Nobody outside the IU football program thought the Hoosiers could do it.
For nearly three years, no one had done it.
Coming into their Oct. 11 home game against IU, the No. 2 ranked Oregon Ducks had won 24 straight regular season games, and 19 straight at Autzen Stadium. They were 41-1 at home going back to 2018.
The odds were literally stacked against Indiana.
Vegas had Oregon as a 7.5 point favorite, and ESPN’s FPI gave the Hoosiers just a 32% chance to win.
The Ducks came in averaging 46.6 points per game, and quarterback Dante Moore was the early Heisman Trophy favorite. Meanwhile, the Oregon defense had only allowed seven touchdown through the first five games.
This was clearly an IU program on the rise, but still a team the outside world doubted. And with bad road losses at Notre Dame and Ohio State in the not-so-distant past, doubts probably lingered on the inside too.
Let’s face it — this looked like a game Indiana could afford to lose while staying in the College Football Playoff hunt.
But everything could change for Indiana on a mostly cloudy — and at times rainy — mid-October afternoon in Eugene. If Indiana could win that game against those odds, anything was possible.
“The big game, the big step for us, was when we went to Oregon,” Curt Cignetti said at the Big Ten meetings in California. “We had to make that step.”
The Hoosiers made more than a step.
They surged to the forefront of the national conversation with the program’s first-ever top-5 road win.
Oregon entered the game allowing just one sack total on the season yet gave up six sacks to Indiana. Moore had just one interception on the first five games of the season to go with 14 touchdowns, but against the Hoosiers, he finished with one touchdown and two interceptions. An Oregon offense that prided itself on establishing the run was held to just 81 rushing yards, and 267 yards of total offense — with much of that production coming late after Indiana had pulled away.
Meanwhile Indiana’s offense came through in the clutch against Oregon’s vaunted defense. For the second game in a row on the road, quarterback Fernando Mendoza followed a fourth quarter interception with a touchdown drive. It was becoming clear no moment was going to be too big for this band of misfits.
The win at Oregon catapulted the Hoosiers on to one of the greatest seasons in college football history, as they stacked big win after big win.
There was the road win at Penn State, Indiana’s first-ever victory there. That’s when Cignetti thought he might have a team of destiny.
And then there was the first-ever Big Ten Championship game win against a team the Hoosiers hadn’t defeated in more than 35 years.
“Ohio State was a another big step, and then we just stayed focused,” Cignetti said.
Belief became conviction. And by the time they reached the national championship game against Miami on its home field, an IU win became the expectation, both inside and outside the program.
That’s why Cignetti says once the clock hit all zeroes and the confetti fell, the scene wasn’t chaotic. Yes there were hugs, and tears were shed on the field. The magnitude of what IU had just accomplished necessitated as much.
But it wasn’t a scene like when a March Madness buzzer beater delivers a major upset no one saw coming.
“The thing about it, it wasn’t euphoric, because we expected to get it done,” Cignetti said.
And the foundation for that expectation was laid more than 2,000 miles from home, on an October afternoon in Oregon.
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