In his excellent new book “Football,” Chuck Klosterman relates a story from a 1933 Laura Ingalls Wilder book called “Farmer Boy” to modern college football. In the story, a child falls through the ice of a frozen pond and barely survives. As he recovers, his father, rather than comforting him, berates him for being so foolish for walking on thin ice. This is done out of love and protection. Life in those times was so perilous that the job of a parent, in many ways, was just to keep their child alive, or, as Klosterman puts it, “to scream him into fearing lakes; for this to work, the father has to be scarier than the water.”
Klosterman relates this to Brian Kelly, a coach who he refers to as “unlikable” but who, he notes, “attempts to terrify his players into execution.”
“If a slow, undersized linebacker does not have outside leverage on a four-star tight end, that linebacker will get pulverized and lose his job. That fact is brutal and unyielding, so Kelly screams him into proper position. And for this to work, the coach needs to be scarier than the mistake.”
Now, using Kelly — who just got fired in rather high-profile fashion — is maybe not the best current example, though you can surely blame that on the vagaries of book publishing deadlines. But I think the idea that you have to be scarier than the mistake is essential to understanding what makes Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, who just pulled off the most amazing thing I think a college football coach has ever pulled off, so effective. Sure, he has been smart about the transfer portal and NIL, and Indiana has given him all sorts of resources previous Indiana coaches never had, and it’s more difficult for the traditional powers to hoard their talent now. But when we talk about how Cignetti is “old school,” this is what we’re talking about.
In all the stories about Indiana’s national championship win over Miami, one thing I haven’t seen brought up much is just how many uncharacteristic mistakes Indiana made in the game, from dumb penalties to clock mismanagement to missed routes. That Indiana overcame these speaks to preparation, talent and plain good fortune. But those mistakes did happen.
And every time, I thought to myself, Oh, man, Cignetti is going to be so mad. This is not how we generally talk about coaching today, in an era of player empowerment: Coaches are supposed to be all big-picture, to be supportive, to understand that we’re all just professionals. But when Indiana plays, you cannot help but feel like every misstep a player makes will have Cignetti jumping down their throat. (Cignetti was even angry when his team poured the Gatorade bucket on him after Indiana won; the player he glared back at looked legitimately scared!)
If players do not like a coach, or they do not believe in him, these tendencies can be seen as pathetic posturing or bullying. But if they do, well, it looks a lot more like basic accountability. After all: No kid wants to fall through the ice. It’s much better to be scared of Dad — and to want to do him proud. More than anything else, I think that’s what’s special about Cignetti. His players would run through a wall for him. And in 2025, that’s exactly what they did.
What Cignetti has done at Indiana is unprecedented, and we’ll be telling the story the rest of our lives. But when you have success like this, in a sport as ravenous, covetous and always-be-looking-over-your-shoulder as college football, that success is also the sort of thing that will drive everyone a little bit batty. Because while Cignetti and Indiana’s victory is their own, it can’t help but reflect on college football in total. For something this unprecedented to happen, it has to mean something has fundamentally changed. The sport is different. The incentives are different. The player compensation and autonomy is different. It has to augur a dramatic shift.
Or does it?
A year ago, Ohio State entered the College Football Playoff as the No. 8 seed after losing to Michigan in excruciating, there-are-cops-at-midfield fashion. The Buckeyes then went out and won the national championship. This led many to argue that the regular season had lost some importance, that all that mattered was peaking at the right time, that true talent (or recruiting rankings) was going to win out in the end. A year later, in the wake of Indiana, none of that seems to be true. Now we think it’s about the transfer portal and NIL and “experienced players” and deep alumni bases and the New World Order of college football. Sorry, Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State … it’s not your sport anymore.
But stories tend to be written by the winners. If we have a different champion next year, we’ll be telling ourselves a different story. Cignetti and Indiana rewired our brains. But our brains are always being rewired by sports. Indiana’s win has us asking if this is really a new era, or if it’s just a Cignetti thing that will fade once the larger schools usurp his methods. And the answer to that question — or at least how we talk about it —is likely to hinge directly on what happens next year. Specifically: Who wins next year’s championship.
Like all of you, I’ve read Stewart Mandel’s early Top 25 for 2026, and there are many candidates to choose from to wear next year’s crown. Few people know college football better than Mandel does, but it should be mentioned that last January, none of his top five teams even made the Playoff, and Indiana was No. 20 (directly behind 5-7 Baylor). That’s to be expected: It was an unpredictable year. (ESPN didn’t do any better.) But it also speaks to how all the lessons we think one season teaches us turn out to instantly be wrong.
This upcoming season seems particularly pivotal in this regard, considering how monumental and terrain-shifting Indiana’s title has been. Where is this sport going? The conversation will be centered around which team wins in January 2027. And I think those teams, and those conversations, will fall in one of four tiers.
Tier 1: Traditional powers reassert their place
Examples: Ohio State (No. 2 in Mandel’s rankings), Georgia (No. 3), Texas (No. 5), Michigan (No. 14), Alabama (No. 20!)
Here, everything goes back to normal, or at least the conversation does. The world remains as you thought it was.
The Indiana victory is seen as wonderful and historic, but also a bit of an aberration; everything landed just right for the Hoosiers in 2025, but that sort of thing obviously isn’t repeatable. In the end, the blue bloods return to power. While this will be annoying for a lot of people, I do think there is some value in it. To have an upset, you need a favorite. If the whole sport is Indiana now, and this can seriously happen to any school, there is no perch. We want blue bloods because we want to see them lose. And for them to lose, they have to first win.
You’ll be mad, or even a little bored, if Georgia or Ohio State wins another title. But there is value in that boredom. There is order.
Tier 2: A team that’s close finally gets over the hump
Examples: Oregon (No. 1), Miami (No. 4), Notre Dame (No. 7), Oklahoma (No. 9), Texas A&M (No. 11), USC (No. 12), Ole Miss (No. 15)
This one keeps a little bit of order but adds in a dash of the new world. If one of these teams, all of which are desperate for a title (and all of which were driven even more batty by Indiana’s ascension), finally breaks through, it will be seen, correctly or otherwise, as a team that was stuck in the “old” ways modernizing itself in All Matters Cignetti to at last reach their own mountaintop. This narrative precedes Cignetti: We’ve seen it already this century with Georgia (no longer fighting Sabanism and instead becoming it) and Michigan (letting go of The Noble Michigan Man junk and embracing the Just Win chaos of Jim Harbaugh).
It’s about adjusting to take the next step, and if any one of these teams at last raises the trophy next January (in Las Vegas!), letting go of the old ways will be seen as a clear reason why. Expect some sort of “we saw what Cignetti did last year, and we knew we had to adjust” quotes, probably from an extremely wealthy donor, on background, from a yacht somewhere, or maybe the moon.
Tier 3: Indiana just wins it again
Example: Indiana (No. 6)
If this happens, know that Cignetti or Indiana will no longer be charming. No one will admit this now, but back in 2002, almost every fan I knew was rooting for out-of-nowhere backup Tom Brady and the upstart New England Patriots over Kurt Warner and those Bad Guy St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl. We love an underdog when they win once — but not twice. If Indiana wins another title, it’ll become as hated as Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, Texas and the rest of them. If this happens, paradoxically, this ends up devaluing the original title in the same way all of Brady’s subsequent Super Bowl wins devalued his first one: What felt like a once-in-a-lifetime lightning bolt ends up just being the natural state of things. And nobody likes inevitability.
I do not suspect Hoosiers fans will mind.
Tier 4: Another chaotic champion
Examples: Missouri (No. 13), Iowa (No. 18), Houston (No. 21), Boise State (No. 23), Illinois, Virginia, Minnesota, Duke, Iowa State, Vanderbilt, honestly, take your pick
I mean no offense to any of the fans of teams here — and as an Illini guy, I’m one of them — but … I think this is the worst-case scenario? I’d be happy for whatever team busted through, but I’m not sure college football fans actually want this much parity, to the point that anyone, at any time, can just jump up and win the whole thing out of nowhere every year. It would start to feel like a coin flip. Something isn’t unprecedented when it happens again the next year.
It is cool when an Indiana happens. But I don’t believe fans will actually find it cool if it happens two years in a row. It will make a title feel less important, not more. This isn’t fair, and I’m certain it’s not right: Fans of all these teams deserve to feel like Indiana right now and can find hope in Indiana’s success. But every year? The very next year? I’m not sure we really want that.
This is the thing about Indiana doing something no one fathomed, about Cignetti flipping over the chess board: We do kind of need those pieces. Eventually, we have to put them back on the board, in the places they’re supposed to go, and play again. The only way any of us will ever forget what Indiana and Cignetti did … is if someone else just goes out and does the same thing.
Oh, sorry, I just realized: That’s not actually the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario makes me think I should add a Tier 5: Champions that would make us all claw our face off in a mirror. This one is reserved for LSU and North Carolina.
I’m not sure exactly what college football fans want. But I know they do not want that.
