Andrea AdelsonJan 19, 2026, 11:17 PM ETClose ACC reporter. Joined ESPN.com in 2010. Graduate of the University of Florida.Follow on X
Indiana’s Riley Nowakowski powers into end zone for game’s 1st TD (0:29)Riley Nowakowski scores a 1-yard touchdown to give Indiana a 10-0 lead over Miami. (0:29)
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Indiana announced its college football arrival a year ago, but even then, it felt hard to believe the losingest program in FBS history would have much staying power. Critics ripped their schedule, called them a fluke, debated whether they even deserved to make the College Football Playoff and dismissed them following an opening-round loss to Notre Dame.
Indiana may have been pooh-poohed as a one-year wonder, opening 2025 ranked No. 20 and picked to finish sixth in the Big Ten preseason media poll.
Indiana may not have won by 30, the way they did in previous playoff victories. But they played with the same confident flair, punctuated by the call of the game: On fourth-and-4 from the Miami 12 and the Hoosiers up 3, coach Curt Cignetti called a quarterback run for quarterback Fernando Mendoza. He pushed up the middle, and bullied his way through the Miami defense, busting multiple tackles to stretch over the goal line.
That play summed up the season in a nutshell: Cignetti banking on himself and his players and Mendoza delivering in the clutch.
Asked before the game whether Indiana qualifies as a “Cinderella story,” given its success last year, Cignetti answered in the most Cignetti way, wryly saying in return, “Define ‘Cinderella story’ in the context of Indiana. I’m not quite sure what you mean by that.”
Noun. Used in reference to a situation in which a person, team, etc., of low status or importance unexpectedly achieves great success or public recognition.
While there may still be a “pinch me, I’m dreaming” vibe to this title run, Cignetti told the world when he was hired to coach the Hoosiers in 2023, they would win, then trash-talked the best teams in the Big Ten when he took the mic at a basketball game the day after he was hired.
While others may have rolled their eyes, the people inside the football program, athletic department and Bloomington, Indiana, charged ahead.
WHEN INDIANA FIRED coach Tom Allen in 2023, university leadership was prepared to take the next step with football. School president Pamela Whitten had laid the groundwork.
When she was hired two years earlier, Whitten was tasked with a long to-do list, including elevating Indiana athletics. This was during a revolutionary time for collegiate sports, with the transfer portal and NIL evening the playing field in a way that would allow more than the same handful of programs to compete for championships.
“We had to raise a lot of money to have the resources, both financial as well as the physical infrastructure,” Whitten said. “So when we were ready to bring in a coach, he needed that ecosystem to be successful as well.”
While Cignetti did not guarantee a national title in two years, he refused to put any limitations on what he thought Indiana could do.
Dolson thought back to a conversation he once had with his brother-in-law, who played football at Indiana in the 1980s under Bill Mallory, who led the Hoosiers to six bowl appearances during his tenure.
Cignetti famously left his job as an Alabama assistant after the 2010 season to take his first head coaching job at Indiana University Pennsylvania, where his dad once coached, taking a massive pay cut in the process. But he bet on himself. Now, he was betting on Indiana.
Cignetti got to work building the program in his image, the same way he built programs and won at Division II IUP, Elon and then James Madison — where he made the FCS playoffs in his first season as head coach. In fact, he made the respective playoffs at all three programs within the first two years.
In 13 seasons as a head coach, Cignetti had never had a losing record. Now, at the losingest program in FBS, something had to give. It wasn’t going to be the stubborn coach.
GOING 11-2 AND losing to Notre Dame in the first round of the 2024 College Football Playoff served as the launching point to this season. Cignetti knew Indiana could go further, so he went back into the transfer portal to make his team even better.
Mendoza had fielded plenty of other calls from interested schools. But he remembers that first conversation with Cignetti, who told him, “If you’re going to come here, you’re going to develop into a hell of a quarterback.”
Mendoza was one of 22 players Indiana added in the portal, including running back Roman Hemby, receiver E.J. Williams Jr., center Pat Coogan, right tackle Kahlil Benson, defensive tackle Hosea Wheeler and defensive backs Louis Moore and Devan Boykin. Those players arrived to find a team that did not take too kindly to the narratives that dismissed them following the playoff loss.
“There was a lot of skepticism after last year, that we were a fluke,” Cignetti said. “That team did a lot of great things and got it all started. I think a lot of that negative stuff in the media fueled the guys returning from this team.”
As the quarterback, Mendoza knew how important it was to become a part of the team from the jump. His first order of business was to learn the name of each of his teammates. To help, he kept roster photographs with him.
Leaders emerged in different ways, particularly during offseason workouts. Tight end Riley Nowakowski recalled receiver Elijah Sarratt urging teammates to do one more rep after their work was done for the day. Soon, others followed. “One more rep,” became a calling card. The Friday before the national championship game, Sarratt screamed to his teammates during a lifting session in the weight room, “One more rep!”
“Finishing how last season finished, losing to Notre Dame, when we came back, we were like, ‘What’s the next step?'” Sarratt said. “For me, I decided to put in that extra work. If you’re doing a little bit more than everyone else, it has to help. I was doing it by myself at first. Then I told one receiver, and now the whole offense is doing it.”
“That’s reflective of guys wanting to pay the price to be the best they can be and pushing themselves, understanding it takes a little bit more to be the best,” Cignetti said. “There’s good and there’s great, and what does it take to be great? It takes a special discipline, work ethic and focus. Those are guys trying to find the edge and improve every single day.”
“Although social media before the year was like, oh, ‘Cinderella story,’ we all had the internal belief in the facility, behind closed doors,” Mendoza said.
RANKED NO. 20 TO start the year and beating Old Dominion, Kennesaw State and Indiana State to open the season was one thing. The first test would come in Week 4, with No. 9 Illinois coming to town.
Indiana overwhelmed the Illini 63-10, as Mendoza threw five touchdown passes and just two incompletions, for its first top-10 win in five years. Afterward Cignetti said, “We’ll get people’s attention with this one.”
“The thing that we said in the locker room beforehand is, ‘This game does not have to be close,'” said defensive lineman Mikail Kamara. “Like, even though everyone’s saying it’s gonna be a close game, we understood we could win this game by like 30, 40 points. We started the game off fast and even though that was not our biggest opponent, we slayed a dragon.”
Indiana got even more attention after going on the road to beat No. 3 Oregon 30-20 on Oct. 11. With the game tied early in the fourth quarter, Indiana scored the contest’s final 10 points — taking the lead for good on an 8-yard touchdown pass from Mendoza to Sarratt with 6:23 to go. Indiana had been winless (0-46) in road games against top-5 opponents in its history. Not anymore.
Then James Franklin got fired. The Nittany Lions were the preseason choice to win the Big Ten, but they fired their coach in mid-October after a disappointing 3-3 start. Once that happened, speculation swirled that Penn State officials had locked in on Cignetti as their top choice.
“I wanted him to know our commitment to him,” Dolson said. “It wasn’t just, ‘OK, we hit one there last year. I told him, ‘We know what the market is. We know your value. We know how coveted you are, and we’re willing to do what we need to do to make certain you feel that.”
Four days after Franklin was fired, Indiana announced a new eight-year contract with Cignetti worth $11.6 million a year, making him one of the highest paid coaches in the country.
When Indiana went to State College, the Hoosiers were ranked No. 2 and Penn State was reeling, having lost six straight.
Playing its most inspired football of the season, Penn State took a 24-20 lead with 6:27 remaining. Then came more Mendoza Magic. Indiana got the ball with less than 2 minutes to go, and Mendoza started rolling, firing one completion after the next to get Indiana down to the Penn State 7-yard line with 36 seconds left.
On third-and-goal and time running out on its undefeated season, Mendoza threw for Omar Cooper Jr. in the back of the end zone. Cooper leapt off the ground and leaned back to make the catch, seemingly defying gravity and the laws of physics to tap his left foot inside the end zone before falling out of bounds. Touchdown, Indiana.
“Fernando put it in the perfect spot,” Cooper said. “So I just went up and tried to make a play. I caught it, and the next thing I had to do was try to keep my feet in bounds. I knew how far I was from out of bounds, and I knew the defender was also pushing me. It happened so fast that I was just hoping that my foot was in bounds. When I looked and saw the ref’s reaction, it was just a rush of excitement and joy. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“We got used to teams quitting, and Penn State had a lot of fight,” Kamara said. “There was no fear on the sideline, no arguing, no anxiety. It was, ‘Let’s go get it done.”
While Indiana appeared to be an unstoppable force, so did No. 1 Ohio State. The two met in the Big Ten championship game, their CFP spots secured, but Indiana had not won a conference title since 1967.