For as long as anyone can remember, if a team from Indiana was going to legitimately contend for the college football national championship, that team was Notre Dame.
Some continued to believe that to be the only plausible scenario when the Irish defeated Indiana 27-17 in the first round of the 2024 College Football Playoff.
But Curt Cignetti has flipped the college football world upside down, with ramifications that have reshaped the power structure within the Hoosier State.
And as it turned out, it was IU that won the first national title by a team from Indiana since 1988. The exclamation point came this summer, when an IU football bus rolled through South Bend to display the national championship trophy at the school’s satellite campus.
IU and Cignetti’s influence on the sport is omnipresent, both nationally and locally. Even in the last week, two highly coveted Notre Dame recruiting targets have committed to the Hoosiers — in-state 5-star wide receiver Monshun Sales, and 2028 4-star quarterback Lukas Prock.
Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman is the most promising leader the Irish have had since Lou Holtz. He’s already reached a national title game, and has his team positioned in the 2026 preseason top-5. But despite that early success, he finds himself inexplicably operating in the shadows of IU football.
And he knows it.
“I don’t love that (national champion Indiana) being up the road like four hours,” Freeman said on ESPN’s First Take this week. “I mean, we got to make sure that we’re putting our program in position to do that.”
Indiana has become the inspirational model throughout the college football landscape.
If it can happen at IU, it can happen anywhere. For generations it was more than just Notre Dame that loomed large over IU, keeping the Hoosiers buried in the depths of college football irrelevancy.
Freeman, a product of Ohio who played at Ohio State, knows that as well as anyone. Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan. The regional power structure was too much for Indiana to overcome.
Or so it seemed.
“Indiana’s a national champion. Like, think about what we’re saying. Indiana football is a national champion of college football,” Freeman said.
“That program. Like, nobody would have said that two years ago. Nobody would have thought about it. And it doesn’t happen by luck. It’s work that’s put in.
“You got to take your hat off and give credit where credit’s due. And a lot of credit is owed to that program.”
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