Indiana beats Miami for college football title

Indiana University quarterback Fernando Mendoza celebrates national championship win

(Image credit: Peter Joneleit / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

What happened

The Indiana Hoosiers beat the Miami Hurricanes 27-21 Monday night to cap an improbable College Football Playoff national championship. It was the first national title for the Hoosiers, the losingest program in college football, and Indiana also became the first team to finish a season 16-0 since Yale in 1894.

Who said what

“Let me tell you: We won the national championship at Indiana University,” said coach Curt Cignetti, who took over the program and its record 713 losses two years ago. “It can be done.” Cignetti’s coaching and a play-of-the-season touchdown run by Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza “brought an improbable — maybe impossible? — national championship to a program that had known nothing but losing and indifference for almost 140 years,” The Associated Press said.

Cignetti completed “one of the most stunning turnarounds in American sports” by molding a “roster of overlooked and undersized misfits” into a “wrecking machine,” The Wall Street Journal said. Indiana’s “out-of-nowhere rise immediately joins the ranks of the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s ’Miracle on Ice’ in 1980” and “the New York Mets’ World Series in 1969.” Cignetti called his team’s victory “one of the greatest sports stories of all time.”

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What next?

Mendoza is a “likely first pick in the 2026 NFL draft,” the Journal said. In a “fitting bit of symmetry” for the Hoosiers, their undefeated football title “comes 50 years after Bob Knight’s basketball team went 32-0 to win it all,” the AP said. “That hasn’t happened since, and there’s already some thought that college football — in its evolving, money-soaked, name-image-likeness era — might not see a team like this again, either.”

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.