‘Hey, we’re going to better ourselves one more time at the biggest stage of the game.'”
The Cinderella story is now complete, whether Cignetti objects to the characterization or not. But the same forces that led the Hoosiers to this point will carry them beyond this exceptional two-year moment.
“One of the things that will probably never go away is the chip on our shoulder, that we have to continually prove ourselves and continue to be paranoid about falling backwards,” Dolson said. “There is a, ‘We still have a lot of work to do,’ mentality around here.”
“I want to make it so we’re like Alabama where this is normal,” Kamara said. “Once we win this, everything will change.”
Heather Dinich and Adam Rittenberg contributed to this report.
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