Best of Week 7: Indiana is a genuine power on the national stage

Indiana Hoosiers vs. Oregon Ducks: Final Game Highlight (0:43) So much of college football these past few years has been defined by what’s new. There’s the transfer portal, NIL money, revenue sharing, revamped rosters, realignment, private equity firms looking to do business with schools, and leagues eager to build up their cash reserves so they can finally afford to build those gold-plated lockers they’ve had their eyes on. If you fell into a coma in 2019 and awoke a week ago, the entirety of the sport would feel like some sort of fever dream. And yet, for all this change, for all that’s new in college football, one thing has remained steadfastly true: The biggest brands have continued to dominate the sport. It has been nearly three decades since we’ve had a first-time national champion. It’s been more than four decades sinceFlorida StateandMiamiforced their way into the staid ranks of college football’s blue bloods. It has been a lifetime since someone in the Big Ten could realistically be called “fun.” But here we are, halfway through the 2025 season, andIndianahas given us something unique, entertaining and truly new — a program that had wallowed in obscurity for decades is now a genuine power on the national stage. “We showed the country we’re a real team,” quarterbackFernando Mendozasaid after Saturday’s stunning 30-20 win over No. 3Oregon. It’s true. Indiana has uniforms, a playbook and everything else. Fernando Mendoza connects with Elijah Sarratt to take the lead against the Ducks. The advent of NIL, revenue sharing and the portal was supposed to simply make the rich richer, but the opposite has largely been true, and Indiana is Exhibit No. 1. Until 2020, Taylor Swift had not been alive during a year in which the Hoosiers finished ranked in the AP Top 25, and stunningly she hadn’t written a single song about how sad that was. Even that 2020 season was mostly a figment of COVID’s artificial reality, and the program regressed to 2-10 a season later. It’s almost impossible to overstate just how bleak Indiana’s football history had been, so bad that even amid all the basketball program’s malaise, no one ever thought, “Hey, maybe we could care about football instead.” Indiana was cheerfully irrelevant, not even interestingly bad, but rather just unnecessary to any larger conversation. Like the protagonist of every John Mellencamp song, Indiana was a program destined to relive the indignities of every past generation, no matter how hard it fought against the crushing obviousness of it all. It was Jack and Diane and Gerry DiNardo. Then Curt Cignetti arrived, overhauled the roster, brashly told the world to Google him, and after scrolling past 73 sponsored results selling military-grade generators, you learned that the Hoosiers coach had won everywhere he had ever been, and he wasn’t about to change now.