Some context for those new here, before we get going:
I’m not sure anyone has been more anti-Curt Cignetti over the last 14 months than us. We had two criticisms. First, against good opponents, he coached like a coward. He turtled against Ohio State, trying to minimize the degree of the blowout. This wasn’t unforgivable—Indiana had an optics problem last year, and a 60-point loss might have kept them out of the playoff. When Indiana did make the playoff, and Cignetti did the same thing against Notre Dame in a playoff game? That was unforgivable. Football coaches are notorious for their wimpy streak, but Cignetti’s acquiescence in South Bend had shades of Philippe Pétain.
Even that, though, would have been fine if it weren’t for our second problem with Curt Cignetti: Curt Cignetti talked a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot, lot, lot, lot, lot of shit. It started in fair territory. “I win. Google me,” he famously told skeptics at his introductory press conference. By the time Indiana arrived in South Bend, it was past the third-base line and way up into the grandstand. On the biggest day of his coaching career, Cignetti spent the pre-kickoff hours preening on College Gameday, equating himself to Nick Saban and giving little mention to the players on his roster. Then, he punted from the 50 and took the ball out of Kurtis Rourke’s hands,. only to then spend the weeks after the game pretending Indiana had competed because the Hoosiers technically only lost by ten.
In a sentence, our complaint was that Cignetti didn’t earn the talk he talked.
That is no longer the case.
Some thoughts on some teams as we turn the page on the 2025 college football season and look ahead to 2026:
Curt Cignetti, Indiana, and Fernando Mendoza
1. Curt Cignetti is the best college football coach in the country, and what he did these last 26 months is the most impressive coaching performance by any college football coach in history. Seeing Indiana named national champions looked like a scene from a video game. Before Cignetti came to Bloomington, it would have been less surprising if Hawaii, Princeton, or Ferris State had one day won it all.
2. Indiana’s championship challenges our belief in the power of high school recruiting rankings. We’ve described a team’s score on the 247 Talent Composite as a measure of how much speed, size, and strength there is inside the program, equating it to the amount of capital inside an economy in college football’s Cobb-Douglas production function. Are those rankings worthless? No. We should be more hesitant to write teams off based on those numbers alone, but more than anything, Indiana’s place on the talent ranking (somewhere between Boston College and Toledo) demonstrates how impressive a job Cignetti did.
3. How did Indiana make up for the talent shortfall? By doing everything else almost perfectly. Dating back to this program’s JMU days, Cignetti and his staff identified undervalued prospects and developed them to just about their full potential. Scouting executed. Position coaches executed. In Bloomington, Cignetti’s staff out-schemed opponent after opponent. Coordinators executed. In the transfer portal last offseason, Indiana prioritized not only high performers but strong leaders. There’s an adage in baseball that teams should be strong “up the middle,” built around their catcher, shortstop, and center fielder. Indiana’s offense was strong up the middle, led by Fernando Mendoza—yes, he was a two-star recruit—and Pat Coogan, the Rose Bowl MVP who left Notre Dame because he wasn’t expected to get playing time. We shouldn’t over-credit Mendoza and Coogan, because the work was roster-wide, but agent-heavy programs like Miami and USC will never get the program-wide buy-in that Indiana got out of this 2025 football team. Players executed.
4. We talked a lot early in the season about how Arizona State and Notre Dame had magic in 2024, and how magic is hard to replicate as a strategy for winning games. This Indiana team had magic. It was not a dominant football team from wire to wire. It was not 2019 LSU. Indiana struggled against Iowa. Indiana struggled against spiraling Penn State. But Indiana had magic. A lot of that came from Mendoza, who lacks some physical tools (the two-star rating looked a little justified on that first half Hail Mary) but is, pure and simple, a winner. Maybe some came from Coogan as well. Maybe it came from D’Angelo Ponds, or from Omar Cooper Jr. who saved the Penn State game with his toe-touch. Most likely, it came from just about everybody. It takes a team to be a special team.
5. Indiana is and isn’t well-built for the rest of the Cignetti era. Their schedules will be manageable as long as the Big Ten remains top-heavy, especially since their next four years of nonconference are still uniformly buy games, schedules made when bowl eligibility was the objective. Resources are as unlimited in Bloomington as they can be anywhere. But coordinators and position coaches will churn, and it does take a few years to stock the pond when it comes to depth. Next year especially, Indiana will be more vulnerable to injury than Ohio State is, or Georgia. The most bearish indicator is the magic. There will never be another Fernando Mendoza at Indiana. Overall, a third-place finish in next year’s Big Ten seems reasonable. A playoff appearance should be expected. A national championship repeat should not be in the cards. From 2027 forward, the road is open. What will this basketball school decide to be?
6. As for Curt Cignetti: He backed up the talk. He also toned down the talk, for reasons we can only speculate. Maybe he knew the critics would be proven wrong on the field. Maybe it was how much quieter the critics were this time around. Maybe Indiana’s administration or Cignetti’s agency saw the backlash coming before it really arrived, giving the coach some coaching. Maybe any remake was temporary and he’ll be an asshole again next season. If he is, it’s hard to complain. There is no better coaching performance in the history of college football than his first two years at Indiana. There are few better coaching stories than his rise.
Miami’s Built for a Giant Playoff. Mario Cristobal Is Not.
7. My tastes aren’t everyone’s, but I’m glad Miami lost. It would have felt wrong for a team to win a national championship after they spent a whole month in the middle of the season dicking around. It used to be that college football championships were always won through perfection or the nearest possible thing. American sports fans love playoffs, though, and American sports decision-makers love short-term cash grabs at the expense of the long-term health of their sport. You can dick around now and still win a national championship. Thankfully, Miami didn’t.
8. It’s predictable that Miami will dick around, and not because of any flaw in Mario Cristobal. I don’t like Miami. I like Mario Cristobal. The reason Miami will always dick around is that that’s their identity. Not directly, the way you can trust the Chicago Bears to do the stupidest things once they’re done celebrating their fifth-place finish in the NFL Playoffs. Indirectly. Miami’s identity is opulence, and opulence doesn’t lend itself well to focus at a college athlete’s age. People call Miami a great job because recruiting’s so easy. Godspeed to Cristobal, who has to keep his athletes from letting Florida State come back against them while they’re celebrating in the third quarter.
9. Cristobal is doing a remarkable job, and Miami might win a national championship soon. If they don’t, it’ll probably be because of Cristobal’s limitation: The man does not know how to navigate a close football game. Miami might not have scored a touchdown if they’d gone for that fourth down in the final minute of the second quarter. There wasn’t much time left. But a 50-yard field goal, from that kicking unit? A wild move. Miami survived Cristobal’s decisions in the Notre Dame game. They survived his decisions in the Texas A&M game. They blew the doors off Ohio State, and Cristobal navigated the Mississippi game well. But playoffs are full of close games, especially for teams who start celebrating in the third quarter and let defeated opponents back into it. Until Cristobal outsources game management to a specialized assistant, Miami’s going to be playing with a loaded gun.
Pete Golding, Montana State, and Other Loose Thoughts
It’s been way too long. Sorry, everybody. More on the website soon about the future of The Barking Crow. It’s hazy.
10. This wasn’t my favorite college football season. College football media groupthink turned the offseason into a bizarre Penn State coronation and September into a parallelly bizarre Arch Manning schadenfreude circle jerk. The stupid expanded playoff turned October and November into a debate over whether one head-to-head result should outweigh the rest of a 21-game sample. In December, my alma mater got a months-overdue punishment for losing to a shitty Texas A&M defense right after my family school’s savior of a head coach left Ames in part because Penn State was too incompetent to hire someone else before Signing Day. Both those teams declined bowl games, with college football more and more following the example of men’s college basketball, the only college sport that’s managed to lose salience over the last 25 years. A Cignetti hater, Cubs fan, and father of a one-year-old who goes to daycare, I spent one Saturday in October watching Indiana upset Oregon, falling asleep during the fourth quarter as I drifted into a fever, then waking up every few minutes over the next seven hours to barf and to shit my guts out. I watched the Cubs season end from the toilet with my phone perched on my shaking thigh, sweating and laughing at how awful the day and month and year had become. Maybe this college football season rocked and I’m just not doing great personally. But I am glad this is all over, and I am excited for next year, and I am nervous about what Tony Petitti will manage to do to this sport so many of us love over the seven months between now and then.
11. Someone who made the end of the year way better? Pete Golding! I wish we’d managed to blog earlier this month, because it’s hard to imagine better poetic justice than Golding’s team upsetting Georgia, who Lane Kiffin didn’t come close to beating himself. I don’t know where Mississippi goes from here. A head football coach’s job is a lot bigger than coaching one football team for one month. But good for Mississippi. That run alone was worth the quick hire.
12. I was relieved Montana State beat Illinois State in that FCS Championship two weeks ago, mostly because Montana State’s false start problems were sadder than Illinois State’s kicking problems. Brent Vigen deserves a national championship, and I’m glad he got it. I do think, too, that this Montana State team was better than North Dakota State. Or at least close enough to NDSU to make it feel like the best team won.
13. On that topic, Movelor had NDSU 43rd in the country and Montana State 54th, separated by 2.2 points in the final ratings. We’ll get these up at some point onto the site, but the final top ten, plus other teams of note:
- #1 Indiana: +51.8
- #2 Ohio State: +45.2
- #3 Oregon: +43.7
- #4 Notre Dame: +43.7
- #5 Texas Tech: +42.5
- #6 Miami: +42.5
- #7 Mississippi: +39.4
- #8 Georgia: +39.1
- #9 Texas: +37.7
- #10 Utah: +37.6
- #11 Penn State: +35.5
- #12 Vanderbilt: +35.5
- #13 Alabama: +34.9
- #14 Iowa: +34.3
- #15 Washington: +33.3
- #16 Oklahoma: +32.1
- #17 Texas A&M: +31.8
- #18 SMU: +30.5
- #19 BYU: +30.0
- #23 James Madison: +27.8
- #32 Duke: +25.9
- #61 Tulane: +18.2
14. To rehash a month-old debate…JMU wasn’t a problem with this playoff. Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas A&M were. The SEC is deeper than any other conference, but it is not that good at the top. We’ll see if next year’s committee starts to accept this. It isn’t all that new. Was Tulane a problem with this playoff? Maybe. Duke didn’t deserve to make it, but neither did Tulane, and neither did Miami, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, or honestly frankly Oregon or Mississippi. It’s always tempting to retrofit playoff formats to seasons we’ve just seen, so I won’t do that here, but I will just note that it’s fun when conference championships matter, that it’s hard to make conference championships fair when leagues are as large as they are, and that a smaller playoff is better than a larger one in the long run. Finally, I know this isn’t an original take, but make the Rose Bowl the national championship and play the FCS Championship after it as a little dessert, and don’t play any college football games after New Year’s Day. I know that crunches the calendar but it wouldn’t if folks weren’t making the playoff so big that Bama, Oklahoma, and A&M all got in.
15. I don’t know when we’ll blog again, let alone about college football. My hope is to have a college football post up once a week or so this offseason, with some of those updates on new features we’re adding to Movelor as we try to make it the best college football model in the land. Realistically, very little of that will happen. We’ll see you when we see you. Bark.
**
