The End of the Underdog in College Football

The Indiana Hoosiers will take the field for college football’s National Championship game Monday night as the darlings of the sports world. Their head coach, Curt Cignetti, perpetually scowling beneath his 1950s crew cut, is fuel for countless memes. Their Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, baby-faced and giving “glory to God” in his postgame interviews, is a midwestern star straight out of central casting—nevermind that he’s from Miami, the hometown of his Monday-night rivals. These two men, along with a team that Mendoza has described as “a bunch of misfits,” have led the long-hapless Hoosiers to the cusp of a national title for the first time ever. Win or lose, they’re being called one of the greatest underdog stories in recent sports history.

The Hoosiers are, I will concede, a great story. As a midwesterner, a graduate of a Big Ten school, and someone who has spent a lot of time in Indiana, I will be pulling for them in the championship game. Unlike their opponent, the Miami Hurricanes, Indiana has never achieved anything notable in college football—except for one unenviable title: The Hoosiers entered this season as the leader in all-time college-football losses.

But we need to be honest about what we’re witnessing: The Hoosiers aren’t true underdogs. They’re a reflection of our wild and moneyed times, in which college athletes earn millions and barely stay on campus long enough to learn the fight song; wealthy benefactors pay player salaries (how much, exactly? No one knows!); loyalty doesn’t exist; and games are won and lost in the transfer portal—a mystical place where college athletes gather at the end of the season, hoping to join new teams, ideally for more cash.

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The Hoosiers aren’t North Carolina State’s 1983 basketball team, a scrappy squad that upset top-ranked Houston to win the NCAA title. They aren’t the U.S. hockey team of 1980, a collection of college kids and players deemed not good enough for the NHL who beat the long-dominant Soviets at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. And they definitely aren’t the boys of Milan High School, who, in 1954, led their little Indiana town (population 1,150) to a state high-school-basketball championship—a moment later dramatized in the movie Hoosiers and sure to be mentioned during the television broadcast on Monday night. The Hoosiers of 2026 are something different. They’re a team that’s achieved greatness thanks to good coaching, smart personnel decisions, generous alumni—and lots and lots of money.

In the 2022 season, two years before Cignetti’s debut in Bloomington, the Hoosiers football program had just $150,000 in name, image, and likeness money with which to pay its players—nickels and dimes compared with the millions in the coffers of college-football powerhouses such as Ohio State and Alabama. Indiana struggled to attract top talent and, predictably perhaps, finished 4–8 that season—tied for last place in the eastern division of the Big Ten. Tom Allen, then Indiana’s head coach, admitted on a radio show that his team just didn’t have the money to compete. By the end of 2023, Allen was gone, fired, and Cignetti, a hot coaching prospect, took the job—armed with some $3 million in NIL funding to pay his players. “The ante has been upped,” Cignetti said in one of his first interviews as head coach.

He spent his money wisely, and in 2024, Indiana finished the year 11–2, with a berth in the football playoffs. The team’s rapid turnaround caught the attention of the billionaire Mark Cuban, the former majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a graduate of Indiana University’s business school. As Cuban explained on the podcast Sideline Stories, he was impressed with Cignetti and wanted to help—but he had certain conditions. “When they asked me for money, it was like, ‘I’m not going to give you money just so you can chase and bid the highest for everybody.’” Cuban wanted Cignetti to be strategic and “find the guys who know their roles”—and sometime near the end of the 2024 season, the alumnus began giving money to make that happen.

Just how much money, Cuban wouldn’t disclose, but The Indianapolis Star reported this fall that Cignetti’s “NIL war chest” has more than tripled since he took the job. Sources estimate that Mendoza was paid more than $2 million this season—13 times the amount Indiana had for its entire team just a few years ago. And now that the Hoosiers have found success, this money will likely just keep flowing. In recent weeks, as Indiana steamed toward the national-title game, Cuban gave even more. (“They’re living right” was how he put it when asked about the amount.)

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This isn’t a criticism of the Hoosiers. They deserve credit for what they’ve built. They’ve invested their money well, using it to sign three-star recruits instead of five-star ones, finding the “right” players instead of the “best” ones. And Cignetti has coached this team up, scowling from the sidelines, all the way to the championship game. I hope it ends well for him and Indiana on Monday night. I’d love to see Cignetti drop his scowl, Mendoza smile and thank God, and happy Hoosier fans spill into the streets, singing John Mellencamp songs.

Just don’t confuse this with a real underdog story. Those might be a thing of the past. Unlike Norman Dale, the coach in the film Hoosiers, Cignetti hasn’t cobbled together a miracle season with some kids he plucked from an Indiana cornfield. This team—like all great teams today—has been bought.