Fernando Mendoza sprawled across the Miami goal line, bloodied and airborne, and Indiana's entire history shifted in that moment.
The Hoosiers' quarterback punched in a 12-yard touchdown run on fourth-and-4 with 9:18 left in the championship game, giving Indiana a 24-14 lead they would not relinquish. Final score: 27-21 over Miami. Perfect season: 16-0. National title: theirs.
"I had to go airborne," Mendoza said after the game, his lip split, his arm bloodied from Miami's relentless defense. "I would die for my team."
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Start Your News DetoxWhat made this moment land harder than any single play is what it represented. Indiana football had lost 713 games over 130-plus years before coach Curt Cignetti arrived two years ago. There was actually a coach in program history who stopped the game early to photograph the scoreboard when it read "Indiana 7, Ohio State 6"—they lost 47-7 that day. The program had become a punchline.
Then Cignetti arrived and something shifted. This year, Indiana beat Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game. They entered the expanded 12-team playoff as the top seed. They won their first two playoff games by a combined 94-25. Mendoza, the Heisman Trophy winner, threw eight touchdown passes and had only five incompletions all season.
The championship game itself was a slugfest. Miami's Mark Fletcher rushed for 112 yards and two touchdowns, and the Hurricanes charged hard in the fourth quarter. But Indiana never gave up the lead after Mendoza's defining run—a play Cignetti had designed knowing Miami's defense would be aggressive. "We rolled the dice and said, 'They're going to be in it again and they were,'" the coach said.
Indiana finished 16-0, matching the perfect-season win total last compiled by Yale in 1894. The trophy heads to Bloomington for the first time. It's worth noting that 50 years ago, Bob Knight's basketball team went 32-0 to win the national championship in the state's preferred sport. Now football has its own chapter in that story.
"Did I think something like this was possible? Probably not," Cignetti reflected. "But if you keep your nose down and keep working, anything is possible."
A program that was a cautionary tale became a blueprint in two years. That's the real story here.
