The Indiana Hoosiers aren’t exactly synonymous with football. From 1899-2024 only four head coaches in team history finished their tenure at Bloomington with a winning record, with Bill Mallory being the only guy to really have a right to claim credit for doing much of anything, as he took the Hoosiers to six bowl games from 1984-1996.
Then something changed. In two short years Indiana went from being a laughing stock cellar dweller of the Big Ten to turning into a juggernaut, and a team crafting a resume that suggests there might even be National Championship potential. With a signature win over Oregon the Hoosiers are not No. 3 in the polls, the highest rank Indiana has achieved since the 1945 and 1967 seasons, when Indiana fleetingly reached No. 4 in the rankings, before tumbling back down the following year.
Indiana football is a story of what happens when everything comes together. They hired the perfect coach, played the transfer portal like a grand piano, and have an entire team believing that nobody in the college football landscape can beat them — and they might be right.
It’s not often you see a coach need to wait until they hit 60 to get a real opportunity, but that was the lot in life for Curt Cignetti. In what seemed to be a endless string of forgotten success, Cignetti was an assistant coach for the better part of 30 years before he actually hot a head coaching shot, and that came with Division II IUP.
Here was a man who didn’t get a shot, despite a developing an incredible resume that included being Philip Rivers’ quarterback coach at NC State, before transitioning to WR coach at Alabama that produced Julio Jones. Cignetti didn’t get a whiff of a coordinator position despite these two incredible jobs, so he had to take an alternate path to FBS football, which took him from the aforementioned IUP, to the minuscule Elon College in North Carolina, before finally landing a job with James Madison in 2019, and given the task of stewarding the program into the Sun Belt, making the jump to the FCS for the first time.
What we saw in all of Cignetti’s stops was unbelievable success, paired with an unbelievable knack for turning programs around. When he accepted the Indiana job in 2024 he came to the school with a ludicrously impressive 119-35 record, which saw him take schools to the postseason nine times in 13 seasons — including James Madison’s first ever bowl game in 2023, which saw him narrowly lose to Air Force.
The story here was that Cignetti was a program builder, a culture changer, the kind of coach who had been overlooked for years. Indiana, the imperfect ball of clay at the bottom of the Big Ten was the perfect place that boasted the resources to get the job done, but didn’t have the reputation to achieve it.
This was where the magic happened.
The 2024 Indiana Hoosiers
The first thing Cignetti did upon arriving at Indiana was identifying that the team needed a serious upgrade at quarterback. Perhaps more importantly: Indiana specifically needed an older, established quarterback — and here he found Kurtis Rourke who was ready to transfer from Ohio for his senior season.
What was so genius about this move is the dominoes it set up, and we’re going to get to those soon. Most importantly as it pertained to 2024 it put Rourke in the driver’s seat as a caretaker starter — while also getting someone in the QB room who could help develop Alberto Mendoza, who was Cignetti’s first big recruit signing to be the future at QB.
Rouke was brilliant in his role. Not only did he help lead Indiana to the college football playoff, but perhaps more importantly he showed that transfers could shine with the Hoosiers. Rourke went from being a blip on the radar to a 7th round selection in the 2025 NFL Draft by the San Francisco 49ers.
It wasn’t just quarterback that thrived in year one of the Cignetti experiment. Receiver Elijah Sarratt transferred in from James Madison to follow his coach, amassing 933 yards with the Hoosiers.
Indiana were one of the shock teams of 2024. Cignetti was the man who put everything in motion, while criticall laying the groundwork for the next season.
Rourke had left, Alberto Mendoza wasn’t ready to take over — so what do the Hoosiers do at QB? Well, you transfer over his older brother, of course. Fernando Mendoza was a truly fascinating quarterback who didn’t seem like he really planned to become the best passer in the nation.
Fernando initially committed to Yale, seemingly putting his studies above football. Then made the decision to try and diversify both interests by changing his commitment to Cal, where he could play high-level conference football and get a world class education. Something happened though — he started getting really, really good.
A first season in 2023 in Berkley gave way to Fernando becoming the full-time starter in 2024. He was a standout on a Cal team that didn’t really have a lot of weapons. So, with his stock rising on the elder Mendoza getting draft buzz he decided to jump and fill the role of caretaker starter once more, giving his brother more time to maturate.
It was part of a mammoth transfer haul for Indiana that saw the team also land leading rusher Roman Hemby (from Maryland), and two starting offensive linemen — among others. In total Indiana has 10 starters who came in the portal from last season, all of whom looked at the system Cignetti was building and wanted to be a part of it.
Winning the portal doesn’t mean anything if you can execute on the field. We’ve seen plenty of schools have top-flight portal classes and struggle to make it mesh, but everything Cignetti’s staff has done has favored putting all these talented elements together into a cohesive group. The high-powered spread offense with option elements is relatively pick-up-and-play, choosing to give athletes the freedom to perform individually, rather than being locked into a strict system.
Meanwhile on defense the team is known for a wide array of zone schemes, with a few blitz packages mixed in. Again, it’s designed not to leave anyone on an island while also being familiar enough that anyone can come to Indiana and pick up the system.
Opening the season No. 20 in the country, Indiana took a small backslide after struggling with Old Dominion in Week 1. This would serve as a wake up call, and the Hoosiers wouldn’t take an opponent for granted again. This was typified by their Week 4 matchup with No. 9 ranked Illinois, in which Indiana absolutely blew the doors off a team many had as a College Playoff team. Mendoza and the offense racked up an obscene 579 yards of offense, with Mendoza throwing for 267 yards and five touchdowns — completing an unreal 91.3% of his passes in the process.
The defense was somehow even more impressive, holding Illinois to 161 total yards and making people forget Luke Altmeyer existed. The 63-10 win established Indiana as a team to watch, vaulting them to 11th in the rankings, followed by 9th with a win over Iowa. Then came the even bigger test, and one people assumed the Hoosers would fail: Oregon.
Not only were the Ducks highly regarded, but they were coming off a win against Penn State that solidified them as one of the top teams in college football. It was definitely a fight, but once again the Hoosiers prevailed, winning 30-20 and taking us to this moment in time. Indiana is now ranked third in the nation. Seemingly nothing can stop them.
Where do the Hoosiers go from here?
It’s tough to find fault with Curt Cignetti’s team. Indiana ranks 4th in the nation in points scored, as well as 4th in points allowed. They are a complete football team that now hits a part of their schedule that’s rich in Big Ten teams, but nobody ranked. With Penn State in disarray their Nov. 8 meeting got a lot easier, and unless complacency creeps in it’s tough to see them losing a game from here on out.
Eyes will be on Ohio State, the No. 1 team in the country. They don’t have a game scheduled with Indiana, and are the likely candidate for the Big Ten Championship Game. The Buckeyes have a relatively easy close to their schedule too, and look completely unstoppable.
Despite this, Indiana will make the College Football Playoff barring something disastrous. Meanwhile Fernando Mendoza has gone from the kid looking at an Ivy League education, to now potentially being the No. 1 quarterback taken in the 2026 NFL Draft, throwing his name in the ring with other top candidates Garrett Nussmeier of LSU and La’Norris Sellers of South Carolina.
Whatever happens from here, the Hoosiers have established themselves as a football force. Cignetti is thriving in a way few coaches are capable of when they make the jump to power conference football — and no longer is it possible to look at Indiana like North Carolina, Duke, or Kansas, being basketball schools with mediocre football.
The Hoosiers have arrived.
