Indiana’s 16-0 Season Could Not Be More Unexpected Considering Program's History

The Indiana Hoosiers won the College Football Playoff championship game to cap off a perfect 16-0 season. It is the only 16-win season by a college team in modern history and the first time a team went 16-0 since 1894 when the Yale Bulldogs did it.

In addition to that, the 1889 Bulldogs went 16-1 and the 1899 Chicago Maroons went 16-0-2.

For those of you unfamiliar, the University of Chicago was a founding member of the Western Conference, which eventually turned into the Big Ten. So technically, the '25 Hoosiers are the second team in conference history to win 16 games in a season. Obviously, a lot has changed since then as Chicago now plays Division III football.

Obviously, it's been a long, long time since a team not only had an opportunity to win 16 games, but actually did it. On top of that, the fact that it was Indiana of all the schools in the country, well, that's somehow more improbable.

Indiana is a school with a rich basketball tradition. We've already discussed how they'd never won 10 games in a season until Curt Cignetti showed up in 2024 and hadn't won the Big Ten in more than 50 years, but there's still one more fact that will really drive home how unbelievable it is that Indiana went 16-0.

In more than 100 years, they had only won 16 games combined over two seasons twice.

The last time they did it was the '87 and '88 season when they went a combined 16-7-1. Before that you have to go back '44 and '45 when they went 16-3-1. And that's it. That's the list.

Between this year and last, they're 27-2.

Indiana hasn't won 27 games over a four-year stretch since the early 40's. They'd won 28 games over the previous six seasons before Cignetti was hired. Five percent of the wins in school's 127 year history have come in the last 17 months.

We have never seen anything like this before and it seems unlikely we ever see anything like this again. The numbers don't lie.

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