By Chris Schumerth | @ChrisSchumerth
Sports Capital Journalism Program
LOS ANGELES – Don’t be fooled by the pagentry of the Tournament of Roses, the traditions extending back more than a century, and the majesty of the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena on New Year’s Day. Indiana coach Curt Cignetti is within his rights to insist upon routine for his football team’s unprecedented business trip, but the rose-colored reality is that nothing about any of this is normal.
Let’s be clear: the Indiana Hoosiers have never won a Rose Bowl. They last played in one in 1968 when they lost to USC and O.J. Simpson, 14-3. They never experienced a No. 1 national ranking and a Heisman Trophy winner until this month, the climax of a 13-0 season, the first perfect record in school history.
Alabama football earned national acclaim and validation 100 years ago Thursday, within that same stadium in Pasadena, with a come-from-behind 20-19 victory over Washington in what Rose Bowl historian Maxwell Stiles called “The Rose Bowl’s Greatest Game.” Alabama, which has claimed 18 national championships, has a record of 5-2-1 in its previous eight Rose Bowl Game appearances, even though most of the game’s 112-year history has been limited to Big Ten and Pacific Coast teams.
“You probably know more about the mystique than they do,” Cignetti said about his team’s approach to its Rose Bowl opponent. “Our guys just know what they see on tape.”
Maybe.
The Crimson Tide are embracing their role as — as hard as this may be to believe – a 7-point underdog after the first-round victory over Oklahoma. The tape reveals uncharacteristic stumbles in a 11-3 season, including a rushing game that was held to 87 or fewer yards seven times. In the Southeastern Conference Championship Game, Georgia held the Crimson Tide to minus-3 rushing yards.
And yet, in the 90 seasons of the Associated Press poll, Alabama’s 11 victories over a No. 1-ranked team are the most in the history of the sport. To listen to the Tide players, it’s as if all the negative scrutiny has become a prelude to another great Alabama moment.
“All the noise of just not being a good team, us not being tough, we shouldn’t be in the playoffs,” said Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson. “We come out with a win. Same thing here this week, being an underdog, playing against the No. 1 team, you got to love that. That’s why you play college football, why you come to the University of Alabama.”
Simpson inspired some early talk as a Heisman trophy candidate, as Alabama quarterbacks sometimes do — his school has won four them in the past twenty years –but it’s the Hoosiers who boast this year’s Heisman winner in quarterback Fernando Mendoza, a transfer from the University of California of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Mendoza was nowhere to found on any list of All-Conference performers a year ago.
“I’ve had one other opportunity to play in the stadium, the Rose Bowl, and it was the last Pac-12 After Dark game,” Mendoza said. “That was a really special game for myself. Watched the Rose Bowl growing up. From my time spending here, living in California for the past three years, hearing everybody talk about the Rose Bowl has really helped it sink in for myself. It’s really helped it sink in on how monumental this game is and how much this means to the west coast, how much this really means to the entire country.”
Monumental, indeed. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Cignetti’s teams have been pumping out wins in Bloomington for just two seasons now as well as the team’s first outright Big Ten Championship since 1945. And it’s not just that the new-look Hoosiers beat people; it’s how they beat them.
This year’s Hoosiers won their games by an average margin of 31 points. Indiana is one of three teams in the four power conferences to exceed 2,500 rushing yards and 3,000 passing yards. The turnover margin of 1.31 ranks second in the nation.
“You can look at the statistics they have,” Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer said about the Hoosiers, “just where they’re ranked in all of those areas. The fundamental things, the turnover margin would be one of them that jumps out at me. That wins or loses you a lot of games. They just are elite in that category, but they’re obviously great running the football, against the run, efficient against the pass, passing the football. They’re just a very well-balanced team.”
What Cignetti’s version of Indiana has not yet done is play, much less beat, the SEC. In fact, Indiana has never met Alabama. During a press conference Wednesday morning, the coach of the Hoosiers was asked if this game represented the biggest test his team has faced.
“You mean the biggest challenge since the last biggest challenge, which was the biggest challenge since the last biggest challenge. It’s all it is, is this challenge, right?” said Cignetti with a rare grin on his face.
Cignetti’s four seasons under Alabama Hall-of-Fame coach Nick Saban at Alabama are well documented. DeBoer spent a season as the offensive coordinator at Indiana, which overlapped with Alabama defensive coordinator Kane Wommack’s three seasons in Bloomington. Those three seasons were far from nothing in the long arc of mostly pain that has been IU football. In 2019, the Hoosiers went 8-5 and lost in the Gator Bowl by a point to Tennessee; in the Covid-shortened 2020 season they were 6-2 with a one-score Outback Bowl setback to Ole Miss.
“I got to work for a great head coach in Tom Allen,” Wommack said, looking back, “who had a vision of growing that program better than where they had been before. And I think we certainly left the program better than we found it.
“But, you know, the biggest thing was having an identity of who we were based off the resources that we had at the talent level that we had, and the competition we had to face.”
Those days suddenly seem like a long time ago. Now the Hoosiers seem to possess both the talent and the resources. Both coaches know what it’s like to work without them in place. Similar to Cignetti’s post-Alabama climb, both DeBoer and Wommack would use their success to take on Group of 5 head coaching roles, with DeBoer landing at Fresno State and Wommack at South Alabama.
Wommack’s Jaguars faced off against a Cignetti-led James Madison group in 2023 during a season in which South Alabama would go on to win seven games and pound Eastern Michigan in the 68 Ventures Bowl. Cignetti and JMU won 11 but lost to Air Force in the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl.
It was week five that season when South Alabama made the trip to Harrisonburg, Va. on a late September afternoon when two late Jaguar touchdowns made the score look close after Cignetti’s group jumped out to 24-7 halftime lead and then held on behind a 48-yard Elijah Sarratt touchdown, 19 tough carries by Kaelon Black, and 15 total tackles between Aiden Fisher and D’Angelo Ponds.
Two years later and a continent away, things look very differently for all of them. On college football’s grandest stage, Indiana’s self-described misfits will attempt to extend their historic season along the way to the next biggest challenge and the business of another day.