There are just two possible outcomes to the college football game that will be played at Hard Rock Stadium on Monday night — and both are pretty amazing, if you think about it.
- The top-seeded and undefeated Indiana Hoosiers win their first national championship. They’ll be the first team in college football history to go 16-0. And, lest we forget, they began the 2025 season with more losses than any other program in the history of the sport. They complete a miraculous two-year turnaround, one of the greatest and most unlikely stories in all of sports.
- The U is Back. The 10th-seeded Miami Hurricanes — the very last at-large team into the 12-team College Football Playoff field, and a polarizing selection as such — go on a spectacular four-game postseason run to win the program’s sixth national championship. Mario Cristobal returns his alma mater to glory, securing the Hurricanes’ first title in nearly a quarter-century and making Cristobal one of the few men in the history of the sport to win a national championship as a player and as a head coach.
These storylines are so compelling — as are both teams’ paths to this point. Indiana had to beat Ohio State, Alabama and Oregon (twice) to get to the precipice of a national title. Miami had to overcome two late-season losses in ACC play (and the CFP selection committee) for a chance to even play this out on the field.
This matchup is proof of concept for those of us who advocated for an expanded Playoff field. It’s not just that Miami wouldn’t be here because two-loss teams ranked No. 10 in the committee’s final set of rankings never got to sniff the previous edition of the CFP. It’s also important to note that schools like Indiana only believed it possible to be here, too, because college football itself changed.
Indiana-Miami is a title game we never would have gotten in the four-team CFP era. Indiana-Miami is a title game we never would have even imagined in the BCS era. It’s a matchup only made possible by the current state of college football.
The Hoosiers went from “the outhouse to the penthouse,” as billionaire alum Mark Cuban put it, because they were willing to invest in the people and resources that you need to be a major player in college football in the NIL/revenue sharing era of the sport. They spend aggressively to attract players out of the transfer portal that they believe can fit both the program and its scheme. They identify talent incredibly well, and they develop those players even better. That’s how a roster of mostly three-star recruits (and zero five-stars) can turn into a national championship-caliber team.
Oh, and they hired a unicorn as their head coach. Other schools may spend the money on players, facilities, and staff, but it may not work quite as well or quite as fast as it has at Indiana. And that’s because of Curt Cignetti, the man who believed the impossible could actually be possible in Bloomington — when everybody else laughed at the idea.
College football is a sport that had long been dominated by blue bloods, and blue bloods were always the ones best positioned to stay atop the sport. The Alabamas, Ohio States and Georgias of the world were the best at attracting top talent — and retaining it. Until transfer rules changed to allow athletes immediate eligibility and an unlimited number of transfers, those bluebloods could also stockpile talent with relative ease. Now, you don’t see a ton of blue-chip recruits content to wait their turn when they could play (and get paid to play) somewhere else, especially if so many schools have a real path to the Playoff these days.
That is what is so refreshing about this new era of college football — that it includes teams like Indiana, Texas Tech and Ole Miss alongside the Alabamas, Ohio States and Georgias. Hope abounds. And that’s true, too, even for a blue blood like Miami that has been largely dormant for more than two decades. It’s anyone’s game these days.
And that’s why this championship matchup matters, no matter who wins it. Because it’s doubling as a giant neon sign advertising the new era of the sport. There’s a clear dividing line between all that’s happened before and a world in which Indiana and Miami can meet with a national title at stake.
Or, you can be Cristobal or Cignetti, and all you’re actually thinking about is how you’re going to be the better football team over the course of 60 minutes on Monday night.
“I don’t see us getting caught up in any nostalgic moments or whatnot,” Cristobal said on Sunday.
Added Cignetti: “It’s time to sharpen the saw now. Throw those warm fuzzies out the door, that 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. You don’t go to war with warm milk and cookies.”
But it is that milk and those cookies that endeared this team and its story to the nation. And it’s that snack combination — with a tiny cup of cafecito for good measure for these ‘Canes — that’s helped change the sport for good.
