If Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti chooses to go full Ricky Bobby and quote the main character from “Talladega Nights” following a win in Monday’s College Football Playoff national championship game, it will be exactly as it should be.
“Here’s the deal: I’m the best there is. Plain and simple. I piss excellence.”
No. 1 Indiana has been the main character of the 2025 college football season, and a national championship win over No. 10 Miami at Hard Rock Stadium would only cement that status. This is a team that’s more than the sum of its parts, devoted to a single ideal, a team no one has been able to stop: legendary.
Here’s my national championship game prediction:
CFP National Championship Game: No. 1 Indiana vs. No. 10 Miami (Monday, 7:30 p.m. ET)
Winner: Indiana
Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti during a game between Alabama Crimson Tide and Indiana Hoosiers. (Photo by Melinda Meijer/ISI Photos/ISI Photos via Getty Images)
After watching the Hoosiers dismantle the Oregon Ducks 56-22 from the open-air press box at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, it’s difficult to point out a meaningful weakness that might prevent Indiana from becoming the first team since 1894 to finish a season 16-0.
In the age of the College Football Playoff, not far removed from three of the best teams to ever win the national title — 2018 Clemson, 2019 LSU and 2020 Alabama — it can feel hyperbolic to say this team will finish as one of the best teams to ever take the field in a sport that has spanned 156 years. However, given how Cignetti has totally flipped a program that was once a bottom-feeder into a burgeoning Godzilla, I don’t think it is.
And I’m not alone.
In a story I wrote earlier this week from the AFCA Coaches Convention in Charlotte, 22 out of 25 coaches I surveyed picked Indiana to beat Miami.
“You show me a more disciplined team?” one Power 4 assistant coach told me. “What Cignetti is doing is what we all want. They’re mean. They’re disciplined. They’re robots. Can I say murder robots? They’re football murder bots.”
Football. Murder. Bots.
Hoosiers by a million.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports. Follow him @RJ_Young.
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