Led by Coach Curt Cignetti and Quarterback Fernando Mendoza, Indiana is a Real Life Sports Movie
In Bloomington, Indiana we are watching a real-life sports movie unfold. In head coach Curt Cignetti, quarterback Fernando Mendoza, and the Indiana University football program as a whole, we are watching the greatest underdog overcomes the odds story of all time.
If/when the Indiana Hoosiers finally win it all this college football season, it will feel like the last decisive play, in the final game, can only transpire in a slow-motion close-up, with ultra-dramatic music playing in the background.
We may never see a worst-to-first (with apologies to Drake) “started from the bottom now we here” turnaround like this again.
This is a story where no hyperbole is required because the numbers speak for themselves. Indiana is literally the losingest program in FBS history, with an all-time record of 532-717. However, since Cignetti, 64, took over in 2024, they are 24-2.
On Saturday night, the Hoosiers beat a #1 team for the first time in school history, when they bested last year’s national champion, Ohio State, 13-10 in the Big Ten championship game. Entering the night, they were 0-16 all-time against the nation’s top-ranked team.
IU earned its first Big Ten title of any sort since 1967, and their first outright Big Ten title since 1945. They are now ranked #1 in all the major polls and the top overall seed in the College Football Playoff. As the only undefeated team left in the country, they are the presumptive favorites to win the whole tournament
Before “Cig” showed up, IU was a place known first and foremost for basketball, with the men’s team having won five national titles, the most recent of which came in 1987. In 2023, it was a place more synonymous with bicycle racing (due to the depiction of the “Little 500” race in the 1979 film Breaking Away) than football
IU is most certainly a football school now.
“I just know that winning lifts all boats,” Cignetti said to the media in Bloomington on Sunday.
“In terms of fan support in the stadium, donations, all parts of the university, downtown when you pack the stadium, bring a lot of people to Bloomington, it helps their sales. A lot of pride in Hoosier Nation. The largest alumni base in America, over 800,000 people.
“I’d say right now the arrow is pointing up. We probably got a lot of momentum going in those kind of areas.”
Cignetti’s Leadership
Absolutely the arrow is pointing up, way up. It is hard to find college football analogies to what Cignetti, who is in his first-ever power conference coaching job after coming over from James Madison, has accomplished.
After a couple of decades of egregious losing, the 1995 Northwestern Wildcats came from out of nowhere to win the Big Ten and reach the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1948. Another Wildcats team (who also wear purple), Kansas State, was salvaged from ruin in the mid-1980s by legendary coach Bill Snyder.
Both Kansas State and Northwestern were two schools where losing, of the most brutal sort, was a long-standing tradition. Until the right guy came along and figured it out. Cignetti’s IU is similar, but also unprecedented, as he flipped the script overnight, while the Wildcats, both in Evanston, IL, and Manhattan, KS, took a fair amount of time.
When you widen the range of comparison to every sport, a couple of apt analogies are in frame. Leicester City, just a couple of seasons after winning promotion to the Premier League, won England’s top flight in 2015-2016. They did so as 5,000-1 underdogs.
Or perhaps the 1980 Winter Olympics, with the “Miracle on Ice,” gold medal game, where a United States team defeated a Soviet Union side that was infinitely more talented and accomplished than they were.
And while the 2016 Chicago Cubs were a very deep and extremely talented team, their World Series win ended a 108 year drought for a franchise that had been branded the “lovable losers.”
Mendoza’s Arrival
IU is led by Mendoza, their field general, playmaker, and leading contender to win the Heisman Trophy on Saturday.
“I would have to say it’s a no-brainer decision,” Cignetti said of Mendoza’s Heisman chances during the Rose Bowl press conference on Sunday.
“I believe that. You got to look at his on-the-field production, particularly in the most critical moments of the football game and how he’s performed at the end of the game with the game on the line and against Iowa, Oregon, Penn State, Ohio State, and then his overall production numbers.”
Those production numbers tell quite the story.
Mendoza is the lone FBS quarterback with five games of 4+ TD passes and zero interceptions. He entered this past weekend as the FBS leader in percentage of passes that result in a touchdown at 10.9%. He’s thrown 33 TD passes against just six interceptions on the season.
He’s also among the short list of favorites to go #1 overall in the next NFL Draft. To ultimately land that coveted slot, Mendoza will have to show NFL teams just how superlative he is both on and off the field.
Cignetti spoke of Mendoza’s high character attributes.
“He’s a tremendous human being that does everything really the right way in terms of preparation, community outreach, leadership,” Cignetti said.
“He’s got a great relationship with the team. They all look up to him.”
Much like when Cignetti came to Bloomington, Mendoza was rather obscure when he transferred in from California.
He was ranked the #134 QB prospect in the Class of 2022, according to recruiting service 247 Sports, when he entered college.
As the #1 seed in the CFP, the Hoosiers will play the winner of Alabama/Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl Game on Jan. 1, 2026. It will kick off at 4 p.m. ET at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.