Now I’m getting annoyed with these backhanded compliments, this transitive property explanation of the greatest sports story of our time.
Stop saying if Indiana can win the national title, anyone can. Because they can’t.
“It wasn’t some magic trick you can teach,” said Indiana center Pat Coogan. “You can’t replicate it.”
You can, however, minimize it — which is exactly what’s happening mere days after the fact.
Indiana was the worst program in college football history. Didn’t have elite high school recruits, or elite transfer portal additions.
Didn’t have the structure or framework, or history and tradition, blue bloods of the sport have used in the modern era to dominate year after year. So there has to be a reason, has to be something to explain this meteoric metamorphosis.
It is here where the boogeyman NIL enters the room, The Tempter with the bling and zing and the easy road to everything you’ve dreamed.
Only there is no easy road. Never has been, never will be.
Just because Indiana won the national title, it doesn’t mean Kentucky or Kansas or Wake Forest can or will. It doesn’t mean other lovable losers of the past can rise from the dregs of the sport and turn it sideways with a two-year run that defies logic ― by throwing NIL money at the problem.
Once we bend and make that absurd jump from rare to attempted reason, we’re completely ignoring the impact of, in no uncertain order:
- Hoosiers coach Curt Cignetti.
- Evaluation and development from Cignetti and his staff, including offensive and defensive coordinators who have been with him for years.
- A core group of overlooked players — the unloved and unwanted of both the transfer portal and high school recruiting — playing at their ceiling and motivated to prove a point.
- Did I say Cignetti?
Beyond the unthinkable worst to first, rags to riches, cellar to thrown analogies, nothing underscores Indiana’s rise among a sport built by and for the elites more that this astounding reality: The last first-time national title winner was Florida in 1996.
Buy IU championship books, prints
That’s 30 years.
Since 1996 and prior to Indiana’s record run of 16 wins, a total of 14 teams won national titles over three decades. There’s nothing random about a clique of schools who continue to win (and play for) national championships.
Winning championships of any kind is difficult, winning the whole thing is damn near impossible unless you’re part of the clique. Even then, it takes good fortune and maybe even a few breaks, to get it done.
Cignettis don’t grow on trees, nor does the unique convergence of motivation and assimilation of transfer portal additions playing the best of their careers while being accepted and embraced by the rest of the locker room.
Before you start throwing around meaningless ideals of the change agent transfer portal, you might want to examine the thing.
Two years ago, Florida State followed an unbeaten regular season by landing a Top-3 transfer portal class, according to the 247Sports composite ranking. The Noles then went out and won two games — one against Cal and some quarterback named Mendoza.
LSU signed the No. 1 transfer portal class in 2025, and coach Brian Kelly didn’t even make it to the end of the show. He was fired in late October, and the Tigers finished with all of seven wins.
And those are two blue bloods, two with every advantage to winning big — falling flat on their faces.
So now we’re supposed to believe any historical nobody of Division I football can not only find the right players, but get them to play with chemistry, and cohesively at the top of their games. With any ol’ coach.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Indiana did this without a single blue-chip recruit on the roster, without a single player who — at some point in his development — was considered among the best in the game. The Hoosiers did it with a coach who bet on himself in his 50s, left the Nick Saban coaching nest at Alabama and started over in the NCAA lower divisions.
Only to work his way back up to the FBS Power conference level at the losingest program in the history of the sport. Then completely turn around a ship dead in the water, and go full-steam with guns loaded at the blue bloods of the sport.
And win 27 of 29 games.
My god, the depths at which blue blood caretakers of the sport will go to minimize what just happened in Bloomington, Ind.
First Indiana was playing a cake schedule, and when that didn’t work, the Hoosiers must have been cheating. Straight Connor Stalions stuff.
When that didn’t work — days before the national championship game, no less — and after Indiana finally pulled the refurbished muscle car into the national champions garage without scratch, well, there was only one thing left to say.
If Indiana can do it, anyone can.
Only they can’t.
