What can we learn from 2025 Indiana football?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points. I hope you all had a wonderful and restful winter holiday season!

We’ve got several announcements of our own to make over the next few weeks, but there’s one I’d like to quickly mention now. We will be at this year’s NCAA convention! Both I and my colleague at NIL Wire, Kyle Rowland, will be in D.C. from Jan. 13-15. I’ve already made a few commitments to speak to graduate classes while I’m there, but if you’ll be in town and would like to catch up, drop me an email! We’ll see you there!

There will be plenty of time to talk about bylaw changes, collective bargaining, revenue generation and a whole bunch of administrative stuff. But today, I’d like to quickly talk about the Indiana Hoosiers.

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A theory from my pal Bud Elliott over at CBS could almost completely predict success in the four-team playoff era. It’s called the Blue Chip Theory, and it states that teams that win championships must have signed more four- and five-star recruits out of high school than three-star guys.

Almost every team to even make the four-team playoff field over the past decade recruited at that level, and every champion did.

And in the first year of the expanded College Football Playoff, the theory mostly held up. Ohio State (an elite recruiting program) defeated Notre Dame (another elite recruiting program), and late-round playoff spots went to teams like Oregon, Texas, Penn State and Georgia. A few teams that didn’t recruit at that level — like Indiana, SMU and Boise State — made the field, but they didn’t make it far.

But this year? The bracket looks different.

Before the season, CBS identified the 18 teams that recruited at an elite enough clip to have a Blue Chip Ratio over 50 percent. Those teams? Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Texas A&M, Oregon, Texas, LSU, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Penn State, Miami, Florida, Auburn, Michigan, USC, Clemson, Tennessee and Florida State. Just short of that bar were South Carolina and Ole Miss.

At the time (July of 2025), here’s what Bud said about a team potentially beating that model:

Now, there were a lot of elite teams on that BCR list. Seven of them made the playoff, and two, Oregon and Miami, are in the quarterfinals. Ole Miss is just outside that range.

But Indiana is nowhere close. The Hoosiers signed just one blue-chip high school player in 2025, and just one more in 2024, well behind programs like Purdue, Minnesota and Rutgers. In terms of team talent composite, which adds up the recruiting ranking of everybody on the roster (including transfers), Indiana has just seven blue-chip players. Its roster rating is 72, behind teams including Boston College, Tulane, UTSA, Oregon State and Purdue.

Teams with those sorts of rosters, historically, battle for spots in the Little Caesar’s Bowl, not the College Football Playoff.

And Indiana didn’t just sneak into its spot in the Peach Bowl. It flat-out kicked the shit out of Alabama in the Rose Bowl after earning the top seed in the field. The Hoosiers are undefeated, with wins over Oregon and Ohio State.

So how is this possible? I freely admit I am not enough of a Certified Ball Knower to offer a completely conclusive answer, and I don’t think we have quite enough data to totally throw out the Blue Chip Ratio as a predictive tool. But I do have a few theories.

The Hoosiers have just one underclassman in their starting offensive 11 (a redshirt freshman) and two sophomores on defense. Many of the team’s most important players are redshirt juniors and seniors … dudes who have been in college weight programs and training systems for four or five years.

That last point is significant. I don’t think having a bunch of dudes who are 21, 22, 23, etc. on the roster matters as much as it does to have a team whose players have played a lot of college football. BYU never enjoyed much of bonus for having one of the oldest rosters in the country over the 2000s, because spending two years dodging Malaria in northern Brazil as a missionary doesn’t actually make you a better football player. But spending two years in the weight room, in the film room and on the training table can.

The concept of getting a roster “old” has been a college basketball buzzword for several years. If you’re a mid-major, the thinking went that it would be better to have five guys who aren’t as athletically gifted but are smart, disciplined and experienced than to have five guys who can jump out of the gym but have only been actually coached for, like, two months. When major upsets happened in March, the Cinderella often followed that profile: a scrappy team full of seniors.

Historically, that’s been more difficult to assemble in college football. But there may be some real truth to it. I wrote last year that the engine of Ohio State’s 2024 national title wasn’t so much transfers or elite underclassmen (although those both helped) as it was spending NIL money to bring back a lot of experienced players. It’s why Penn State was such a trendy national title pick this year too.

College football coaches have come out of nowhere to quickly bring lousy teams into contention. Bill Snyder at Kansas State, LaVell Edwards at BYU, Barry Alvarez at Wisconsin and Randy Walker at Northwestern have all done variations of this before …but what Curt Cignetti has done at Indiana is arguably the most impressive turnaround job in college football history.

How is he pulling this off? Well, for one, he’s been doing it a while. Cignetti isn’t a hotshot offensive wizard who looks like he’s barely old enough to buy a beer. He’s 64 years old. He’s coached QBs at NC State (including some dude named Phillip Rivers) and wideouts at Alabama under Nick Saban. Then, he’s won everywhere he’s been a head coach, from Division II IUP to Elon to James Madison.

To the extent there’s a Cignetti blueprint? It appears to be based on a relentless focus on the fundamentals, dramatically improving existing players and being elite at scouting and identifying potential. Via the Athletic:

On the field, my read of what has made Indiana so dang good is that the players just don’t make mistakes. The Hoosiers are top in FBS in turnover margin, top in third down conversion percentage, third in penalty yards and seventh in yards per play. If you have experienced guys who are capable of making good decisions again and again and again … you’re going to always be in a position to win.

Or, as my pal Richard Johnson described it over at CBS:

I think it’s a little bit of a misnomer to just say Indiana is the product of Cignetti taking all of his old James Madison players, as there are key contributors who came from other programs, like Maryland, Notre Dame and Cal. And the idea of “having an advantage by taking a bunch of Sun Belt dudes” only works if you’re really good at identifying and developing guys at a Sun Belt school.

Without public data, we can’t really say for sure, but I have yet to hear from an athletic director, reporter or industry person I trust that Indiana is rocking a team payroll anywhere near those of Ohio State, Oregon, Texas, Texas Tech or any other top spender. In On3’s preseason survey about team payrolls, Indiana didn’t get a single vote.

But Indiana has made meaningful investments elsewhere. According to FY24’s MFRS reports (obtained and organized by the Extra Points Library), Indiana reported over $61 million in total operational expenses for football. That’s 13th in the country among public schools, more than Auburn, Oklahoma and Oregon.

Indiana spent big to keep Cignetti and his assistants, and it’s about to do it again. When the dust settles after this season, Cignetti and his staff will be among the very highest paid in the entire country. Couple that with what Indiana has invested in operations and staff, and you have a school that is just as committed to football success as the others on that top-15 list … even if it might not have a $30 million payroll.

I also suspect there is something to the idea that recruiting out of the transfer portal is really hard.

High school recruiting rankings are not perfect, but they’ve been highly predictive for the past 15 years, especially on the aggregate. High school recruiting rankings are a great way to see if a particular athlete has the physical measurables of a potential NFL draft pick and a good projection of how strong a college player he might become.

But transfer rankings? They’re a bit different.

If you have a kid who had high four-star measurables as a 17-year-old, but he hasn’t demonstrated those at the college level in two seasons, how do you evaluate his potential? Is he still a four-star? How much do you “ding” him for not meeting his previous development curve? And how do you project a very productive player at a lower level who is a few inches shorter and a few steps slower than the guys at the all-American camps?

Here’s an example. Let’s take last year’s transfer rankings. The No. 1 recruit, a “five star” on the 247 top transfer board, was Nico Iamaleava, who went from Tennessee to UCLA, and was … fine. (UCLA was not.) Fernando Mendoza, the guy who just won the dang Heisman Trophy, was fourth. But you could also find very productive Power 4 starters in the low 20s … and lots of guys who didn’t play much in between. That’s true at nearly every position group.

My hunch is that over time, the transfer rankings will become predictive. But if you have a coach who really is better at talent evaluation than his peers, it’ll show up in the portal compared to high school recruiting, where everybody has more data and more time. My gut is Indiana has that.

That was probably worth at least three wins a season, right?