There’s a dream from a few weeks ago that I keep replaying in my mind.
I’m back in Bloomington, the town I grew up in, visiting Indiana University, my alma mater. (Yes, Cutters are real.) It’s an unseasonably warm fall afternoon. The students are out. The leaves are changing colors. The campus looks beautiful. I stroll down Kirkwood, past the buildings and bars that made me. I walk through Dunn Meadow into the media school, where I meet a freshman looking for career advice, except he has no idea what he wants his career to be. He’s a blank canvas of an 18-year-old: quiet, shy, his whole future in front of him. Peculiarly, he’s from upstate New York. He could have gone to college anywhere. How in the world did he end up in southern Indiana?
I ask him just that. Without missing a beat, he looks me dead in the eye and utters the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
“I always wanted to go to a football school.”
Indiana at the 2026 Rose Bowl
The funny thing about that dream? It wasn’t a dream at all. It happened in the first week of November, when I made my annual pilgrimage to Bloomington for Career Day. But just like pretty much everything that’s happened involving IU football since Curt Cignetti arrived on campus, it still doesn’t feel real.
Maybe that’s because the previous nightmare lasted for so long. If you think the Paul Finebaums and Colin Cowherds of the world are gobsmacked by what the Hoosiers are doing, imagine experiencing this season as a born-and-bred Indiana fan. I expected the sun to explode before I expected the Hoosiers to run the table and become the college football darlings of America. None of this makes sense. In fact, maybe it proves we’re living in a simulation. How did the program with the most losses in Division I history become the greatest story in all of sports?
The College Football Playoff
Hoosiers fans (and I can’t emphasize this enough) used to dream of six-win seasons, a feat the program has accomplished 26 times in its 138-year existence. A participation trophy was our best-case scenario. IU’s all-time winning percentage looks like Ted Williams’s batting average. Do you know how demoralizing it is to finish 14th in the Big Ten? When the team went 8-4 in the 2019 season we nearly wept, but even that was just a mirage. Two years later, it was back to two wins.
But now, after toppling the likes of Oregon, Ohio State, and Ala-fricking-bama in the Granddaddy of Them All, the Hoosiers are 14-0, ranked no. 1 in the country, and set to play Friday in a College Football Playoff semifinal. Somehow, they’re the undeniable favorites (?!?) to win the national title. So, yeah, apologies if us Hoosiers feel like this is a fleeting fantasy.
For most of my life, college football felt like a foreign concept. Living in the heart of a basketball state, in the shadow of Bobby Knight, I joined my fellow Hoosiers fans in mostly choosing to look the other way each fall. We readily made plans for Saturdays. (Sundays were for Peyton.) We were the laughingstock of the Big Ten for as long as I could remember, and at a certain point we accepted our fate. How could we be this bad for this long?
We couldn’t get people to leave the tailgating fields and cross 17th Street to go to the games. You literally couldn’t give tickets away. Hell, even Northwestern mattered every now and then. But no one wanted to go watch the Hoosiers inevitably get annihilated. Indifference. Ineptitude. Intolerable. Indiana.
Before this season, Indiana last made the Rose Bowl after the 1967 season, an achievement we clung to like a lifeboat. But it was also a brutal reminder of how long it had been since the Hoosiers were relevant. Great coaches like Lee Corso and Bill Mallory came and went, but lifting the albatross that was IU football to mediocrity seemed impossible. Prior to last week’s victory against Alabama, we hadn’t won a bowl game since the internet was invented. Antwaan Randle El was one of the most electric players in college football history and the first FBS player to record 40 career passing and rushing touchdowns, but his Hoosiers never won more than five games in a season during his time on campus. Gerry DiNardo was better known for his Italian restaurant than his coaching. Bill Lynch and Tom Allen were … nice guys. Kevin Wilson was not.
It’s not that we Hoosiers hated college football. We just never felt like it was for us. After all, we’re a basketball state. Hoops season served as our defense mechanism. Sure, we’ll never win at football, but at least we have this.
There’s only so much losing and humiliation a sports fan can take. You might keep watching, but eventually something hardens. You have to become cynical to protect yourself. If you were an Indiana football fan who thought the Hoosiers would eventually turn it around, you weren’t an optimist—you were a fool. This was a permanent Groundhog Day of ass-kickings.
The situation was so bleak that the athletic department would wait until the biannual home game against Ohio State to take aerial photos of the stadium for the media guide. Buckeyes fans wore red too—who could tell the difference?
The 2007 Indiana Hoosiers
As mind-bogglingly incredible as Cignetti has been, he wasn’t Indiana football’s first savior. That was Terry Hoeppner, affectionately known as Coach Hep, who came to Bloomington in 2005 after completing an impressive stint at Miami of Ohio. Hoeppner rallied the fan base unlike anyone I had ever seen. He started new traditions. He recruited well. He spoke with confidence. He was an eternal optimist who actually made a turnaround seem plausible. He took the Hoosiers to the doorstep of bowl eligibility in 2006, and for the first time in decades the program had genuine hope.
Then, the unthinkable happened. Coach Hep was diagnosed with brain cancer and died in June 2007. There had been whispers around campus for months that his health had deteriorated, but no one wanted to believe it. The Hoosiers dedicated the following season to him. They vowed to “Play 13” and make good on Coach Hep’s dream to reach a bowl game. And they did just that, earning a matchup against Oklahoma State in the Insight Bowl.
I covered the Hoosiers for the Indiana Daily Student that season, from training camp in Bloomington to the finale in Arizona. The roster was generational, filled with veteran players motivated to honor Coach Hep. The climax came when Austin Starr drilled a game-winning 49-yard field goal to clinch the Old Oaken Bucket and IU’s first postseason bid in 14 years. Don Fischer’s call and Jane Hoeppner’s reaction made even Purdue fans tear up.
But that IU team marked the end of an era, not the start of a new one. The Hoosiers kept interim coach Bill Lynch aboard for three more years, but they wouldn’t make the postseason again, beginning another seven-year drought.
Hep’s death stung in the cruelest of ways. Indiana had finally found the football coach it was looking for, only to be reminded of how fleeting all of this is. Hoosiers fans were devastated. We had lost the leader for whom we’d desperately been searching. You couldn’t help but feel like it was never going to be.
Curt Cignetti
I’d never heard of Curt Cignetti before he was hired at Indiana. I’m guessing most other Hoosiers fans hadn’t, either. IU had long given up on making a splashy hire. To turn the saddest college football program in the country around, it was going to take a stroke of brilliance.
Then came this motherfucker. It’s not that Hoosiers fans thought Cignetti was a bad hire when his appointment was announced on November 30, 2023. But when you hear “James Madison” and you’ve lived through Indiana’s history, you know better than to get your hopes up.
Cignetti first introduced himself to Hoosiers fans during a timeout at a men’s basketball game at Assembly Hall. Initially, he received what I’ll call an enthusiastic golf clap. We appreciated the cameo, but he was also interrupting a basketball game.
Then he took the mic, walked to center court, and cut a wrestling promo for the ages. He looked sort of like Phil from Modern Family or your local financial adviser, but the words coming out of his mouth would have gotten Norman Dale himself to run through a wall.
“I’ve never taken a back seat to anybody and don’t plan on starting now,” Cignetti said.
Whoa, what’s that?
“PURDUE SUCKS!”
OK, you’ve got my full attention.
“And so does Michigan and Ohio State!”
Holy Branch McCracken. Who the hell is this guy?!
In the background, you can see IU athletic director Scott Dolson do a double-take toward the court as Cignetti walks off. He wasn’t the only one. Sure, we Hoosiers fans were used to puffing out our chests under our five basketball national championship banners. But to call out Michigan and Ohio State in football? My guy, what are you thinking?
It turns out, he was thinking big. Soon after, Cignetti would deliver another all-time one-liner when asked about how he sells recruits on his culture. “I win. Google me.” At a minimum, you had to admire the gall. He spoke like the most confident man in the room, as well as someone who was equal parts peeved and amused that he had to answer questions about himself. Hoosiers fans had seen previous coaches come in and talk a big game, and here was Cignetti speaking like this was destiny. It was hard to believe he wasn’t a complete sucker.
In retrospect, we were the suckers.
Indiana fans were used to seeing the football team start strong and then collapse once the cupcake portion of the schedule ran out. But 2024 was different. Cignetti won his first six games, marking the school’s best start in 57 years. The Hoosiers were already bowl-eligible heading into a clash against traditional powerhouse Nebraska. Surely, this is when reality would kick in.
IU won, 56-7, matching its biggest margin of victory in the Big Ten.
OK, that’s … weird.
Then the Hoosiers beat Washington and Michigan State to crack the top 10 in the AP poll for the first time since the 1967 Rose Bowl team.
OK, that’s … actually insane.
Then Cig beat Michigan, just like he said he would, leading to IU’s first-ever 10-win season. (Yes, you read that right.) Everyone in cream and crimson was suffering from a brutal case of vertigo on an unfamiliar mountaintop. But last year’s Hoosiers weren’t a finished product. They lost 38-15 at Ohio State, blinking for the first time and bowing to the Big Ten standard bearer. A 66-0 curbstomping of Purdue cleansed the palate, but the Hoosiers got outclassed against Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff’s opening round, leaving some IU fans wondering whether the entire season was just a delightful fluke.
It’s never felt so good to be wrong.
The 2025 squad has been light-years ahead. Fernando Mendoza, the best golden retriever to ever play quarterback, won the first Heisman Trophy in school history. The team had the third-best offense and second-best defense in the country. It committed just 11 defensive penalties all season. Cignetti wasn’t just a generational leader; he was a generational delegator. He worked brilliantly alongside two of the best coordinators in the country. Opponents marveled at Indiana’s poise and discipline. I can’t believe I actually just typed that.
The Hoosiers demolished Illinois 63-10, delivering the biggest beatdown of a top-10 opponent in Big Ten history. They handed Oregon its first home loss in two years, beat UCLA by 50 points, and crushed Maryland by 45. Then they pulled off an all-time comeback win at Penn State, featuring the catch of the frickin’ century.
That set the stage for the Big Ten championship game. Just as Cig said, IU slayed mighty Ohio State, 13-10, capturing the school’s first Big Ten title since that ’67 Rose Bowl team. Last week’s 38-3 rout of Alabama in the Rose Bowl was the most-viewed college football game in years. There was no more denying it. The Hoosiers were real—and they were spectacular.
Can they keep it going? Oregon is seeking revenge in Friday’s Peach Bowl, and Ducks coach Dan Lanning has likely been foaming at the mouth for an opportunity like this. Then again, Cignetti has been waiting his entire life, too. His coaching journey began in 1983 at Pittsburgh and took him to Davidson, Rice, Temple, NC State, Alabama, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Elon, and James Madison before IU. Forty years of working up the ranks, waiting for a shot like this. You’d look like a pissed parent all the time too if you had to wait four decades for this kind of bite at the apple.
Meanwhile, Hoosiers fans aren’t ready to wake up. The more Indiana’s football reality changes, the more I can’t help but think of the past. Of Corso and Mallory. Of Anthony Thompson and George Taliaferro. Of Mark Deal, Pete Pihos, Tracy Porter, Trent Green, Randle El, and everyone who ever donned the cream and crimson and dreamed they weren’t destined for a life in the college football cellar. I think of Scott Dolson, Kit Klingelhoffer, Buck Suhr, Galen Clavio, Chronic Hoosier, and John Ebling. Maybe you don’t know those names, but you know those people. Diehards who never stopped believing, even against their better judgment.
But mainly, I think of Coach Hep. I think of The Rock. I think of the beat writers who finally get to cover a winning team. I think of all the people who endured decades of frustrations and setbacks to see something like this come to fruition. They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. Bah gawd was it pitch-black.
Coach Hep’s dream was to “Play 13.” Now, somehow, Indiana has won 14. And these Hoosiers have a chance at eternity.
To call this a dream season would be wrong. Indiana fans never dared to dream this big.
