Indiana was aided by a robed former jock.
Indiana was aided by a robed former jock.
O n Monday night, the perennial college football bottom-dwellers from Indiana University won a national championship. Next, you’ll try to tell me our country elected a reality show host as president or that there’s an American pope.
After the final whistle, the breathless praise for the Hoosiers began. Bruce Feldman at The Athletic declared Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti “college football’s best coach.” At the Washington Post, a breathless Will Leitch saw Indiana’s win as a vindication for athletic competition writ large, in that sports “transform the impossible into established reality.”
Fair enough: Part of the beauty of sports is that people can say wild things either during or shortly after watching a game and nobody takes it all that seriously. Indiana’s championship this year seemed about as likely as Greenland taking over the United States, so a heaping spoonful of hyperbole is warranted.
But after a deep breath, it’s easy to see that Indiana’s dominance isn’t as unlikely as it seems. The team’s century of haplessness took place under a rigid system that no longer exists. And when the rules change, so do outcomes.
Back in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court rocked the world of college athletics when it started peeling away the façade of “amateurism” in college sports. While the Court didn’t address paying athletes directly, it stripped college sports of certain antitrust exemptions in offering specified educational benefits to athletes. Sensing its hand was a losing one, the NCAA within a week introduced a plan to pay players based on their “name, image, and likeness.” A year later, players were given the right to change schools without being forced to sit out a full year.
Under this new system, chaos has ensued. Some players now move schools every year, seeking bigger and bigger payouts. Many of them put their careers in the hands of amateur agents, whose credentials are simply that they put the word “agent” in their Twitter/X profiles. Coaches at some major schools have simply stopped recruiting high school quarterbacks, knowing they can always just poach a more seasoned player from a smaller college.
Initially, it seemed like the new rules would benefit the big schools in the large conferences. Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, and Michigan have alumni with deep pockets all over the country, so it stood to reason they would fork over cash to sign the best players.
But the destruction of the old system has reshuffled the power in college sports, and weaklings like Indiana now have a shot at it where none existed before.
It’s not fair to say Indiana “cheated” or “purchased” a national title. It’s operating under the same rules as everyone else; it’s just doing it better. Cignetti, despite his comic dyspepsia, is clearly an outstanding coach, and going 16–0 makes this year’s Hoosiers one of the greatest teams of all time.
But the new rules also helped them immensely. When Cignetti was hired two years ago, he was able to plunder his previous school of many of its best players, bringing them to play in Bloomington immediately. With the help of deep-pocketed alumni like billionaire Mark Cuban, he was able to buy a future Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback away from the University of California. This year, Fernando Mendoza earned an estimated $2.3 million on his way to college football’s top individual honor, putting him near the top of earnings for college athletes.
The new rules clearly ease the way for a good coach to remake a program in his own image much more quickly, and there is much more talent available for him to cherry-pick. In the past, top high school recruits would go to the biggest schools and have to sit on the bench behind future professional prospects. If they wanted to move to a school where they could play immediately, they had to wait a full year for eligibility — so most of them stayed put.
But now shrewd schools like Indiana can reach out to those players once they enter the transfer portal. The best players may no longer pool at the top as they have in the past — now, with the ability to move freely, they can run to where they can make the most money, get the most playing time, or win a championship. (College coaches loathe this development, given that other schools might be contacting their players, promising all the above on their campuses.)
Indiana quickly mastered the art of finding players from other schools. This year’s roster featured 33 players that Cignetti acquired from other schools in 2024 and 2025. This led to another of Indiana’s advantages: age. Of the 18 transfers Cignetti accepted before the 2025 season, 16 had started over ten college games, earning loads of experience at other schools. Most of their starters were transfers, and as the New York Times calculated, the Hoosiers this year had more combined career starts among their starters than any other school that made the college football playoffs.
Clearly, Cignetti knows how to play the game both on and off the field (and he is no doubt aided by big checks from Cuban and others). For that, he deserves full credit.
But it can’t go without saying that he also got help from Supreme Court justices, such as former high school football player Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote a concurring opinion calling the removal of the NCAA’s antitrust exemption “important and overdue.” Kavanaugh noted that while the NCAA v. Alston case didn’t address player compensation, the current payment rules “raise serious questions under the antitrust laws.” He wrote that the Court should one day decide whether limiting athlete pay could “pass muster” and posited that the NCAA may lack justification for its compensation rules.
So while Indiana won on the field, it received a big boost from the former Georgetown Prep defensive back. Decades later, Kavanaugh finally got the national championship he likely craved.