Indiana’s College Football Championship: A New Way to Win

The Indiana Hoosiers reign supreme over college football. 

Polishing off one of the most astonishing title runs in recent sports history, Indiana bested the uber-talented University of Miami Hurricanes 27-21 in the College Football Playoff (CFP) National Championship on Jan. 19 to win their first championship in their 138-year history.

En route to the final, the Hoosiers toppled one college football giant after another. Before reaching Miami, they won the Big Ten Championship by beating then top-ranked Ohio State (13-10), obliterated the preeminent program in the sport in Alabama (38-3), and put up over 50 points in their win against Oregon in the semifinals (56-22).

So what changed? How did the perennial basement dweller, Indiana, the losingest program in college football history, become the best team in the sport? Head coach Curt Cignetti and starting quarterback Fernando Mendoza happened.

Cignetti began his coaching career immediately after finishing three seasons playing quarterback for West Virginia. First as a graduate assistant at Pitt, then at six other stops, Cignetti built a strong reputation as a position coach over 23 of work. Then, in 2007, Cignetti joined Nick Saban at Alabama where he worked for one of the best coaches of all time and banked a quarter of a million dollars annually. But after having worked for Coach Saban for three years and at 50 years of age, Cignetti took a gamble. He left one of the greatest coaching systems ever established to take the head coach position at (of all places) Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). Inheriting a team that finished sixth in the West division of the Division-II Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference the year before he arrived, Cignetti orchestrated a revival. Over five seasons, Cignetti turned IUP into a winning program, leaving town with a 53-17 record and multiple playoff appearances. 

Cignetti then went to Elon University in 2017, where he did the same thing: taking over a program that had gone 7-27 over its three previous seasons and turning the team into a Division-I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) playoff contender in back-to-back years. 

Next, in 2019, he took over the head coaching position at James Madison University (JMU). Unlike his previous stops, the Dukes were already a dominant program, but Cignetti still managed to exceed expectations. In command as the program jumped from the lower-level Division-I FCS tier to the upper-level Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) tier, no reasonable person would have expected immediate success. It takes years to bridge the gap between the FCS and FBS; few teams can play .500 football immediately, and fewer still play winning football in year one. Whatever. In year one, Cignetti oversaw an 8-3 campaign and registered the best record in the Sun Belt Conference.

Which is why, given such an immaculate track record, his success at Indiana should come as no surprise. Yet it has. 

The Hoosiers signed Cignetti in November after the 2023 season. Now the head coach of a Big Ten school, Cignetti wasted no time making his name known throughout the college football world. With a revamped roster heavily reliant on the transfer portal, Indiana started the season 11-0 for the first time in school history. Even after shouldering an ugly loss to Ohio State in Week 11, the Hoosiers made the CFP — a first for the program — before falling to Notre Dame in the first round. Considering the Hoosiers had finished the previous season 3-9, 2024 was a resounding success for Indiana by any metric. 

However, whether Cignetti had the firepower to challenge the true behemoths in the sport remained open for debate. After all, the only two ranked teams Indiana played in 2024 beat them by a combined 65-32, not confidence-inspiring for those weighing Indiana’s future championship potential. 

But Cignetti was trying something novel. Instead of compiling a roster stocked full with four and five-star recruits, Cignetti relied heavily on the transfer portal to develop a team of players united by their work ethic, drive, and proven ability to produce. In many cases, Cignetti recruited players from previous teams he had coached to join the Hoosiers, knowing that their skills were often overlooked by competing Division-I programs. One such player was Austin Sarratt, who began his collegiate career at Saint Francis University and put up 700 yards receiving in his first year there. Cignetti recruited Sarratt to join his program at JMU where he immediately achieved a 1200 receiving yard season. Following Cignetti to Indiana, Sarratt blossomed into the go-to receiver on a championship squad. 

Take another case: Kaelon Black came out of high school as an undersized and overlooked recruit, but Cignetti offered him a spot as a running back at JMU. There, Black developed his skills as a backup running back and eventual starter for three years. Like Sarratt, Black transferred with Cignetti to Indiana where he became a backup once more before breaking out for a monumental 1,000-yard rushing season. Black is only five feet ten inches in a sport where most players in his position tower over six feet but he runs so physically that his size does not matter. His impact at Indiana is textbook Cignetti coaching. 

However, the paragon of this approach is Indiana’s star quarterback, Fernando Mendoza. Now the presumed number one draft pick in the upcoming National Football League (NFL) Draft, Mendoza started his career as a three-star quarterback for the University of California-Berkeley Golden Bears. He played well, if unspectacularly, for two seasons before entering the transfer portal in 2024. Cignetti quickly picked up Mendoza from the portal as a player whose talents he wanted to invest in, acknowledging that Mendoza’s skills needed refining when he got to Indiana. But developing talent is what Cignetti does best, and under his tutelage Mendoza unleashed a season of brutal efficiency, opportunism, and big moments worthy of the Heisman Trophy, the highest accolade for college football excellence. 

Cignetti’s unique approach to roster building is perhaps best exemplified by Indiana’s blue-chip ratio: the percentage of players on a roster who were four or five-star recruits coming out of high school. No national champion in the 10 years before Indiana’s title had less than a 50% blue-chip ratio. These teams were stacked with individual talents, many of whom were bound for the NFL post college, whose successes were expected and unsurprising. Unlike these teams, entering 2025, Indiana’s blue-chip ratio was 8%. 

Of course, all of this is not to say that Indiana did not have talent. Like many other teams, Indiana’s talent came from the guys on their roster who had developed over three, four, five, and even six years of college football playing experience. That players get better over time is no secret. The difference, however, is that the members of Indiana’s team were never expected to be great.

Indiana’s foe in the championship game, Miami quarterback Carson Beck, was playing in his sixth year in college football after transferring from the University Georgia for his final year of eligibility. Beck was elite. But he was always elite — as a recruit, as a sophomore, and now, as a fifth-year senior. Fernando Mendoza was fine as a recruit, solid as a sophomore, and a Heisman winner as a junior. 

With Mendoza and at least 10 starters leaving from the championship Indiana team, either because of exhausted eligibility or because they are transferring, Indiana will have a lot to replace next year. Cignetti has proven time and time again that he can identify talent where few others can, and he will need to do so once more this offseason if Indiana wants to remain at the top of the college football hierarchy. Indiana fans should not be worried.