The cheapest tickets to the national championship game are more than $3,000 on StubHub<\/a>, and you\u2019ll have to forgive me for being skeptical it\u2019s because of \u201chome game<\/a>\u201d status for Miami. That place is going to be lit up crimson like Pasadena and Atlanta were.<\/p>\n This has been happening all year. While running the New York marathon back in early November, I saw dozens of people in Indiana gear along the route, and I even regularly see Indiana gear in Athens, Ga., something that has never happened in the nearly 13 years I have lived here. I suspect, wherever you live, you have experienced something similar. Indiana\u2019s rise is the story of this college football season<\/a>. But its fan base\u2019s sudden, overwhelming ubiquity is the Greek chorus that surrounds it, and thus us all: The fans are who have turned a dominant football team into a traveling roadshow.<\/p>\n What\u2019s strange about this is that, well, it\u2019s Indiana football. When Curt Cignetti was hired just more than two years ago<\/a>, it was considered a smart move by the athletic department, but no one kidded themselves that Indiana was some sort of raucous fan sleeper cell just waiting to be activated. Indiana had been bad at football for years, but more than that, it had been irrelevant, even on its own campus.<\/p>\n The 2019 Indiana team was the first to so much as be ranked in 25 years<\/a>, and its final home game was against a top-15 Michigan team. It was about as big a game as the Hoosiers had played in several decades. It was also a game that played to 10,000 people short of capacity<\/a>. (And ended with the Hoosiers getting blown out. Again.) Indiana football was bad, sure. But it was also generally ignored, both externally and internally. Basketball? Well, now that\u2019s something different. But football? At Indiana? Who has ever cared?<\/p>\n Apparently: A lot of people!<\/p>\n It is OK if you did not see this coming; they don\u2019t appear to have seen it coming either. At the Peach Bowl, I ran into my friend Galen Clavio, director of the Sports Media Program at Indiana and the host of \u201cCrimsonCast,\u201d an Indiana sports podcast, who knows the history of IU as well as anyone on the planet. He still had the dazed look of someone who woke up one morning surrounded by puppies with thousand-dollar bills in their collars.<\/p>\n I asked him where, exactly, all these Indiana football fans came from. \u201cI had no idea,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m as stunned by that as I am by how good the team is. Maybe more?\u201d And then he floated off back to heaven like the rest of them.<\/p>\n This raises the question: Why are there so many Indiana football fans who have suddenly sprung from the earth, apparently fully formed, like they\u2019ve been waiting their whole lives for this specific moment?<\/p>\n \n Curt Cignetti led Indiana to a No. 1 ranking for the first time, with Fernando Mendoza winning the program\u2019s first Heisman Trophy. (Jonathan Bachman \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n The easiest answer is math. In October, the university sent out a press release<\/a> claiming that the school boasts \u201cthe largest living alumni community in the country,\u201d an odd phrasing that, I\u2019ll confess, made me worry the Indiana alumni association might be putting out mob hits on the alumni of other schools. But there\u2019s no question Indiana is a massive school, 20th in the country by the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings<\/a>, with graduates spread throughout the country. If there were ever a moment to dust off those old IU hoodies, now would be the time.<\/p>\n But then again, there are 19 schools above IU on that list, including Texas, Wisconsin, Penn State and (gasp) Purdue, and despite some wonderful seasons from those schools in various sports over recent years (including a national championship game appearance for Purdue in men\u2019s basketball just two years ago), they weren\u2019t even close to as inescapable as Indiana fans are right now. For a sport that, again, no one on campus seems to have cared about as recently as 18 months ago.<\/p>\n Part of it is likely connected to that Indiana basketball obsession, in that Indiana basketball fans have long considered their school an inner-circle blue blood in spite of, well, every piece of available evidence. Indiana last made the Final Four in 2002 \u2014 43 schools have made the Final Four since Indiana last did, including George Mason, Loyola Chicago, San Diego State and eight other Big Ten teams \u2014 which means we\u2019ve had two and a half decades of Indiana basketball fans thinking they are special when they are in fact not.<\/p>\n But Indiana football, of all things, has made them feel special again, that they are the champions they\u2019ve always imagined themselves to be, that Bob Knight had raised them all to think they were. Indiana football has made Indiana basketball fans feel like they once did, like they have always felt they are supposed to.<\/p>\n But I bet that\u2019s only a part of it, and probably not the biggest part. (I doubt this will happen to Nebraska fans, for example, if that basketball team keeps winning<\/a>.) I suspect the real reason is the most straightforward: It really is just about the team, and its story.<\/p>\n This Indiana team is good, obviously; its dominance in the CFP has led, reasonably, to all sorts of Best Team Ever discussions<\/a>. But more than that, the Hoosiers are special. Of all the stories we have talked about during this wild college football season<\/a>, the first thing we will remember when we look back will be, \u201cOh, that was the Indiana year.\u201d Indiana is a classic underdog, but what\u2019s different is these Hoosiers have everything:<\/p>\n \u2022 Two vivid, iconic personalities at the center. Cignetti has turned this program around<\/a> in a way that feels unique to his personality: intense, unyielding and, above all, in a consistently (and hilariously) grouchy way that does not even allow him so much as a muscle twitch of a reaction even when his team has just scored a touchdown. Cignetti\u2019s lack of joy is, paradoxically, magnetic to watch.<\/a><\/p>\n Meanwhile, quarterback Fernando Mendoza<\/a> is the opposite: a big, smiling, slobbering puppy dog of a human being. Mendoza combines a seemingly infinite knowledge of everything that\u2019s going to happen in any given moment with a constant goofy, doofus grin on his face in a way that honestly is starting to make me wonder if he\u2019s secretly one of The Others from \u201cPluribus.\u201d<\/p>\n These are the two unique main characters of college football this year, and they are both on the same team. The best team, no less.<\/p>\n \u2022 A signature moment that, when you close your eyes, you\u2019ll forever associate with them and college football\u2019s history. I am a longtime Gus Johnson skeptic<\/a>, but the one time I\u2019ve found the Gus Johnson Brain Explosion moment honest and appropriate was when Omar Cooper Jr. caught that Mendoza pass against Penn State back in November<\/a>. Gus was, for the first time, making the same sound I was making. It\u2019s the signature play of this<\/a>, and maybe any, college football season, and it happened to this team, during this.<\/p>\n \u2022 They are truly dominant. This is the key thing: Indiana really is the best team. As David Ubben wrote after the game<\/a>, \u201cCinderella wears combat boots and brass knuckles.\u201d The 2025 Indiana team has drawn comparisons to the 2020 Alabama team, or the 2019 LSU team<\/a>, or the 2022 Georgia team, or even the 1995 Nebraska team<\/a>. But the thing is: That those teams were dominant is unsurprising; they\u2019re teams you\u2019d expect to be dominant. This is happening to Indiana. It\u2019s like \u201cShe\u2019s All That,\u201d except Rachel Leigh Cook not only becomes the prettiest girl in the school, but also is elected president, discovers cold fusion, cures cancer, colonizes Mars and ends all the world\u2019s wars.<\/p>\n Indiana has had everything happen this year \u2014 all at once. Imagine if this happened at your school? You\u2019d be irrepressible and omnipresent too; you wouldn\u2019t wear anything that didn\u2019t have your school\u2019s logo on it. It would become your entire personality. I am sure, if it happened at Illinois, it would become mine.<\/p>\n It is not even accurate to call it a once in a lifetime experience, because most fan bases never experience anything like this. When you are touched by the gods like this, in a way that happens only once a decade or so in any sport \u2014 when you become an all-time iconic team, like the 1985 Bears, or the 1927 Yankees or 2003-04 Arsenal \u2014 it goes beyond just how much you care about your team, or how much history it does or doesn\u2019t have. It becomes sports lore, canon, even myth. Instantly. There are Indiana fans everywhere because things like this so rarely happen, and it has happened to them. Who could possibly resist this? You couldn\u2019t. Nobody could.<\/p>\n It is one of the wildest things I\u2019ve ever seen in sports. It\u2019s a story unlike any other. We\u2019ll never forget it.<\/p>\n All they have to do is, ahem, finish it off on Monday. Because if they don\u2019t? I may never see an Indiana football hoodie in public again. Then this story becomes something different than the happiest things any fan base has ever experienced: It becomes, instantly, the opposite.<\/p>\n So, no pressure, Hoosiers fans. This is your night, and your time. Probably.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Do you want to share your predictions, analysis or thoughts on Monday\u2019s National Championship Game between Indiana and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[331,1784,7,4725,49,48,320,156],"class_list":{"0":"post-674323","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-college-football","9":"tag-culture","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-indiana-hoosiers","12":"tag-ncaa","13":"tag-ncaa-football","14":"tag-opinion","15":"tag-sports-business"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115888589109662135","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/GettyImages-2255484523-scaled.jpg\")
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