Indiana's run stacks up among college football's most unlikely success stories

College sports is all about Cinderella stories. Whether it's Brad Stevens turning Butler to a powerhouse or a No. 16 seed pulling a March Madness upset in basketball, or it's an Ole Miss team sneaking into the NCAA Tournament with the final spot and then winning baseball's College World Series, fans and even media love a surprise story.

Curt Cignetti's two-year run at Indiana is claiming a spot atop the list of college football's greatest surprising success stories. Indiana had claimed exactly zero 10-win seasons and a pair of No. 4 finishes in its entire college football history. The 9-0-1 team from 1945 was pretty much the gold standard for IU success.

In two years, Cignetti has delivered the first double-digit win totals in program history and is looking to wrap up a 16-0 season with a national title in 10 days. For a program that was the all-time NCAA leader in losses at the beginning of the 2025 season, this is quite a change. Can any other NCAA football stories compete? Here's some of the other major success shifts in college football history.

Virginia Tech

Tech floated through decades of football mediocrity and was an Independent 2-9 team in 1987 when a new coach named Frank Beamer took over. Beamer got Tech into the Big East, put together a run of impressive bowl bids and in 1999 with a QB named Michael Vick, took Virginia Tech all the way to the national championship game, where they lost to Florida State.

While Tech hasn't returned to that level, they have become a successful and significant program and new coach James Franklin might take them back to the top.

Boise State

A former junior college and FCS team, Boise State jumped to FBS in the mid 1990s. Chris Petersen led Boise to a pair of undefeated seasons and top five finishes in 2006 and 2009. The 2007 run was especially impressive, climaxing with a historic 43-42 win over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl on a couple of epic trick plays.

While Boise hasn't quite been able to sustain that run, they did reach the College Football Playoff in 2024. Not being a Power Four team makes sustained excellent a challenge.

Northwestern

Long the doormat of the Big Ten, Northwestern under Gary Barnett went 3-8, 2-9, 3-7-1 and then put together a 10-2 season in 1995 that included a Big Ten title and a Rose Bowl appearance. The WIldcats haven't quite been able to keep up that level of success, but longtime coach Pat Fitzgerald had a nice run, including four top 20 finishes before he was fired after the 2022 season.

Northwestern, like Indiana, swooped to a shocking Big Ten title... but the Wildcats didn't finish the job and struggled to sustain excellence.

Ole Miss

The Rebels, unlike the other teams on this list, had a proud and impressive past. But Ole Miss was caught behind in the tide of racial integration in the 1960s and saw their program get pummelled. Ole Miss went 15 years without a bowl win and didn't have a 10-win season between 1971 and 2003.

Hugh Freeze delivered some solid seasons, but Ole Miss still had two 10-win seasons between 1971 and 2020, when they hired Lane Kiffin. Kiffin won 10 or more games in four of the last five seasons, built the Ole Miss team that reached the CFP semifinals, and departs with the program on better footing than its been since Lyndon Johnson's Presidency.

BYU

BYU didn't reach a bowl game for the program's first 52 seasons and was mired in mediocrity. But an offensive genius named LaVell Edwards changed the script. It took Edwards a dozen years to have a perfect season and a claimed national title in 1984, but he changed the scope of BYU football.

The Cougars struggled after Edwards, but have rebounded under Kalani Sitake. Of the five schools here, BYU might be the one that's perhaps the most appropriate athletic analogy for IU football. Like Cignetti, Edwards was a visionary. And even if the national title level isn't sustainable, having an excellent program with flashes of glory is sustainable.