College football Week 7: Indiana pulls huge upset with win over Oregon

So overmuch of assemblage shot these past fewer years has been defined by what's new. There's the transportation portal, name, representation and likeness money, gross sharing, revamped rosters, realignment, backstage equity firms looking to bash concern with schools and leagues anxious to physique up their currency reserves truthful they tin yet spend to physique those gold-plated lockers they've had their eyes on. If you fell into a coma successful 2019 and awoke a week ago, the entirety of the athletics would consciousness similar immoderate benignant of fever dream.

And yet, for each this change, for each that's caller successful assemblage football, 1 happening has remained steadfastly true: The biggest brands person continued to predominate the sport.

It has been astir 3 decades since we've had a first-time nationalist champion. It's been much than 4 decades since Florida State and Miami forced their mode into the staid ranks of assemblage football's bluish bloods. It has been a beingness since idiosyncratic successful the Big Ten could realistically beryllium called "fun."

But present we are, halfway done the 2025 season, and Indiana has fixed america thing genuinely unsocial and entertaining, genuinely caller -- a programme that had wallowed successful obscurity for decades, present a genuine powerfulness connected the nationalist stage.

"We showed the state we're a existent team," said backmost Fernando Mendoza aft Saturday's stunning 30-20 triumph implicit No. 3 Oregon.

It's true. Indiana has uniforms, a playbook and everything else.

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Elijah Sarratt’s TD puts Indiana up for good

Fernando Mendoza connects with Elijah Sarratt to instrumentality the pb against the Ducks.

The advent of NIL, gross sharing and the portal was expected to simply marque the affluent richer, but the other has mostly been true, and Indiana is Exhibit No. 1. Until 2020, Taylor Swift had not been live during a twelvemonth successful which the Hoosiers finished ranked successful the AP Top 25, and stunningly she hadn't written a azygous opus astir however bittersweet that was. Even that 2020 play was mostly a figment of COVID's artificial reality, and the programme regressed to 2-10 a play later. It's astir intolerable to overstate conscionable however bleak Indiana's shot past had been, truthful atrocious that adjacent amid each the hoops program's malaise, nary 1 ever thought, "Hey, possibly we could attraction astir shot instead." Indiana was cheerfully irrelevant, not adjacent interestingly bad, but alternatively conscionable unnecessary to immoderate larger conversation. Like the protagonist of each John Mellencamp song, Indiana was a programme destined to relive the aforesaid indignities each past generation, nary substance however hard it fought against the crushing obviousness of it all. It was Jack and Diane and Gerry DiNardo.

Then Curt Cignetti arrived, overhauled the roster, brashly told the satellite to Google him, and aft scrolling past 73 sponsored results selling subject people generators, you'd find that the Hoosiers' manager had won everyplace helium had ever ...