Tim Cowlishaw: Indiana is the best story in college football. Can SMU top Hoosiers in 2026?

I feel, though, that I’m surely the first to say, ”You’re on deck, Rhett Lashlee.” An SMU national title is about the only thing I can conjure to even compare to the job the Hoosiers finished in Monday night’s hold-your-breath 27-21 win over the Hurricanes in Miami.

First, a note about Indiana football history. There isn’t one.

Maybe that’s unfair. The 1967 squad snuck into the Rose Bowl to get taken down by (oops) O.J. Simpson and the USC Trojans. I don’t know how Indiana managed a three-way tie in the Big Ten that season. In the seven years leading up to 1967, the Hoosiers’ conference record was 5-39-1. Within two years of the Rose Bowl, they went back to losing conference records. They would finish above .500 in Big Ten play eight of the next 55 seasons.

Now we know why Curt Cignetti carries a perpetual look of a man with serious acid reflux. What Cignetti managed Monday night is far, far different from lifting up, say, Auburn or Oklahoma or Florida State from a few down seasons to a national title. As he stated after the game, it really can be done in Indiana, a land and a school where basketball has been the only real concern for nearly a century. For those who track these things, Indiana is considered the only team without a single five-star recruit to win a championship. That‘s not to say the Hoosiers didn’t jack up the payroll like everyone else. Their roster is filled with four- and five- and six-year players and transfers.

I can’t compare this Indiana team to the LSU squad that rolled over everyone on the way to 15-0 six years ago. As good as Fernando Mendoza and his colleagues are, I’m not sure a team with Joe Burrow, Justin Jefferson and Ja’Marr Chase is getting stopped by anyone. It doesn’t matter because that Tigers’ team is ancient history — two head coaches ago (not counting two interims) — in today’s game. The Hoosiers are kings of the football world, and everyone in Alabama is bowing down in their honor.

The Texas Western comparison has been made, but it’s really one more of shocking people into their senses and overcoming their racism enough to allow Black players to play in the Southeastern Conference and the Southwest Conference and elsewhere. In terms of a major upset, Don Haskins’ team (which would become UTEP) was ranked No. 3 to Kentucky’s No. 1 and had knocked off strong Cincinnati and Kansas teams in the NCAA tournament. But the first team to start five Black players showed college administrators what they were, rather pathetically, still missing, almost two decades after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

If college athletic programs were chasing dollars back then the way they do today, Bill Russell’s back-to-back championships at USF in the mid-Fifties would have crushed segregation a decade before Texas Western’s shining moment.

So how does SMU fit into this? Well, what could possibly rank alongside what Cignetti did with a team that has 26 zero or one-win seasons in the Big Ten since 1960? How about a school that was knocked down to its roots by the NCAA’s Death Penalty, then forced to spend three decades wandering through the darkness of what was the Group of Five before negotiating a deal with the Atlantic Coast Conference that was so favorable to the ACC it couldn’t say no?

In 2024, the Mustangs became the first team to go undefeated in a major conference after being elevated from the smaller ranks. They earned an at-large spot in the first 12-team College Football Playoff. And while a 9-4 record this past season was a bit of a disappointment, as Miami was crossing midfield and surging towards the goal line and a possible last-second championship-winning touchdown Monday night, I was checking to make sure that the last team to beat the Hurricanes this season was … yes, indeed, SMU back on Nov. 1.

With Kevin Jennings back for another season at quarterback, who’s to say what is and isn’t possible? The Mustangs had a couple of silly losses (three points to Cal, one point to Wake Forest) that a more experienced team would have avoided, not to mention a double overtime loss to Baylor that they mismanaged down the stretch.

So why not SMU next year or in the near future? If you’re telling me that the Indiana Hoosiers just went 16-0 and knocked off Ohio State, Alabama, Oregon and a reborn Miami team in their last four games after the regular season, I am telling you that in the brave new (and very messy) world of college football, anything and everything is possible.

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