Image Source: Brandon Marcello
Key Takeaways:
- Indiana is on the verge of a historic national championship in college football, with a 15-0 record and a chance to become the first undefeated team since 1894.
- The team’s turnaround under coach Curt Cignetti is being hailed as one of the greatest in college football history, with the Hoosiers going from a 3-9 record to a potential national title in just two years.
- The team’s success is being compared to other great underdog stories in sports, including the "Miracle on Ice" and NC State’s 1983 NCAA basketball championship.
- Coach Cignetti’s focus and discipline have been key to the team’s success, with players and analysts praising his ability to get the most out of his team.
- A win in the national championship game would not only bring a title to Indiana but also cement the team’s place in college football history.
Introduction to the Miracle Season
Indiana stands one win away from a transformation once reserved for legends and the movies that borrow from them. Two years ago, the man who writes those Hollywood scripts sat inside the Hoosiers’ Memorial Stadium with an extra ticket in his pocket and an empty seat beside him, unaware he was witnessing the final stillness of yet another losing season before belief came home to Bloomington. Angelo Pizzo, the screenwriter behind the sports film classics "Hoosiers" and "Rudy," is a lifelong Indiana fan, season-ticket holder, and alum. As a kid, he attended countless Indiana football games with his father, making the one-block walk from his home to watch the Hoosiers be bludgeoned by the Big Ten’s blue bloods. The stadium was nearly empty every Saturday. On Monday night, he will trade one of the most coveted tickets in college sports history for a seat inside Hard Rock Stadium, where Indiana will chase the final step of a miracle journey from doormat to undefeated national champion, a season begging for a Hollywood ending.
A Historic Turnaround
Indiana is doing something college sports have never quite seen before. The No. 1 Hoosiers are an incredible 26-2 over their last two seasons, a breakneck turnaround not even second-year coach Curt Cignetti envisioned when he inherited a 3-9 team with only 40 scholarship players remaining on the roster. As recently as November, Indiana still owned the losingest record in college football history, but that flipped when Northwestern lost its 716th game on Nov. 8 and Indiana kept winning. "Forget about movies for this moment," Pizzo said. "It’s a unicorn. I don’t think there’s anything like it." Indeed, Indiana is doing something college sports have never quite seen before.
A Team of Believers
Team USA’s captain Mike Eruzione tries to pass against Team Russia during the XIII Olympic Winter Games in February of 1980 in Lake Placid, New York. "I can’t wait to watch the game because I know how hard these players work and the sacrifices both teams made," said Mike Eruzione, who scored the decisive goal against the Soviets in 1980’s "Miracle on Ice" Olympics victory for Team USA’s hockey team. "You want to see that person who nobody believes in win. That’s what makes our country so great. They embody what our country is all about: people overachieving and accomplishing great things." The man who never blinks, Curt Cignetti, remains unmoved. He usually is. He only cracks a smile — and a beer — after wins, but his laser-focused demeanor has turned him into today’s most recognizable face on the sidelines.
A Coach with a Plan
Cignetti’s process fueling Indiana’s rise is upending college football — and rivals are taking notes. Bill Snyder took over a hapless Kansas State program in 1989 with only four winning seasons in its previous 44 years. By his third year, he won seven games, sparking a 27-year career that included 18 winning records, two Big 12 championships, and seven 11-win seasons, including four in a row in the late 1990s. The flip from bottom dweller to championship contender led former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer to label Snyder "the coach of the century." "In some ways, it was an impossible task, and in other ways, it was far easier than anyone could anticipate," the 86-year-old Snyder said this week.
A Legacy in the Making
If Indiana completes the fairytale with a Hollywood ending by beating Miami, it would eclipse most comeback tales. "You’ve got to think about them in terms of the ‘Miracle on Ice.’ It’s that kind of level of comparison that I’d have no problem agreeing to," said Tony Barnhart, who has covered college football for 50 years. Rebuilding is hard. Rebuilding a program that has been on the low rung for most of the last 100 years is supposed to be impossible. Turning it over in the blink of an eye, like Cignetti accomplished at Indiana, has never been done, but there are working blueprints sprinkled throughout history. Indiana has a history of winning, just not in football. The Hoosiers won five basketball national titles, including three under the late Bob Knight.
A Story for the Ages
"It would trump any national championship for basketball," Pizzo said. It would also ripple far beyond Bloomington — everywhere except, perhaps, Miami — and lift the Hoosiers into rarified air, perhaps eclipsing the sport itself. "Indiana has become America’s team in a way, because they do represent the player or person who most people think of in terms of themselves," Pizzo said. "That’s why ‘Rudy’ has sustained in popular culture for as long as it has, because it goes beyond sports. It’s really about the average guy who punches above their weight." The moment arrives, and Indiana wins, college football will shift, and so will the lives of the Hoosiers’ players. Plucky programs with no prior history of championship success in the modern era are not supposed to suddenly emerge and win national titles. Yet here Indiana stands, unfazed, staring into territory the program has never known.
https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/indiana-football-greatest-sports-stories/