Like many, I watched in amazement as Indiana hoisted the trophy for its first ever National Championship. I have no connection to the University, but the story got me excited uniquely for a CFB team. Perhaps I was rooting a little harder than normal considering news had just broke that Indiana’s opponent, Miami, had stolen Darian Mensah from my alma mater. Regardless, I thought to myself that I had truly witnessed history.
The next day, I was shocked to find out that others believed they had witnessed history as well, but in a completely opposite way to me. I had witnessed one of the most rare and spectacular miracles in sport. They had witnessed a changing of the tides, a reversal of all we knew to be true, a world where any program could become national champions.
I couldn’t think this is further from the truth. Obviously, NIL and the transfer portal have changed the sport in many ways, but not so much that we should expect perennial losers to become national champions.
I posit that at least 1 of the following 2 things must be true about Indiana’s run:
Curt Cignetti is a unique genius, one of the most gifted coaches ever at program building and talent evaluation that the sport has ever seen, or
Indiana identified a market inefficiency for these older, low star players who had developed into something at the college level, and who were available in the transfer portal.
In the following years, I think we will increasingly realize that either one of, or both of, these facts are true. However, both of them preclude the idea that this is easily replicable.
If Cignetti is a genius, then maybe he keeps winning, but we won’t see a Rutgers rise up to 16-0 unless they too find a genius level coach willing to stick around long enough.
If the market inefficiency has been identified, then every school is aware, and despite the previous underappreciation for these players, they’re still a finite resource. It isn’t a viable strategy to build your team this way if every school in America has realized it’s a good idea to pick up the 0-star guard who put on 30 lbs. of muscle in college.
My problem with this dialogue, moreso than just believing it to be wrong, is that it undercuts the miracle. I love when a sport gives us a moment that is too improbable to be fiction. To reduce what just happened to the idea of “well college football has changed, so you’re going to be seeing a lot more of these” is just boring.
I don’t want to see more- I want to cherish the insanity of what has just been seen. Yet, your average person takes what has just happened and wants to tell you what that means about the future of the world. I’m reminded of this Ringer article I read a few years ago: Inside the Denver Nuggets' Plan to Build a Dynasty.
This article released right after their championship and discusses how they are going to build a dynasty with their roster. As of now, they’ve yet to come close to the same success. And yes, I get that most of these types of articles are just puff pieces, but humor me for a second in taking the words in the article at face value. It makes sense in the moment- the Nuggets have just won the championship, so the easiest thing to imagine is that the world will continue to be the way it is right at that time. There’s no introspection to realize that most NBA champions never repeat, even though I’m sure that most, if not all, feel they’re in the process of building a dynasty after their first title.
I’m additionally reminded by one of the more humorous articles I read in the last few years about the Atlanta Hawks: The Hawks want to be Warriors 2.0 with Trae Young. That’s a good start. I’ll give you a hint: it didn’t have a good finish. This article is even more apparently slop, and I remember sending it to my friends at the time saying how silly it was. Understand the Golden State dominance of this era- it made people believe that the only way to win a title was to emulate the Warriors, despite the fact that the title winning teams since haven’t looked much like the Warriors lineup. We were so caught up in that moment of dominance that a roster construction of Dollar-Store Steph, Klay, and Draymond was turning people’s heads.
I went on my NBA side tangent to make this point: the current moment doesn’t always tell us what the future will be. Sometimes the current moment is unique, especially often when it is fully unprecedented like this Indiana Championship.
There’s too much desire to take every event as an opportunity to predict what’s next to come. Instead, take a deep breath, remember this feeling, and realize you might have witnessed something you will never see again.