Where Does Indiana Rank Among All-Time Champions?
On its own, IU's 2025 season stands toe-to-toe with history’s greatest champs — and the path they took to get there was totally unprecedented.
Roughly a quarter-century ago, Miami dominated the national title game to solidify its place among college football’s greatest teams ever. In this season’s finale, though, the shoe was on the other foot — the Hurricanes were cast as the feisty underdog, looking to use home-field advantage and an elite defense to stand athwart Indiana’s bid for immortality.
In the end, though, the Hoosiers’ present-day greatness was too much, as they beat Miami 27-21 on Monday night to stake a claim of their own at GOAT status with one of the most impressive — and, more notably, improbable — championship seasons this sport has ever seen.
Indiana’s victory showcased just how many different kinds of games this team was capable of winning. After averaging 47.0 points per game in the College Football Playoff leading up to the title game, the Hoosiers found themselves locked into a far more defensive battle on Monday night, with the co-most punts they’d had in a game all season. It was the type of contest that seemed to be setting Miami up for the potential upset, as the Hurricanes’ strength is on the defensive side of the ball and they’d won all of their previous CFP games by suffocating the opposition, relative to their usual output.
But although Miami drew things within a field goal several times during the second half on a trio of touchdowns by Mark Fletcher Jr. and Malachi Toney — despite Indiana blocking a punt for a TD and Fernando Mendoza pulling off a heroic fourth-down TD run of his own — Indiana did just enough to win in the end, sealing the title when Jamari Sharpe picked off Carson Beck on the game’s final drive.
The win sets up plenty of conversations around where these Hoosiers rank in the all-time college football championship canon. For one thing, Indiana went a perfect 16-0, becoming the winningest single-season team in major college football history. And while today’s champions also play more games than historical teams did — due to the dragged-out nature of the expanded playoff — the flip-side there is that IU one-upped Ohio State last year for great teams beaten in a single season, based on the opponents’ Elo ratings going into the game.
The Hoosiers also finished on the short list of top post-war teams by several different power ratings, including both Elo (where they provisionally finish 13th-best since 1946) and SRS (37th):
But the real factor that makes this Indiana team historically notable is how they got here. Before coach Curt Cignetti arrived for the 2024 season, Indiana was an also-ran, perennially one of the worst teams in the Big Ten. (They’d famously recorded 26 losing seasons in the 29 years from 1995-2023.) To say this kind of turnaround was unprecedented is a ridiculous understatement — among all BCS- and playoff-era champs (since 1998), the Hoosiers had the lowest Elo rating 2 years prior, as well as the lowest average Elo rating over the previous 10 and 20 years, and no other champ is even remotely close.
They are the defining team of college football’s new era of expanded playoffs, transfers and roster reshuffling. Just as many people hate that era as love it, but you can’t deny that only this version of the sport could produce a champion like these Indiana Hoosiers — a once-forgotten program that climbed straight to the summit by beating the best, then finished it off by outlasting a proud Miami program on its own home field.
Filed under: College Football, Football
And of those 8 wins over high-quality opponents, just one at home (and one other in state).