Indiana football already won

When the journey really is the most important thing

Photo credit: Getty Images

Late last week, an editor reached out to ask if I would be interested in doing a freelance column on the improbability of Indiana football and the joy this season has brought to its fans. The logistics didn’t end up working out — and this isn’t what I would have written there, necessarily — but the wheels had already started turning, and I decided I should probably write something.

So here it is. Forgive the rare digression. Buzzer will soon return to its regularly scheduled programming.

On the morning of Aug. 23, 2025, I was sitting at a Scottsdale, Ariz. sports book with four lifelong friends. We’d arrived just before 9 a.m. We clanked our first drinks soon after. Besides being on our decades-long annual fantasy football draft trip, with no family responsibilities and thus no concern for the clock, the excuse for the early morning was simple: The first college football game of the season, Iowa State-Kansas State in Dublin, would be on. I was mostly there to watch Arsenal.

College football wasn’t my thing. It hadn’t been my thing for a very long time. Even last fall, when upstart Indiana made the playoff in its first year under an ambitious new coach, the whole thing was — for me — a pleasant diversion. Everything about the program’s history suggested it would fade. Everything I had ever experienced as a once-devoted student section attendee, and then a jaded tailgating upperclassman, and then a fully apostate adult, held that all that was good and right in the world of IU football would blink out of existence as quickly as it arrived. I kept it at arm’s length.

During that Scottsdale session, one of my buddies, an obsessed Notre Dame fan, asked what I thought about Indiana’s new quarterback. I said I didn’t know.

Not in the “hey, we’ll see if he pans out” way. I really didn’t know. Who? I couldn’t have guessed his initials, or whether he was any good, or whether he’d be playing behind a good offensive line, or whether he’d need to be amazing or just OK because Indiana’s defense was going to be amazing or just OK. I didn’t pretend otherwise. I didn’t keep up with the football team’s offseason portal additions. Of course I didn’t. No clue.

That was five months ago.

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My first season as an Indiana football fan was the fall of 2003. I was a freshman. My buddies and I ordered our student season tickets, because that’s what we assumed you did when you were a student at a Big Ten college: You went to the football games. Here are that season’s results:

The memories are scattered. I recall that first eerily empty kickoff in Memorial. Where is everyone? Our seats were always good, at least. BenJarvus Green-Ellis was better than everyone else on the team, which is a tough spot for a running back to be in. That overtime loss to Northwestern, when Indiana took the lead early in the fourth quarter, sticks out, an early step in the march toward apathy: For a few minutes in the fourth, when Indiana led 31-24, my buddies and I really thought we might watch a Big Ten win. Naive. (We got one a few weeks later. I don’t remember that at all.)

The Ohio State game was even more deflating. No one expected a win, obviously, but it was our first time experiencing OSU fans overrunning Bloomington, the first time hearing them boom out “O-H-I-O” from every corner of an away stadium. The Indiana Athletics gallows joke, which I learned a couple years later, was that the biannual Buckeyes home fixture was called “poster day.” It was IU’s only chance to capture an overhead Memorial photo for media materials, because it was the only time the stadium was full of people in red and white.

As for sophomore year, I only remember this:

I was at that game. Indiana came in with three wins. After this, and the following week’s 63-24 Old Oaken Bucket loss in West Lafayette, it ended the season with three wins. I don’t remember bucket game. But the Penn State ending broke my heart and I still don’t totally know why. Indiana had nothing to play for. Penn State finished 4-7. Maybe because Penn State was a big deal when I was growing up, when I was just as obsessed with college football as anything else? Maybe because pre-Sandusky Joe Paterno was right there in front of me — not on TV or NCAA Football 2003, but right there? Maybe I just wanted to see IU beat someone, or at least someone that wasn’t Illinois, for once? I don’t know. Then that happened.

While living in Bloomington had already codified my love of college basketball, two years of devoted IU football attendance had created a clear fork: care less or embrace the pain.

It was into this depressed environment Terry Hoeppner arrived in 2005. Convenient timing, personally: I had graduated from minor sports desk beats to covering the football team for the Indiana Daily Student, so “professionally” I wasn’t supposed to care. I wonder if I would have bought student tickets that year. Most of my friends didn’t. Anyway, Hoeppner was a breath of fresh air: relentlessly positive and forward-thinking, constantly prodding students to show up. He was charismatic and great to cover. The away trips — Wisconsin, Michigan — were also eye-opening. The atmosphere, the sheer human crush; this is what real college football was.

Senior year, 2006, I never attended a game. The highlight was the 31-28 home win over No. 13 Iowa, the game that convinced fans Hoeppner was building something real. I was in the tailgate fields across 17th. I watched on someone’s pickup truck TV, went home, took a nap, and went to Kilroy’s a few hours later. Senioritis. This was the standard trajectory.

A couple of months before I graduated, Hoeppner announced he would miss spring practice for health reasons. He died of a brain tumor in June.

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What then? For me, a job, adulthood, Chicago, late nights with buddies, the occasional date, ESPN, concerts, sort-of girlfriends, sort-of breakups, the usual 20s stuff. Then, later: A real relationship, financially irresponsible flights, late-night phone calls planning out life, moving to D.C.

For Indiana: a 7-6 season in 2007, which I remember taking some note of at, like, Duffy’s, followed by this:

A couple of decent seasons in there, maybe, but mostly it was easy to ignore. Anyway I had other stuff going on: a career, marriage, her career, one kid, two, three. Indiana football, of all the ways to spend the vanishing time, only sporadically crossed my radar.

Does this make me a bandwagon fan? I’ve thought a lot about this lately. In one sense, yes, obviously. I wasn’t an active fan of Indiana football for the past, like, 16 years. I didn’t go to games. I barely watched games. Now they’re good. Now I’m a fan. Seems pretty cut and dry.

Then again, it’s not like I was never a fan. I was, forever ago, before my spirit got crushed, and before real life took over. How much time are you going to devote to Indiana football? The years fly by. Then one day you wake up and Indiana is apparently pretty interesting at football now? Curt Cignetti was great at JMU, he seems confident, things seem to be getting kind of real? You start watching games, and things snowball, and now they’re in the playoff in the new coach’s first year — isn’t this fun!

And then the season ends and the offseason happens and your friend is asking a question about a transfer quarterback that you aren’t prepared to answer because he might as well be asking how long it takes to walk from Briscoe to Ballantine. Don’t know, man. It’s been a while. Out of practice.

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I know who Fernando Mendoza is now.

I won’t say I’ve become obsessed with Fernando Mendoza, because that feels kind of weird to say, but I will say I have enjoyed his 2025 season as much or more as any college athlete ever — including every great college basketball player I’ve watched and written about for the past two decades. This is a wild comparison, but it has at times reminded me of what it meant to root for Michael Jordan as a young Bulls fan: Whatever happens, you figure this guy either a) dominate or b) do something incredible to fix it. He has made the remarkable feel routine.

With a few exceptions running kids around on weekend activities, I’ve watched every play. The demolition of then-ranked Illinois. The nervy win at Iowa. The marquee oh-yeah-this-is-a-real-thing road win at Oregon. The string of blowouts that followed. Surviving Penn State.

The Big Ten title game against Ohio State, a team everyone said would overwhelm IU with raw talent and experience. The playoff statement against Alabama. Oregon, again, but so much worse. Mendoza won the Heisman Trophy! An Indiana player won the freaking Heisman Trophy! The whole thing still feels like a fever dream, much like my consumption of it.

In the matter of a few months, I have become a devoted college football fan. I have also, somehow, become the most shameless, shit-talking dork in the world. Iowa has had a nice history, one certainly more successful than Indiana’s, and I have verbally (jokingly!) berated Iowa buddies who dared to criticize Indiana for being (in their view) “cringe” because LOOK AT US. LOOK AT HOW GOOD WE ARE. HOW DARE YOU. KNOW YOUR PLACE.

Imagine the poorest person in the world won the biggest lottery jackpot of all time. Imagine a person gave up on life, stopped caring, couldn’t even get out of bed, didn’t feel alive anymore … and then the next day they’re as wealthy as Bill Gates. That’s how it’s felt to be an Indiana fan this season. You might expect that person to be a little gauche, to overspend on a couple of items, to imperfectly optimize their balance sheet. That’s been me, or at least me and my IU buddies on our group chats, doing the opposite of the parable about how people go broke. Gradually, and then all at once, we realized we were stinking rich. We haven’t shut up about it once.

Beneath the goofy bluster is love. The 2025 Indiana football team has done many things for many people. For the true die-hards — the sickos who stuck it out at every Saturday home game for the past 30 years no matter how bad the team was, who parked their RVs and went through the gates, and the people blogging and writing about it with all the same intensity as any SEC outfit — well, sheesh, just imagine what this is like for them. Those people deserve it more than anything.

But everyone feels something. For fans everywhere, the losingest program in high-major history becoming the winningest the past two seasons is clear proof that the doors to success have been flung wide open; you’re only just one generational coach and some NIL investment away, in any sport. For casuals, it’s become a 60 Minutes segment, this aw-shucks nerd QB and his frighteningly focused taskmaster. It’s one of the best general interest stories in modern sports history.

And there are people who are cynical, too, who will dissect Indiana if it loses, who will ask questions about whether this was all so real in the first place. There will be hot takes. Mendoza will get criticized. Cignetti, nautrally, has dismissed all of this fuzzy nonsense, all of this emotional waffling we’re doing right now:

“I think it’s time to sharpen the saw now, throw those warm fuzzies over out the door,” Cignetti said. “That’s sentimentalism. It’s time to go play a game against a great opponent. We’ve got to have a sharp edge going into this game.”

He wants to win the game. He will be tortured if he loses it. He doesn’t care about the journey, not right now. Not the warm and fuzzy type. Many others will agree. The result will matter, to the team most of all, and to how the rest of the world remembers everything that came before. Fine.

I disagree. And I bet there are an awful lot of people like me.

People who were Indiana football fans at one point, when they were younger. Before time shrank, before life got in the way, before the losses wore them down. People who were pleasantly surprised but wary of last season’s success. People didn’t know the quarterback’s name five months ago.

People who obviously care deeply about what happens Monday night but also somehow kind of don’t care at all. People who know the idea of being in a national title game was a hilarious joke no one would have dreamed to tell two or 10 or 20 years ago; people who wonder how, at this point, you could possibly be mad at anything this team does. People who have enjoyed it so much there is nothing you can say or do to them that could ruin the joy now.

There are millions of us. Our flame dimmed to darkness but never fully went out. This Indiana team stoked that fire again, then set it blazing. No matter what happens Monday night, it will rage on.

Josh Hoover is projected to be Indiana’s starting quarterback in 2026. I don’t know whether he’ll be better than Fernando Mendoza, or whether I’ll enjoy him as much. Seems unlikely. But I damn sure know who he is.