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It’s Remarkable that Penn State, with a Backup QB, Had this Indiana Team on the Ropes
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The Indiana Hoosiers completed a remarkable 16-0 season on Monday night, beating Miami 27-21 to win the College Football Playoff and the program’s first national title.
The resume is incredible. This should be turned into a poster and thumb tacked to the wall of every IU bar from here to Bloomington:
Quality wins stacked upon quality wins. They annihilated a nine-win Illinois team and then beat Iowa and Oregon on the road in consecutive weeks. Then they easily handled some average teams the way a championship team handles lesser competition. They escaped Penn State in Happy Valley and pipped OSU in the B1G title game, then beat Bama, Oregon again, and Miami en route to the championship.
It’s wild to think that the PSU game was their biggest challenge. Sure, the Ohio State game came down to the missed field goal in the fourth quarter, but Indiana was up 13-10 at that point. The Penn State game, they were trailing 24-20 with 1:51 in the fourth quarter and had gone punt/interception/punt on their three prior possessions. They answered the bell with 10 plays and 80 yards in 1:15, winning on that ridiculous catch from Omar Cooper:
Insanity. Penn State almost got it done without Drew Allar, putting Ethan Grunkemeyer out there with an interim coach while running the ball 29 times between Nick Singleton and Kaytron Allen.
The Indiana story is so good for college football, though, isn’t it? Curt Cignetti was coaching at James Madison as recently as 2023. He’s a Pittsburgh guy who played college ball at WVU and then had lesser gigs at Rice, Temple, Pitt, NC State, and Bama before taking the IUP job. IUP! Not Indiana University, but Indiana University of Pennsylvania out there in the hinterlands, where I think they’re still drinking Lionshead. He went 53-17 out there and earned himself the Elon job, then JMU, IU, and the rest is history.
But we’re living in an NIL world where the gulf between the haves and the have nots has widened, or at least we thought so. It’s the big, bad SEC and blue blood programs like Ohio State, then here comes Indiana out of nowhere with a combination of some money, a good coach, and a bunch of experienced transfers who have played a lot of games. If anything, it goes to show that it’s not just going to be about throwing the cash around, but checking a number of boxes. That was a disciplined and organized team with a great coaching staff and quality players on both sides of the ball.
HOOSIERS!
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com