SI:AM | Indiana Completes Storybook Season With Thrilling Win Over Miami

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I want to make sure you know that there was a goalie fight in the NHL while you were busy watching the national championship game last night.

In today’s SI:AM:
🏆 Indiana’s impossible turnaround
🏈 What Hoosiers’ win can teach us about CFB
1️⃣ Way-too-early 2026 top 25

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They actually did it

The Indiana Hoosiers are national champions. In football.

By now you’ve heard every college football reporter, TV analyst and guy at the barbershop talk about how unlikely Indiana’s 2025 season was—how the Hoosiers began this journey coming off a 3–9 finish in ‘23 with a then-unknown coach who kicked off his tenure by telling doubters to “google me” at his introductory press conference. It wasn’t just that they had struggled of late, either. They started the year with more losses than any program in the history of the sport.

Monday confirmed what had become increasingly clear throughout the season: Indiana was the best team in the country. The Hoosiers beat Miami, 27–21, to complete a historic 16–0 season and put a period at the end of their storybook season.

It’s impossible to overstate how improbable Indiana’s victory was. Before this season, Indiana had not won a postseason game since the 1991 Copper Bowl. In the three seasons immediately preceding coach Curt Cignetti’s arrival, the Hoosiers had a combined 3–24 record in Big Ten play. Cignetti inherited a program that was historically among the most hapless in any sport and that was going through a particularly fallow period. Building a bowl-eligible team would be a tough task. The idea of building a champion was laughable.

Cignetti was an unlikely man to lead Indiana out of the wilderness, too. He’s the son of a College Football Hall of Fame coach, Frank Cignetti Sr., and served as an offensive assistant at several big-name schools before. In 2011 at 50, he became a head coach for the first time when he was selected to lead Division II Indiana University of Pennsylvania. (Cignetti’s father coached IUP for 20 years.) He went from there to Elon, an FCS school, then James Madison, which was transitioning from FCS to FBS. In a span of three years, he went from coaching in the FCS Colonial Athletic Association to coaching in the Big Ten.

Cignetti’s now-famous quote at his introductory press conference came in response to a question about how he’d be able to get recruits to come to Bloomington, and how he’d keep the players the Hoosiers already had: “It’s pretty simple. I win. Google me.”

Players must have liked what they saw when they googled Cignetti, because he was quickly able to build a championship-caliber roster—not by hoarding five-stars, but by identifying overlooked players whose talent had yet to be unlocked. Indiana’s success is undeniably a product of the transfer portal era, but Cignetti and his staff deserve credit for coaching those players to their full potential. Cignetti brought several key players with him from James Madison, most notably linebacker Aiden Fisher, cornerback D’Angelo Ponds, receiver Elijah Sarratt and running back Kaelon Black. Other players signed on to help build on the Hoosiers’ initial success last season, like running back Roman Hemby (a transfer from Maryland) and tight end Riley Nowakowski (Wisconsin).

Cignetti’s biggest portal coup, though, was landing Fernando Mendoza from Cal. Mendoza is a Miami native who grew up dreaming of playing for the Hurricanes. As a two-star recruit coming out of high school, he was denied even a chance to walk on at Miami and instead went across the country to Berkeley. He’s now a national champion, a Heisman winner and the presumptive No. 1 pick in April’s NFL draft. (Mendoza, a junior, has yet to declare for the draft.)

Mendoza had long since etched his name among the greatest players in Indiana history, but one play he made in the fourth quarter will make him a college football legend. With the Hoosiers up 17–14 and 9:27 left to play, Cignetti decided to go for it on a fourth-and-4 from the Miami 12-yard line. The play call was a quarterback draw. Mendoza got the first down with a juke to elude two defenders, then ran right over 230-pound linebacker Wesley Bissainthe before lunging forward and extending the ball over the goal line. It was an epic run made even more unforgettable by the stakes and immortalized by the image of Mendoza reaching desperately to break the plane. A championship as unlikely as Indiana deserved to have an iconic moment like that to remember it by.

The best of Sports Illustrated

Indiana QB Fernando Mendoza dives into the end zone to score a fourth-quarter touchdown in the Hoosiers’ win over Miami — Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Indiana completed its improbable run to its first national championship. Hoosiers quarterback Fernando Mendoza’s fourth-down touchdown run becomes the most iconic play in the team’s unbelievable romp to a 16–0 season, Pat Forde writes.
Bryan Fischer says the Hoosiers’ perfect season and a third straight national title for the Big Ten show how the league’s strength now runs from top to bottom.
Fischer reveals his way-too-early 2026 top 25 college football rankings, with Ohio State, Notre Dame and Georgia looking stacked for next season and Indiana needing to reload after winning the title.
Chris Mannix issues a warning for the Eastern Conference: The Pistons will be a problem.
The Bills should be thinking of Sean McDermott’s replacement as a five-year hire for Josh Allen’s early 30s. Conor Orr has some offensive-minded candidates for the job.
Before you rip another quarterback, Orr says to take a look around at just how miserable defensive coaches are making life for offenses across the board.

The top five…

… plays from the national title game:
5. The comically loud clang when Miami’s Carter Davis missed a 50-yard field goal. (I mostly wanted to mention this so I could direct you to the video someone made incorporating the sound into the song “Ants Marching” by Dave Matthews Band.)
4. Miami freshman sensation Malachi Toney’s touchdown run to get the Hurricanes back in it late in the fourth quarter.
3. Mark Fletcher Jr.’s 57-yard run for Miami’s first touchdown of the game.
2. Indiana’s punt block that was recovered for a touchdown in the third quarter. (The Hoosiers only sent five rushers against six blockers but were still able to get home. It looks like Indiana had correctly identified that Miami’s Australian punter Dylan Joyce was rolling to his right on every punt and Mikail Kamara was able to get around the edge for the block.)
1. Fernando Mendoza’s clutch touchdown run.