The Indiana of it all
The Hoosiers' rapid rise, as they play for a national title tonight, is echoing throughout college football and you can hear it in Lincoln.
When Nebraska began its Big Ten adventure in 2011, it wasn’t hard to come up with interesting angles to most of the Huskers’ new conference matchups. At the time, it wasn’t unrealistic to think NU could compete with Ohio State for conference superiority, and it was a “helmet game.” So were Michigan and Penn State, though Big Red fans also had infamous moments1 from history to draw on there. Michigan State was breaking through under Mark Dantonio and looked like a heavy. Wisconsin was on a decade-plus run started by former Husker Barry Alvarez and, due to proximity to Lincoln, felt like a natural rival alongside Iowa and Minnesota, the two Big Ten teams Nebraska had faced the most before joining the league.
Those were the easy ones. Purdue-Nebraska and Illinois-Nebraska required a little more effort, but football historians could at least conceive of strong teams from the Boilermakers and Illini. That was harder with Northwestern, which had the most losses (628) of any major program entering 2011, but it was a division game.2
My memory is that the hardest matchup to generate (or even feign) excitement over was Indiana-Nebraska. The Huskers and Hoosiers had history, comparatively speaking—19 games, third most behind Minnesota and Iowa—but it didn’t make sense. Nebraska had the fourth-most all-time wins entering 2011 (837) and Indiana had the second-most3 losses (617), yet somehow the Hoosiers had a 9-7-3 lead in the all-time series. You could thank a 10-game stretch between 1941–59 where NU went 0-9-1. Nebraska and Indiana were oil and water in terms of all-time results, but also in terms of series results.
It just didn’t make sense, and maybe the Big Ten agreed as Nebraska was a conference member for five seasons before NU faced IU. The Huskers have still only played Indiana four times since joining the Big Ten 15 years ago. There just wasn’t much connective tissue here.
Yet, since Nebraska’s 2025 season careened into a ditch and came to a smoking stop, the program Matt Rhule hasn’t been able to avoid invoking is Indiana. That’s been the case for a lot of college programs as everyone has tried to make sense of Indiana’s two-year rise under Curt Cignetti from “I don’t think about you at all” to a 15-0, 8.5-point favorite over Miami in tonight’s national title game. That’s an 8.5-point favorite on the Hurricanes’ home field, by the way.
If you’re a recently hired head coach,4 the Indiana comparison is inescapable. The second-losingest program in the country 15 years ago is now the gold standard for the modern turnaround. Maybe every coach doesn’t need to directly address the Hoosiers’ rise, but Rhule certainly has.
So, let’s talk about it.
The FOAT?
“It’s been a long time since we were great, so our passionate fan base is always kind of worried,” Matt Rhule said of Nebraska’s .500 record following his first three seasons during an appearance on the Zach Gelb Show last week. “I haven’t been able to do it overnight. Indiana did and I did not, and I have to own that. But you know what? We are creeping towards it, and we are going to fight.”
Nothing really to disagree with there—Indiana has done it, Nebraska hasn’t yet—but it is indicative of just how the Hoosiers’ rise seems to be reverberating for coaches all over the country. Rhule wasn’t asked about Indiana, he volunteered that example.
The 10-day layoff between the CFP semifinals and tonight’s championship game meant plenty of people wrote stories trying to explain how Indiana has done this.5 I don’t think there’s a single answer that explains it all, but exploring exactly what Indiana has done is still useful for understanding why this two-year run has impacted almost every college football coach.
I don’t think there’s much question that Indiana’s hyper speed jump from 3-9 pre-Cignetti to 11-2 to (currently) 15-0 is the fastest rise we’ve seen in the last two decades, maybe ever. Since 2007, I’ve tracked various numbers for every power-conference coaching hire in a so far mostly futile effort to separate any signal from the multi-million-dollar noise of making a hire. In terms of change in a team’s Elo rating,6 Cignetti inherited a program with a 1343 rating, improved to 1951 after Year 1 (+608) and then, just when many begrudgingly acknowledged the Hoosiers’ rapid improvement while believing it was a one-off, IU got better again, improving to 2264 (+313) entering Monday’s game.
That Year 1 change is the largest among power-conference coaches hired since 2007. The cumulative Year 2-over-inherited Elo change (+921) is also No. 1, 29% bigger than the second-best improvement, which belongs to Deion Sanders’ first two years at Colorado. Sanders was shockingly up-front about what he was going to do with the roster, bringing in more than 50 transfers and prompting multiple “this is the end of college football columns.”
That same hand-wringing did not accompany Cignetti’s decision to welcome 31 transfers—third-most nationally—ahead of his first season in Bloomington. A year earlier, Sanders said he was bringing “Louis [Vuitton]” luggage with him to Colorado, and he was largely right. Travis Hunter jumped from Jacksonville State to CU and won the Heisman in his second year.
Cignetti just reused the big-box-retailer luggage that helped get him to James Madison and then ran out to Walmart once he got to Bloomington for anything he couldn’t fit in his bags. Indiana’s success7 in the transfer portal doesn’t explain the past two years on its own, but when viewed alongside the second-biggest two-year rise since 2007, it does help explain how a massive portal flip of the roster became normalized in less than a year. Since Colorado boldly went where no team had gone before, a transfer class of 30-plus is just considered shrewd business, particularly for new head coaches.
Rhule, coming from the NFL in 2023, didn’t have the option to import a new core for his first Husker team. That alone also doesn’t explain why Indiana’s done it and Nebraska hasn’t yet, but it’s useful context. For team’s hiring today, an NFL coach’s lack of access to a starter pack is likely to weigh heavily into hiring decisions until the game changes yet again.
In our current version of the game, however, a lot of programs will try to replicate what Indiana’s done without fully understanding the past two years are likely as good as it’s ever been done. And, more importantly, probably as good as it will be done for some time.
The GOAT?
With a chance to become the first 16-0 national champion in history, it was inevitable that the “greatest of all time?” question would get asked about Indiana. While not Rhule’s concern, it’s likely of some interest for Husker fans given Nebraska has long had two popular claims to the mythical title—the 1971 and 1995 national championship teams.
When I did a deep dive on Indiana’s stats from 2025, all of them were impressive but only one was truly shocking—this year’s Hoosiers have engineered 108 scoring opportunities8 on offense and allowed just 54 on defense. I don’t care what era or what team, generating two chances to score to every one the opponent gets is dominant football.
Yes, the Hoosiers were unimpressive in a Week 1 win over Old Dominion and won by less than a touchdown against a good Iowa team and a good-ish Penn State squad, but in unanswerable GOAT debates, I prefer to zoom out rather than in. Give me a standard measure that applies across decades—even if it has weaknesses—over whatever details seem most relevant on a case-by-case basis. Give me something like Elo.
Not that this will be the “truth.” The truth doesn’t exist in this scenario, but a system like Elo (or any of the many competitors) can at least tell you if this is a conversation worth having and Indiana has some ground to make up when viewed through this lens.
I grabbed the best Elo team9 each season since 1970—a year selected, yes, because it is the earliest date of most relevance for a Nebraska audience—just to see what this specific number said. The ’95 Huskers (2455) do indeed have the highest recorded Elo from collegefootballdata.com over that 55-year span followed by ’05 Texas (2407), ’20 Alabama (2398), ’18 Clemson (2388) and ’72 Nebraska (2384). Yes, the 1972 team, which didn’t win a national title, ranked ahead of the more popular Nebraska pick of 1971, which did win it all. Other Nebraska teams with a higher Elo rating than the ’71 team: 1997 and 1983. Do with that what you will. I can buy it with the ’83 team, maybe, but this highlights a key point of all GOAT debates: Without a title, it’s an uphill climb.
On the long Elo list, ’25 Indiana (2354 entering Monday) is the 15th-best team we’ve seen since 1970. Restrict that list to only national champions—should the Hoosiers get there—and they move up to 11th. It’s elite company with Indiana falling between ’97 Nebraska and ’93 Florida State. Should the Hoosiers rip through Miami, Indiana’s Elo might surpass that of the ’97 Huskers.
That feels pretty fair. By Elo calculations, the ’95 Huskers would have about a 64% win probability over ’25 Indiana, which would make NU about a 5.5-point favorite.
But if Indiana wins going away tonight, as it did in playoff wins over Alabama and Oregon, the GOAT discussion will only pick up steam. Because the Hoosiers deserve it. Because of recency bias and a broken media ecosystem. Most of all because Indiana is a symbol of a changing game. It isn’t just good, being in the national championship game represents something larger, something unavoidable.
Just ask Matt Rhule.
1997 and 1982 respectively.
And a fight for the right to “NU.”
That’s right…just “better” than Northwestern.
I’d say 2021 or later is the cutoff.
Split Zone Duo had a particularly good podcast on it.
Elo ratings were originally designed to rate chess players. Like any other ranking, they’re not perfect, but they do offer a way to measure growth (or lack thereof) across multiple changes to the game. They work, essentially, by translating ratings into a win probability. If Team A has a 0.80 win probability over Team B and wins—a binary rating of 1 or 0—its rating reflects the 20% it outperformed expectation, while Team B, the loser, is dinged for the 20% it underperformed. That’s the very, very brief version.
Quarterback Fernando Mendoza, a Cal transfer with an identical QBR as true freshman Dylan Raiola in 2024, won the Heisman in 2025.
Drives that include a first down inside the opponents’ 40-yard line.
Note: This designation was not always the national champion that season.