Five Months After Indiana's National Title, the Hoosiers Are Still Being Dismissed

Five months after one of the greatest stories in sports history, and some still want to diminish the greatness of the 2025 Indiana football season.

Go figure that it came from the Notre Dame side of the aisle.

Indiana's National Championship Run Still Not Getting Enough Respect

Tyler Horka, who covers the Irish for On3, offered up this thought piece about how unless IU continues to compete for national titles, the 2025 title "would be easy to move on from," whereas Notre Dame winning it all would be like the "Yankees or Cowboys ending their title droughts."

Uh, sure?

Unless Indiana goes on a roll, which is possible, its national championship would be like when the Raptors won it all. A fun flash in the pan. Easy to move on from.

A Notre Dame natty would be like the Yankees or Cowboys ending their title droughts.

🔗: https://t.co/GUhCrm54mo pic.twitter.com/XwzFUyR8g1
— Tyler Horka (@tbhorka) June 26, 2026

Perhaps many have moved on from Indiana's national title - the rise from nothing to superpower status this fast really is surreal.

But, no, it'll never be dismissed. It was too big, too crazy, and too fun.

The Indiana Excitement For Football Is Only Growing

Let's start with the micro, though it's probably unfair to call Indiana's overwhelming fan support with the nation's largest living alumni base a "micro" topic.

Indiana dominated crowds in all three Playoff games, including the very one that clinched a national championship in Miami's home stadium.

Sure, you could argue that Notre Dame has a bigger national fanbase than IU in terms of how it acquires its fans without having gone to the school.

But if the whole argument is that the Irish's title would impact more fans, doesn't that dismiss what IU fans did to completely take over neutral sites?

Let's say Indiana doesn't win the national title again over the next few years - that would make 2025 even more memorable, considering it happened in a sport that hadn't had a first-time national champ dating back to 1996 Florida.

Compared to the Raptors, who began a streak of eight different NBA champs in as many years, IU going 16-0 for the first time since 1894 Yale was a completely different, and more memorable feat.

Indiana Appears to Be Getting Better and More Solidified as a Program

In the NIL/transfer portal era, we wondered if we'd see new blood in the national championship hunt.

The 2024 Ohio State team, which beat Notre Dame to claim the first title of the 12-team Playoff era, didn't exactly open up those floodgates.

A team with an expensive, talent-rich roster instead got a path to a national championship as a 10-2, non-conference champ participant that no previous team would've gotten.

To Ohio State's credit, it took advantage of that. To Indiana's credit, it also took advantage of the new way to construct a roster, albeit in a different way.

For all this talk about potential expansion to the 24-team Playoff creating even more inclusion, you know what else makes a lasting impact with that? Watching a 60-something coach take over a program with more losses of anybody in the sport's history, only to rip off a perfect season in Year 2.

Should we expect more stories like Cignetti moving forward? Probably not. But time will tell how IU's run impacts downtrodden programs in the coming years. Even if IU fades from the national picture, that macro impact could be massive.

That's something that a Notre Dame title cannot do.

To be clear, that's a credit to the Irish, who have been chomping at the bit to win their first national title since 1988. It's a program that's 34-7 the last three seasons, two of which ended with top-10 finishes and one of which included a Playoff win against IU.

There's no doubt that for a large percentage of college football fans, many of whom feel one way or another about the Irish, a Notre Dame national title would be a major storyline of the 2020s, much like Michigan was when it ended its title drought in 2023.

Indiana's 2025 Season Will Never Be Dismissed

The Indiana story was a monster, with 30.1 million viewers tuning in to watch the national title game.

If he was, he was part of the most-watched audience for a college football game in 11 years, and the most-watched, non-NFL sporting event since the Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series.

By the way, the 30.1 million viewers was a 36% year-to-year increase from the 22.1 million that tuned in for the Notre Dame-Ohio State national championship.

But I digress.

What IU did was beyond ratings, and here are plenty of books and/or movies in the works that'll chronicle just how memorable 2025 was. Lord knows the Fernando Mendoza touchdown run felt like watching a sports movie in real life.

Even if that was truly a one-time deal, the act of gatekeeping national title impacts for the traditional powers in today's college football landscape should have a universal reaction.

Indiana fans, and college football, will never move on from the magic of last season, no matter what.

Add us as a preferred source on Google