- Coach Curt Cignetti credits the team’s success to veteran players with strong character and leadership.
- Multiple Indiana players, including quarterback Fernando Mendoza, are projected to be high NFL draft picks.
Now that there’s no doubt remaining, seedy skepticism has arrived.
So before we dive into more nonsense and deconstruct more lunacy, let’s begin where all elite teams do: players.
Indiana has better players than just about every team in college football.
Better than Ole Miss and Alabama. Better than Oregon and Texas and USC and Michigan and yep — hold onto your Bucknuts — maybe even better than Ohio State.
Soon enough, we’ll add Miami to the list.
“We’ve got a lot of veteran guys that have strong character,” said Indiana coach Curt Cignetti. “Great leaders, great players.”
What Indiana has is a bunch of players who will have long careers in the NFL. It’s so much more than just the perfect storm of motivated outcasts brought together by the coach finally getting his shot.
This is about talented players, and one the undeniable truth that underscores it all: it’s impossible to hide on a football field ― especially in big games and big moments. Great players rise to it, flawed players wilt in it.
Cignetti, who coached at Alabama under Nick Saban and has seen the overwhelming blue-chip train firsthand, will be the first to tell you this Indiana group is built different. But it doesn’t mean they’re any less talented.
One AFC scout, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his team’s draft process, told USA TODAY Sports the Indiana roster is, “A bunch of guys who will play a long time in this league. Football players, guys who love the game. It will be the most Indiana players ever drafted by a long way.”
Like left tackle Carter Smith, who has handled every team’s best edge rusher, and will do so again in the national championship game against Miami’s Rueben Bain — a projected Top 10 pick.
Like wideout Omar Cooper, who has 22 career touchdown catches. Or linebacker Aiden Fisher, who arrived with Cignetti from James Madison with little hype, and developed into an All-American.
Or center Pat Coogan, edge Mikail Kamara and running back Roman Hemby. By the time the third day of the NFL draft is complete, Indiana will have more players drafted in the Top 100 picks than a majority of FBS schools.
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Not with ridiculous internet allegations of cheating or stealing practice video or — I just love this one — a roster that’s full of grown men older than a majority of the rest of college football.
I don’t know if internet sleuths are aware, but Vanderbilt and Wake Forest and Northwestern and Oregon State (among others in Indiana’s previous zip code) all routinely had the oldest teams in college football prior to the explosion of NIL. And all — but for a scant breakout season here and there — struggled annually to reach bowl eligibility.
More to the point: Indiana had old(er) teams in the past, and couldn’t bust a grape.
I’m just throwing this out there: maybe it has something to do with talent level of the players this time around, and the men coaching them. Not some 15-second graphic in a weekly three-hour pregame show desperate for content.
Arkansas had 17 fourth- of fifth-year starters in 2025, won two games and fired its coach. Penn State? Loaded with fourth- and fifth-year players.
So were Nebraska and Arizona State and Wisconsin.
Weird how no one complained about Ohio State’s loaded, experienced roster in 2024. You remember that roster, right?
The Buckeyes spent $20 million to build it, including paying stay home money to a handful of critical starters on defense that could’ve left for the NFL. They also paid for a starting senior center, and a fifth-year starting quarterback — because coach Ryan Day wasn’t convinced he had a quarterback on his roster who could win a championship.
Then they went out and did it with an old roster, and the best freshman in the country.
That team was celebrated as an “all-in” moment. This Indiana team may as well be a bunch of NFL rejects who have returned to the college game to play under their weight class.
This is what happens when you upset the norms, when what should be suddenly becomes what’s old and slow and yesterday. Like LSU, which went all-in by constructing a roster full of fourth- and fifth-year players — and fired its coach before a disastrous season ended.
The one lasting takeaway from the NIL era is the systematic dismantling of norms. Nobody cares about your blue-blood status anymore.
Certainly not Ole Miss, which built a roster with 15 starters who were four- or fifth-year players, and was a defensive stop away from reaching the CFP national championship game.
There were no grassy knolls with the Ole Miss buildout, only the concrete fact of a dumb move by a self-centered coach that galvanized the entirety of college football around a team that prior to 2020, was an historical loser in the modern era of the sport.
Sort of like Indiana before Cignetti arrived and changed everything.
‘There was a lot of skepticism last year, that we were a fluke,’ Cignetti said. ‘That team did a lot of great things and got it all started.’
This one will finish it.
Want to know why Indiana will win the national title, and complete the greatest zero to hero rise in the history of college football? Check out the NFL draft in four months.
Elite players win games.
