Johnny Langan is rooting for Indiana to win the national championship on Monday night, but the former Rutgers quarterback/tight end/human battering ram figures he owns bragging rights no matter who ends up dancing under the confetti with the trophy.
“I’m undefeated against both teams,” Langan said over the phone this week. He beat Indiana and its title-game opponent, Miami, twice if he counts a victory over the latter when he was redshirting at Boston College, his first college stop. He is ready to stake claim to some generational bragging rights. “We’re pretty much national champions either way!”
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Langan laughed, of course, but he also can’t help but marvel at the matchup. The Wayne native didn’t play during the era of wide shoulder pads and clunky TV graphics. He is just two years removed from college, still in good enough shape that he could line up on the field right now and pancake an opposing defender if he had eligibility left.
(Side note: Has anyone double checked to see if he does? Hey, these days, it’s worth a shot.)
It was just 749 days ago that Rutgers defeated Miami in the Pinstripe Bowl to give the Scarlet Knights their first winning season in nine years. And it was just 817 days ago that Rutgers trounced Indiana on the road to guarantee that bowl trip — a time frame that, given the Hoosiers success since, seems utterly impossible.
If you were betting on the future of one of those two programs on Oct. 21, 2023, in Bloomington, Ind., you would have been a fool not to pick Rutgers. The Scarlet Knights had stepped over the Hoosiers on their climb to respectability in a 31-14 victory, a win that set off a raucous celebration in the visiting locker room that felt like the start of something.
Indiana, owners of the most losses in college football history, seemed light years from relevancy in the sport that day. Dominance? Please.
“They didn’t just slay the dragon. They became the dragon,” Langan said with a hint of wonder in his voice. He didn’t think it was possible. Then again, the list of people who did could fit on the back of the little slip of paper inside a fortune cookie.
It is only natural to feel some level of despair, if you’re a fan of Rutgers or any other college football program forever searching for that breakthrough season, about what miracle worker Curt Cignetti has done over the last two seasons for the Hoosiers.
To crash the 12-team playoff in Year 1 was remarkable enough. To become a 15-0 juggernaut favored to win the title and stake claim as one of the 21st Century’s greatest college teams in Year 2? To beat traditional powerhouses Ohio State, Alabama and Oregon — twice — along the way? To gobble up expensive, top-level players in the transfer portal this winter in a way that suggests this run of dominance is just getting started?
That is something else entirely.
Indiana’s success won’t be matched any time soon, the combination of the right coach arriving at the right place at just the right time. But the Hoosiers’ success should offer hope to downtrodden programs that climbing to the top of college football is a far more attainable goal in this era than at any time in the sport’s history.
Gone are the days when tradition — i.e., the name on the front of the jersey — was the biggest determining factor in success for a program. Cignetti had a telling quote before the team’s playoff game against Alabama when asked about the mystique of the mighty Crimson Tide: “Our guys just know what they see on tape.”
They saw that they were the better team. It didn’t matter that Alabama had nicer facilities, five-star recruiting classes and deep tradition of success. In the era of revenue share and name, image and likeness payments, the possibility of the sports hierarchy changing — and changing quickly — is real.
To be clear: This doesn’t happen without a mountain of cash. NBA billionaire Mark Cuban has openly talked about opening his checkbook to help Cignetti hire players. But all of the top programs have resources. Indiana’s success has come, in large part, because the Hoosiers have done the best job of using that cash to build a football team better than anyone else.
“Now, you just come to work every day knowing that blue blood, red blood, orange blood, whatever, everybody’s got a chance, man,” Illinois head coach Bret Bielema told ESPN last week. Indiana isn’t the only unheralded program that has thrived in this new era. Look at Vanderbilt. Look at Texas Tech.
The latter program might have the fattest budget thanks to Cody Campbell, an oil tycoon. Texas Tech just made quarterback Brendan Sorsby college football’s first $5 million player, and if that name sounds familiar to Rutgers fans, they were paying close attention that October 2023 day when Rutgers and Indiana played.
Sorsby was the starting quarterback for the Hoosiers that day, throwing for just 126 yards. Langan hadn’t made the connection, but the player who made nine starts at quarterback for the Scarlet Knights in his career could only shake his head.
“I like to joke sometimes, if I was five years younger, I’d be retired right now,” he said.
Langan came along too early to benefit from college football’s money game. He’s still a big Rutgers fan, though, and holds out hope that his former team will figure out how to navigate this new world.
It might seem hard to see that outcome from where the Scarlet Knights are now. But can it seem any more improbable than it was for the program they trounced just 817 days ago?
MORE FROM STEVE POLITI:
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Late Rutgers star was a legend in my hometown — and, for a kid sportswriter, a savior
The untold story of how Rutgers crashed the Big Ten
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Last of the Lifers: Can a high school coach survive for half a century in today’s world?
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