The fact that Indiana is the defending national champion is a fact that we simultaneously talk about all the time and not nearly enough.
Not only were Curt Cignetti's Hoosiers the last team standing, they were dominant in victory. IU was the first 16-0 team since 1894 Yale, and just the seventh undefeated national champion of the last 15 years. After taking a 13-10 lead on Ohio State at the 8:02 mark of the third quarter in the Big Ten Championship, Indiana did not trail again for the rest of the season. Their 38-3 Rose Bowl win over Alabama was the Tide's worst loss since 1998, and their worst postseason loss ever. They built a 41-point lead over Oregon, after beating them by 10 in Autzen Stadium. They beat a 9-win, Top 25 Illinois team by 53 points.
Indiana 63, Illinois 10 was especially poetic because the college football chattering class collectively anointed Illinois as "this year's Indiana" heading into the 2025 season. Having improved from five wins to 10 in 2024, Illinois started the 2025 campaign at No. 12, while Indiana -- despite jumping from three wins to 11 over that same time frame -- began all the way down at No. 20.
Little did we all know that This Year's Indiana for the 2025 season was... Indiana. Cignetti taught us all in brutal fashion that trying to project his legendary abilities to do the impossible is a fool's errand that only a moron would attempt to try.
Having said all that, let's predict this year's Indiana.
The story of Indiana's national championship contains so many multitudes that one team cannot possibly contain them all. (That's this writer's way of hedging his bets and not pin all his hopes on one single team.)
-- Wake Forest. Part of the difficulty in quantifying the IU story is separating the IU team -- Cignetti, his staff and players -- from the IU program, i.e., all the players and coaches who share nothing in common with the current Hoosiers except they wore the same uniforms. The first FBS program to reach 700 losses, IU's all-time record still stands at 536-720-44; their .429 winning percentage ranks 129th all-time. One spot below them: Wake Forest, who sits at 507-700-33 all-time.
The idea of Wake Forest hammering Alabama, Oregon and Miami en route to a 16-0 national championship in 2027 sounds as preposterous today as Indiana doing so on the eve of the 2026 season.
-- Oklahoma State. This one is so on-the-nose I'm not sure it even counts anymore. Cignetti jump-started his success by importing the nucleus of his 11-1 James Madison team with him to Bloomington, just as Eric Morris has with his 11-2 North Texas team from a year ago, who surely would have punished the 1-11 Oklahoma State whose identity they have now inherited. Oklahoma State is now such a shark-jumped surprise pick that the Pokes are drawing preseason Top 25 votes.
-- Penn State. Cignetti took 13 transfers with him from James Madison to Indiana; Matt Campbell nearly doubled that number in Iowa State tagalongs, including quarterback Rocco Becht. Where this comparison runs into trouble, though, is that Cignetti's Dukes got to Bloomington after winning the Sun Belt East, and served as white blood cells to a body that knew nothing but losing. That is not the case at Penn State, where the program hit rock bottom when it became apparent the team would not fulfill the promise of playing for a national championship after swinging and whiffing so many times under James Franklin. Campbell will attempt to level up Penn State with a core that went 5-4 in the Big 12 last season.
-- UCLA. After going 52-9 across five seasons at JMU, Cignetti took over a 3-9 Big Ten team that from the outside seemed indifferent about even trying to be competitive. After going 21-6 across two seasons at JMU, Bob Chesney now takes over a 3-9 Big Ten team that from the outside seemed indifferent about even trying to be competitive.
Not to belabor this point, but imagine UCLA making the CFP this season and pulling off a 16-0 season in '27.
-- Washington. Speaking purely literally here. Indiana began the 2025 season ranked No. 19 in the Coaches Poll, which is where Washington sits in the 2026 edition (the AP is not out yet). FBS coaches view Washington climbing the mountaintop as likely as they did Indiana last season.
-- LSU. Stay with me here. I think the closest parallel to where Cignetti was from 2024 to '25 -- a team on the cusp of a national title, with an upgrade at quarterback and further tweaks on the roster -- today is Lane Kiffin. He just had to switch schools first. Kiffin has been in the realm of the elite for years now, and breaking through with a new cast of characters does not seem as unlikely as it did in a pre-Cignetti world.
-- Indiana. "There are no men like me," Jamie Lannister once said, "only me." Indiana finished 2024 ranked No. 10 in the country, then fell to No. 20 in the offseason despite getting dramatically better -- it just took the rest of us two months to see it. After finishing No. 1 in '25, Indiana will start this year in the top 10 (likely No. 6). After last year, we cannot be blind to the possibility that Indiana once again upgraded, or at least maintained, its level of dominance over the sport.